Public Space and Shop Windows

Abstract

The paper summarises the results of research on the role of the transparency of shop windows in public space upon the example of selected streets in the centre of Krakow. Shop windows played a crucial role in the traditional public space of city centres, offering passers-by an opportunity both to look at the shop’s offer and to see the shop interior. For those inside it gives a sense of the movement in the street. The shop’s quality depends on that of the street, and vice versa. In this sense, transparency is crucial for the relationship of public space with the functions inside the buildings on the edge of the space and for generating and maintaining a vital public domain. With the development of large-scale retailing and the prevalence of advertising covering various ranges of public media, the situation of shop windows has been changing radically. The internal organisation of stores focuses on the internal arrangement of goods so that the largest possible quantities of them are available to the buyer. Shop windows seem to be unimportant and the retail space in the contemporary city tends to be centripetal in its layout. The research measures this phenomenon in the public space of the inner city of Krakow. The study includes a sequence of streets radially extending from the city centre westwards (Szewska, Karmelicka, and Królewska Streets). The streets have diverse characteristics, but within each of them, there is an active space for pedestrians and edges of volumes with various types of services. The study presents the basic characteristics of the streets and their urban blocks, the density of the structure, types of functions of ground floors, the amount of shops, as well as the degree of window transparency.