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8 Urban Retail Dynamics From shopping spaces to consumer places1

Herculano Cachinho

1. Introduction

Retailing has always been par excellence an urban activity. The

requirements of centrality and accessibility are the main factors responsible

for this pattern of location. It was so in the past, it still is nowadays, and

despite the potential of e-commerce it is likely to continue in the near future.

In fact, when there is a dearth of customers as happens in villages and small

towns, retail shops tend to disappear or curtail their activity to cover only the

barest essentials, low order goods and services. Other businesses earning their

living on the sale of high order goods seldom last long in these places.

Instead, every so often, “roving shops”, which are vans belonging to the

modern-day travelling salesman, make their rounds, and fairs become

“temporary shopping malls” held on different days of the week and in

different places (Cachinho, 2002).

The links between retailing and the city have been lost over the years.

If not all cities are “daughters of traders”, as the historian Henri Pirenne

(1969) once suggested, urban life has never blossomed in any civilisation

without the presence of stores (Barata Salgueiro, 1996). Retailing is one of the

city’s raison d’être (Fernandes, 1997); it makes city life feasible; it explains its

inner cohesion and it justifies a good deal of the city’s dynamic. Through

1 In T. Barata Salgueiro & H. Cachinho eds. (2011). Retail Planning for the Resilient City: Consumption and Urban Regeneration, CEG, Lisbon: pp.147-168

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retailing and the localities it takes place in, people satisfy their consumer

needs, meet their wants and make some of their dreams come true. It follows

that owing to the diversity of people and merchandise involved, any market

place becomes simultaneously an important source of information, a

dissemination centre for innovation, an opportunity to make new contacts,

and a first-class playground and leisure spot. In short, it may be said that the

real embryo of urban life resides in shopping because it presupposes

interaction, exchange and production of innovation (Barata Salgueiro, 1996).

In spatial terms, the relationship which retailing has with the city

nowadays has very little in common with that of bygone days. The secular

marriage with centrality and proximity on the basis of which geographers set

up a hierarchical system of centres, was followed by convenience linkages

favouring accessibility, circulation and parking facilities on the one hand, and

on the other, by the divorce from the public city, its squares and avenues and

colourful streets throbbing with movement, life and panoramic

representation. The downtown areas of large cities have even lost a great part

of their charm and neighbourhood centres have shown signs that they are

heading the same way. In postmodern times, shopkeepers’ interests have

turned to the city outskirts. Owing to the fact that the spaces in the periphery

are built according to less coercive or at least more flexible regulations as

regards the production and use of the land, investors find them more

attractive. This explains why a good many businesses have been set up in

these places mixing entertainment with shopping. It is also in these places

with their simulated environments, authentic copies of the real-life city or the

imagined city of times gone by, that many consumers find their refuge, mainly

over the weekends, in order to satisfy their needs and hankerings in shopping

and have fun.

In studying the evolution of relationship between retailing and the city,

two stands need to be taken into consideration. On the one hand, there is the

material city and the retail landscape comprising a group of shops as places of

exchange, focused on the supply of the consumer’s needs (the retailscape). It is

evaluated on the basis of its choice of location in terms of distance, and the

qualities it has regarding centrality, proximity and accessibility. On the other

hand, there is the imagined city and the retail mindscape, produced by the

ability to represent and communicate the topological hyperspace, the experiences

offered by the outlets and the hidden agenda of merchandise and consumer

sites (the consumerscape).

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This chapter makes a first evaluation of the evolution in the

relationship between retailing and city by resorting to this two-pronged

approach. In doing so, three main issues need to be stressed: the evolution of

the stores’ spatial organisation, the processes underpinning change and the

way in which geography has sought to interpret the links between retailing

and the city.

