We develop a semi-deterministic semi-stochastic channel model for the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system under the macrocell environment with local-to-mobile and local-to-base scatterers. We show that employing closely-spaced antennas (e.g., phased array) at the base station is capable of achieving diversity via the local-to-base scatterers, which avoids impractical large aperture requirement for the spatial diversity at the base station. We evaluate the system performance in terms of ergodic capacity, average pairwise error probability (PEP), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR); derive closed-form expressions for lower and upper bounds on the capacity and PEP; and show that the capacity, multiplexing and diversity gains are limited by the number of multipaths around the base station. The base-station array affects the lower bound on the capacity and the upper bound on the error probability through the same metric; thus, optimal design of the base station array based on this metric will optimize the two different information theoretic measures simultaneously. The fading correlation matrix also appears in the two bounds in the same form. To improve the performance of the macrocell MIMO system, we propose using artificial scatterers and discuss optimal design issues. Numerical examples demonstrate the accuracy of our analytical results and tightness of performance bounds.