I visited the spectacularly successful Santana Row open
air mall recently. Santana Row is on the border of San Jose and Santa
Clara and has become the social center of Silicon Valley. It is a mall
built on the principles learned from 3rd Street in Santa Monica. 
There are three blocks of dense street level stores, with about one in six being a local business. The side walks are wide enough for four people to walk abreast on each side, with a two lane no-parking strip in the middle. (Ban cars and people don't feel comfortable.) Plenty of restaurants and bars, mostly local, with open street seating in good weather. There is a central plaza with coffee, eating, ice cream and booze. Room for music and performance. On the second level and third level on most of the street there are offices. There are several hotels and many condominiums in buildings that go up to seven stories. A big movie theater is just off the main walk and abundant multi-story parking is on every adjacent street.
Santana Row works and every mall developer in America knows all about it.
So
some schmuck tried to merge the old style mall with the Santana Row
model in Boulder CO, called the 29th Street Mall. Merge? Yes. It is five
blocks long with a magnet stores on each end. Magnets are the traditional mall model. Macy's and Home Depot are the magnetic "anchors",
except the Home Depot has its ass facing the mall. 29th Street is open air with
a full two way street in the middle with parking. Major streets go
right through it and I never saw a local store, only chains. The whole
thing was two stories high. There was a square but it was off the
street with no businesses or life in it. There was a theater but it
wasn't very big and seemed irrelevant. The parking was open lots with
more chain stores on the boundaries of the parking....meaning people
would be driving to whatever particular store they were going to.
While it was new and virtually empty, it had no heart, no intelligence in its design, and certainly no future. What a stupid waste and failure.