2. Centrality, proximity and hierarchical models of retail spatial

organisation

In terms of the functional mix and spatial structure, the commercial

fabric has always been closely connected with the size of urban centres. As a

result of their size and area of influence, small towns have a low marketing

potential owing to the functions available. They are fairly limited in number

and are almost always concentrated around a central area. In the opposite are

the large urban centres where the consumer potential increases considerably

and with it a larger number and variety of purposes. At the top of the

hierarchy are the metropolitan areas which make an impact over a widespread

region. In cases such as these, the city centre tends to be too far away for

many consumers and forces them to travel quite a distance. This is why some

functions, mainly the shops providing goods and services used on a daily

basis, tend to move in harmony with urban expansion. Over time, they also

make up new shopping and service-provider centres while others spearhead a

functional differentiation process of affinage, ending up by forming a system of

central places that are able to exert distinct attractions. Due to this fact, it is

possible to slot them into a hierarchy (Wild and Shaw, 1979; O’Brien and

Harris, 1991)

The standard way in which the distribution pattern of retailing

occurred within cities, led various researchers to idealise the typologies

capable of explaining a spatial organisation such as this. Within this context,

by putting in first place the geographical pattern of the shops (dispersion or

concentration), the morphological nature of the concentration (nucleated and

ribbon), and the commercial mix features (specialised, diversified, the way

they are organised), a typological range was established, where its complexity

was generally linked to the size of the urban centres. Among the typologies

put forward are those elaborated by Proudfoot (1937), Burns (1959), Carol

(1960), Berry (1963), Garner (1966) and Davies (1974).

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Proudfoot was the first to set down the key-elements in the hierarchical

organization of retailing within the city. Basing his observations on detailed

studies of several cities in America, Proudfoot specified five categories of

retail districts: the Central Business District (CBD), the outlying business

centre, the principal business thoroughfare, the neighbourhood business

street, and the isolated store cluster. At the top of the hierarchy is the CBD. It

is functionally more complex and enjoys a greater standing, extending its

influence over a wide area and going beyond the confines of the city. The

isolated store clusters are on the lowest tier and have a very limited offer,

supplying only the basic needs to a small number of consumers who live in

the vicinity.

Despite its convincing logical appeal, Proudfoot’s hierarchy is

nevertheless subjective and based on intuition (Dawson and Kirby, 1980).

Other researchers therefore sought to introduce a more objective, scientific

approach in pinning down the intra-urban hierarchy of retail districts. By

applying the Central Place Theory, they were to provide a deductive approach

able to explain this regularity. Carol’s analysis (1960) operates along this line

of enquiry when looking at small towns in the USA. He comes up with a

four-tier hierarchy of centres: the CBD – which serves the whole city; the

regional business district /community centre – which caters to between

90,000 to 100,000 inhabitants and offers middle order goods (photographic

equipment, florist, …); the neighbourhood shopping centre – which serves

between 5,000 and 10,000 and stocks low-order goods (milk, groceries, etc.),

and the local business district – a cluster of corner shops.

Central Place Theory provided an important step forward in describing

the development and change of the spatial arrangement of retailing and in this

way produced an undeniably useful concept. Be that as it may, it still lacked

predictable precision. Other authors thus sought ways to enhance their

analytical exactness by resorting to multivariate statistical techniques. Berry

(1963) did his research along these lines in the early 1960s applying a factor

analysis to 64 unplanned business districts in the city of Chicago. On the

grounds of this study, Berry suggested that the intra-urban commercial

structure could be divided into three large groups that each had its own size

and morpho-functional features: the nucleated centres, the ribbon

developments and the specialised areas (Figure 1). Each of these groups was

further divided into sub-groups that were closely connected with the size and

the complexity of the urban cluster.

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Figure 1 – The major forms of shopping areas identified by B. Berry in the city

Generally speaking, retail nucleations obeyed a hierarchical structure,

defined according to the activity they pursued, their stores’ attraction and the

market area. Apart from the special characteristics typical of each higher-

ranking centre, it also had attributes belonging to lower-ranking centres. In

dealing with cities in the USA, Berry identified four levels situated below the

CBD: regional centres, community centres, neighbourhood centres and

convenience centres.

Ribbon developments are lines or rows of shops lying alongside the main

urban roads. They may be found in traditional shopping streets without any

kind of functional specialisation, or along business routes geared to specific

branches of activity. Among them, for example, are businesses linked to the

motorcar industry (service stations, garages / workshops, spare-parts shops,

car stands, ) or house-and-home supplies (furniture, decoration, domestic

appliances …).

