Abstract
The rapid expansion of online retailing has long raised the concern that shops and shopping centers (evolved or planned agglomerations of shops) may be abandoned and thus lead to a depletion of urbanity. Contesting this scenario, I employ the concept of ‘retail resilience’ to explore the ways in which different material forms of shopping may persist as online retailing proliferates. Through interviews with planning and development professionals in Edmonton (Canada), Melbourne (Australia), Portland (Oregon), and Wuhan (China); field/virtual observations in a wider range of cities; and a morphological analysis of key shopping centers, I find that brick-and-mortar retail space is not going away; rather, it is being increasingly developed into various shopping spaces geared toward the urban experience (a combination of density, mixed uses, and walkability) and may thus be adapted to online retailing. While not all emerging forms of shopping may persist, these diverse changes, experiments, and adaptations of shops and shopping centers can be considered a form of resilience. However, many emerging shopping centers pose a threat to urban public life.
Highlights
Shopping has been at the heart of urbanity since the earliest cities developed as sites of exchange
I define them based on a morphological typology: here, a ‘type’ does not refer to an ‘archetype’ that can be replicated in different contexts. It is shown by a diagram depicting something that works in general while still being geared toward the particularity of each instance [43,44,45]; in such a diagram, the spatial arrangement of shops is able to imply the ways in which a shopping center 1) operates economically and 2) influences the production of urban public life [44]
The trend towards the urban experience in shopping center development leads to different impacts on the main street, suburban mall, and power center
Summary
Shopping has been at the heart of urbanity since the earliest cities developed as sites of exchange. Ron Martin coined the term ‘adaptive resilience’ [16], meaning the ability of a human system to persist through new regimes while maintaining a strong adaptive capacity for change Drawing on this thought, Wrigley and Dolega found that some successful main streets in the United Kingdom (UK) were transformed into new regimes when a chained supermarket, often considered a killer of main street shops, entered the main street and spurred a revitalization [18]. Et al [24] introduced the notion of ‘spatial resilience’, by which shopping space is conceived of as ‘loose space’ that can be adapted into different forms, giving rise to retail resilience. To examine retail resilience in this study, I specify three key terms as follows: the retail system, sustainable development, and shock
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