Edited sentence: It remains to be seen whether and when downtown Regina can recover vitality.Its own early days were before Regina's City Counsel substantially gave in to demands by business enterprise that downtown to a considerable extent be abandoned and emptied in favour of shopping centres on the outskirts of the city.The policy has been experimented with in other central North American cities over the years though cities of the American mid-west have laboured in recent years to overcome what they came to regard as a disastrous miscalculation