Finally, there are the specialized areas, which usually occupy a fairly

extensive area reserved for businesses dealing in specialised retail and service

functions. They may be divided into several categories depending upon what

sort of specialisation they are engaged in. For example, businesses areas

focusing on entertainment and leisure include sports facilities, restaurants,

cafés, cinemas and bars; the automobile row comprising a concentration of

garages and auto-dealers which benefits from comparison shopping, and the

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furniture districts encompassing furniture, electric household appliances,

decorations, and crockery.

Although Berry’s classification revolutionised our understanding of the

spatial organisation of shopping districts and even today many authors allege

that it is still applicable, it nevertheless reveals several limitations that quickly

become clear upon examination. Among the most important setbacks are the

system’s lack of universality and anachronism (Brown, 1992; 1993). While

some studies undertaken outside the USA suggest that this typology can

hardly be representative of Western urban societies, other studies undertaken

a few years later in the USA describe its inability to provide a satisfactory

answer when dealing with the evolution of retailing in the USA itself. For

example, Clark (1967) and Davies (1974), studying Christchurch in New

Zealand and Coventry in England showed that due to differences in scaling,

the four-tier hierarchy was better, and even though ribbons of shops could be

found in the suburbs, they did not display any of the complexities observed in

Chicago (Dawson and Kirby, 1980: 90-91). The observations made by

Dawson and Kirby (1980: 88) and Dawson and Sparks (1987: 38) were even

more critical. While the former authors alleged that “hierarchical models are

no longer adequate representations of urban retail provision nor are they an

adequate basis for planning retail land-uses over the next 20 years”, the latter

went further, taking the view that the framework was “no longer relevant to

many consumers and retailers”. They therefore called for an alternative

conceptual framework based upon changing and increasingly segmented

consumer needs, and the nature of the retail system’s response to these

changes (Brown, 1992: 51).

As studies have mushroomed, so has the volume of criticism against

the taxonomies drawn up empirically or even statistically-based in order to

defend the hierarchical organisation of business districts. Notwithstanding,

even if in practice the premises contained in the Central Place Theory are not

upheld and it is a foregone conclusion that this theory is unable to respond to

the dynamics of retail locations and the means of supplying consumers, such

criticism has failed to come up with anything more than a relative

endorsement of its validity. There are yet to appear new versions of the theory

by including other attributes, for example, ones connected to its dynamics by

applying theories of chaos (Wilson, 1988) and catastrophes (Arlinghaus, 1985;

Oppenheim,1990).

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3. Accessibility, diversification of retail environments and post-

hierarchical taxonomies

The drawbacks emerging upon using the traditional hierarchical

typologies are largely felt when dealing with the deep-seated changes in the

retail system in metropolitan spaces and in medium-sized cities. Over the last

decades, several new retail facilities have appeared on the market

revolutionizing the commercial system of urban clusters. The hypermarkets,

planned shopping malls, large-area specialists, and category killers are

particularly relevant in this wide range of innovations. Owing to their size,

functional complexity or location patterns, not only have new polarities

emerged but also the classical model of supplying households has been

challenged. Of course, there are also other factors that need to be taken into

account. For instance, Dawson (1988) highlights the mechanisms of change

within retailing itself, O’Brien and Harris (1991) stress the growing

suburbanisation of the population, Kulke (1992) and Guy (1998; 2007) call for

the increasing role of public policies, and Moss (2007) emphasizes the closing

gap between shopping and leisure. While suburban growth occurs outside the

traditional shopping and service centres, public authorities exercises its duties

by drawing up regulations that distort the interplay of free market forces and

encourage investment in commercial ventures and less competitive locations.

For example, proposed shopping centres are discouraged from setting up in

direct competition with existing retail strips in order to assure the latters’

growth and survival (Shaw, 1987). As for the union between shopping and

leisure, apart from influencing the way retail spaces are conceived, planned

and managed, their aim is also to transform themselves into places of

experiences, thus changing the relationship between consumers and the city

(Lipovetsky, 2006; Bäckström, 2006; Miles, 2010). For quite a considerable

number of consumers, this has tended to be restricted to a set of scenic

outlets or enclaves scattered along motorways (Cachinho, 2005).

In fact, with the retail revolution due to new kinds of retail formats, all

principles contained in the Central Place Theory have been put into question.

