Urban retail distributions: an appraisal of the empirical foundations of retail geography

Abstract

The contribution to marketing studies of British researchers trained in geography has been considerable. The paper suggests that further developments along these lines are being jeopardised by some neglect of the empirical study of the spatial aspects of retailing. While descriptive research is usually laborious and rarely prestigious, for a distinctive contribution to marketing studies to come from retail geography, improvements must be sought to our knowledge of the distributions of shops, shopping centres, and consumer spatial behaviour. Indeed retail geographers have a responsibility to increase and publish this knowledge, and these tasks should be undertaken alongside the more attractive theoretical and applied problems. If this is not done, the latter will be built upon increasingly insecure and out-of-date foundations. The arguments of the paper derive from a review of the literature concerning the spatial aspects of retailing in Britain, and they lead to recommendations for future research.