Abstract
Street retail shops are an emblematic image of the Sri Lankan urban landscape. Retail shops vary in size, sell a diversity of household, mechanical and convenience items and appear as an integral part of urban form. While retails shops provide essential services to a variety of consumers generate employment and make urban streets vibrant, there have been few investigations into the nature of retail form in Sri Lanka. It appears that the global spread of supermarkets and shopping malls are transforming the retail space in Sri Lankan cities. Utilizing field observation data, this study investigates the extent to which traditional retail outlets dominate the retail form in the urban landscape, creates employment, and attracts customers. This study also examines to what extent city retail outlets are retained as shop houses. Results show that while Sri Lankan traditional small retail shops form a greater number of retail shops and continue to be an emblem of the urban landscape, the development of a few new shopping malls and supermarkets have impacted the daily shopping behaviour of people and are slowly transforming the retail form as well as urban landscape.
Highlights
Retailing forms an important aspect of Sri Lanka’s urban function and landscape
Building on earlier work by Bromley (1998), this paper investigates the form of retailing in a Sri Lankan urban area and the extent to which traditional retail shops dominant the retail form in urban landscape
The findings reveal that small retail shops form a greater number of retail outlets and they contribute to a larger part of urban development
Summary
Retailing forms an important aspect of Sri Lanka’s urban function and landscape. Retail shops are pervasive throughout urban areas, with higher concentrations in town and city centres and within linear developments along the major roads and neighbourhoods in Sri Lanka. Similar to retail shops in Asia and elsewhere in the world, Sri Lankan retail stores sell a variety of items for different socio-economic groups. Retail shops, in small traditional retail areas, make urban spaces vibrant. They provide spaces for people to interact, and thereby facilitate building and maintaining authentic communities (Gehl, 2010). Such small retail dominant areas make urban spaces live and improve the perceived safety of pedestrians as retailing increases pedestrian movements in streets (Jacobs, 1961). Retailers tend to invade pavements/ footpaths though construction of illegal structures, ambulant traders often block pedestrian movements in street and footpaths and some markets are poorly integrated with other urban land uses
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