The connection between the level of goods and the distance needed to go and

acquire these goods has changed. When going shopping, proximity and

centrality is no longer as important. The relationship between the functional

mix of the business districts and the place they occupy in the system of

central places has also changed, and shopping districts have lost their

exclusive nature.

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As regards the link between the hierarchy of goods and distance, the

concept has lost some of its relevance due to the fact that it is no longer

possible to establish a linear connection between the ranking of goods, the

frequency of use and the place of acquisition. Owing to new shopping

patterns, consumers not only travel further to shop for convenience goods,

but these products are no longer bought at the same rate of frequency as of

old: for example on a daily or twice-weekly basis for some items. It can even

be stated that owing to the dissemination of shopping malls and

hypermarkets, (physical) distance has ceased to be a factor of differentiation

when buying certain kinds of products, no matter if they are comparison or

convenience goods.

The idea that consumers get their supplies in the shop nearest them

where the store plays a twofold role based on centrality and the exclusiveness

of the markets, does not seem to make sense either anymore. In the case of

the downtowns of large cities, this seems to be an indisputable fact. Apart

from the centre having gradually removed itself from the reach of a large

number of consumers because of growing suburbanisation, it has become less

accessible due to the combined effect of difficulties in circulation caused by

heavy, slow-moving traffic and the lack of parking space within its confines.

In opposition to this, the city outskirts are irrigated by motorways and

equipped with multifunctional shopping facilities, making them more

attractive at least for the car-owning consumer. From the point of view of

shopping, it is a matter of saying that while the centre is becoming more

peripheral and is losing its place on the stage of shopping habits and supply

routines, the periphery, to the contrary, is gaining centrality and is becoming

the chosen destination of an increasing number of consumers.

Finally, it has been suggested that business centres are organised in a

pyramid and that centres of the same rank provide a similar offer.

Furthermore, it is alleged that shops selling low order or convenience goods,

though fewer in number, are also present in the centres situated at a

hierarchically higher scale. Be that as it may, this situation is no longer

pertinent owing to the fact that new business poles composed of shopping

malls exert a regional influence. First, the tenant mix of planned shopping

malls is a far cry from these principles. Generally speaking, the new retail

spaces, which share similar functional mix, tend to compete not as far as

proximity or the tenant mix, but rather in the ability to be different in terms

of architecture, design, atmospheres and the experiences they offer.

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Afterwards, just as the market is about to become saturated, new concepts are

invented to guarantee that the system works and capital reproduced.

There is not a shadow of a doubt that this change in the geography of

intra-urban retailing demands new interpretative approaches. In fact, even if

the number and variety of stores may always call for a hierarchy among the

various business clusters in a retail system, the way in which the consumer

takes them over has little to do with traditional hierarchical values. Indeed,

more and more consumers go to different kinds of stores and shopping

districts without setting up any linear relationship between the distance they

have travelled, the rate of buying and the nature of the goods and services

they acquire. Consumers not only buy goods at different shopping rates in the

same places but they also turn around the classical notion of distance

associated with buying different types of merchandise. They travel greater

distances to purchase convenience goods (newspapers, cigarettes and so on)

than they do for high order or comparison goods (shoes, furniture, etc.).

Naturally, there are many factors that explain such behaviour. In first

place, the tenant mix of the different kinds of centres does not follow the

classical rationale any more. In the same shopping mall, we are able to find

stores that offer low order or convenience goods (coffee, tobacco, grocery

products…) and high order or comparison goods or, at least, shops which are

visited only every now and then to buy, for example, clothing, CDs/records

or perfume. Secondly, because supplies and shopping are increasingly

associated with other social practices, such as leisure, socialising and

entertainment, some kinds of stores and retail spaces are now catering to

consumers by offering them atmosphere and experiences.

The obvious inability of the hierarchical models to explain the current

form of retail’s spatial organisation has sparked off interest in coming up with

new taxonomies. Although they consciously try and avoid the term

“hierarchy”, some authors are unable to forget the legacy left by the Central

Place Theory, and in this event, their models should be considered mere

reformulations. Others authors, such as, Dawson and Sparks’ (1987), who

deliberated upon consumer shopping behaviours and retailing formats, or

Brown (1991), whose findings are given in Figure 2, have provided

convincing alternatives.

