Cities and Retail: Sustainable Transformation of Retail in Urban Environments

• Autor(a) principal: Guimarães, Pedro
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/59053
• topic: Cities; Retail; Sustainable Transformation; Urban Environments

Commerce functions are on the basis of urban agglomerations, often justifying the existence of several cities and villages of different sizes, which explains how cities evolve throughout history [1,2]. It is in the urban sphere that retail exists in abundance and where most of the innovative processes that transform the sector initially take place [3]. In its essence, retail is an extremely dynamic sector. Its transformation can be seen in a wide array of aspects, on which many researchers have sought to guide their investigations in the last several decades [4,5,6]. For instance, within the final decades of the last century, the growth of some retail companies led to varying processes of concentration, through which a reduced number of companies gain a significant market share of a certain retail typology [7]. Food retail is often the main example, as some national and international food retail operators dominate the food retail landscape in several countries, such as that detected in Sweden by Franzen [8]. Some international clothing retail companies have also disseminated worldwide, provoking the decline of small, local-based independent stores. Interconnected with these changes is the appearance of new retail formats, disrupting the traditional urban retail systems mostly composed of brick-and-mortar stores, which were distributed alongside commercial centers, streets and other urban areas, questioning the earlier established retail hierarchies of shopping areas [9]. The peripheral location of shopping centers, its impacts on town centers alongside public policies and projects—such as those framed as retail-led urban regeneration projects [10]—toward the revitalization of these latter areas marked the scientific literature on the subject in the 1990s and 2000s [11,12,13], both of which were also periods characterized by a changing stance in public intervention regarding public–private partnerships, such as town center management schemes [14] and business improvement districts [15,16], illustrative of a neoliberal standpoint, but where concerns about the viability of city centers are also very much in evidence. Current contemporary transformations of retail cannot be discussed without mentioning the ongoing and possible future impacts of the internet, whereby discussions on the topic of e-commerce seem to be increasingly oversimplified to capture the complexity of multichannel and omnichannel platforms [17], a topic that the recent pandemic seems to have highlighted [18]. What most studies on these research subjects and others that fall within the geographies of retailing have in common is their focus on the connection with the territory, that is, the effects that such changes provoke in urban spaces [19]. Within the geographies of retailing, this sector is analyzed as more than merely an economic activity—the research of which would instead fall under the topic of economics—but rather is studied based on how changes in the sector impacts the vitality and viability of urban centers [20,21], and whether those changes will disrupt the respective urban retail systems, questioning the ability of the population to supply. This Special Issue has captured the diversity of the studies that focus on retail in relation to cities. It contains eight articles and one review, which I briefly describe in the next paragraphs. On this matter, I clarify that it is not the purpose of this Editorial to elaborate on each of the texts, but rather to encourage the reader to explore them.