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By crossing the geographical form of the retail areas (cluster, linear,

isolated) with the functions of spaces and stores (general, specialist and

ancillary), Brown (1991, 1992) has discerned a matrix composed of nine

categories of retail areas. They extend from the spontaneous, unplanned

clusters (such as the city centre, the specialised areas given over to night-life

entertainment or restaurants in the business districts), and the “planned” areas

(shopping malls, theme parks, airport galleries), to the isolated shops (that

range from a simple corner shop to the free standing superstores or retail

warehouses in out-of-town locations), including areas with a linear layout

(traditional arterial routes, suburban business poles, etc…) placed near the

ribbon developments, to quote Berry as above.

FUNCTION

GENERAL SPECIALIST ANCILLARY

FOR

M

CLUSTER (Unplanned)

City Centre

(Baixa)

Bright Lights District

(Bairro Alto)

Snack-Bars in Business Districts

CLUSTER

(planned)

Mega shopping centres

(Shopping Colombo)

Speciality Shopping Centre

(absent in the city)

Shops in Airport Departure Lounge

LINEAR Traditional shopping street

(Estrada de Benfica)

Ethnic Shopping Street

(Rua Benformoso)

Shops Alley in the subway stations of Parque or Campo Grande

ISOLATED Corner Shops

Supermarkets, …

Do it yourself outlets

Furniture stores

Snack-Bar in Health Clubs and cinemas

Source: adapted from S. Brown (1991). Retail Location: the post hierarchical challenge, Int. Rev. of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, Vol.1, (3), pp. 367-381.

Figure 2 – Brown’s post-hierarchical classification of urban retail locations applied to Lisbon Metropolitan Area.

There is no doubt that Brown’s innovation resides in the way he

dispenses with the notion of hierarchy in business clusters. The evaluation of

retail areas, is now made not only from the perspective of the number of

shops and the variety of activities, but also by taking into account the

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attributes of its location in the urban system. In short, Brown’s classification

suggests that the frequency and capacity of the retail areas to attract clients, is

influenced more by the functions they play rather than the size or position

they occupy in the retail system.

In being anchored in the stores’ functionality and the retailers and

consumers’ economic rationale, the hierarchic and non-hierarchic typologies

allow us to make a streamlined interpretation of the retailscape in different

urban settings. The earlier typologies were drawn up during a period in which

the city centre was, par excellence, a hive of entrepreneurial activity dealing in

comparison goods and services. The latter started to gain ground during the

development process involving suburbanisation (dependent on the motorcar),

the diversified format of shops and the decentralisation of retailing.

Nevertheless, although they are not interested in the symbolism or the

intangibility of the retail spaces and merchandise, which are dimensions

exploited exhaustively by the more enterprising retailers in order to transform

their shops into places of experience, these typologies are hard put to explain

the changes that have been occurring during the last few years and are

affecting urban retail landscapes. Taken as the outcome of the creativeness of

shops to communicate and represent, as well as of the sign-value of

merchandise and the seductive power held by brands and labels, the “new”

retail landscapes call for a renovation of the conceptual framework that will

take into account the new valences of retail facilities and precincts.

The next section will be dealing with some cases leading to a first

reflection about the symbolic dimension of retail urban landscapes in order to

draw up an alternative typology to what has gone before.

4. Consumerscapes: imaginary cities and symbolic readings of retail

spaces

In Italo Calvino’s magical and poetic story Invisible Cities (1990), Kublai

Khan invites the explorer Marco Polo to describe one by one, the fantastic

cities he has visited from his explorations around the world. A series of short

and surreal descriptions show vastly different ways of life and types of people.

In actuality they are all descriptions of the same city, Venice, but seen from

different perspectives. One of these ‘invisible cities’ is Leonia, a thinly

disguised allegory of our consumer society (Paterson, 2006). The city of

Leonia is passionate about everything that is new and different. Thus, “each

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morning people wake up in fresh sheets and bathe with newly unwrapped

cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model

refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the

most up-to-date radio” (Calvino, 1990: 115). Naturally, this obsession with

the new has its price. In order for the city to work, every night street cleaners

and garbage trucks silently go about the business of freeing the city of “the

residue of yesterday's existence”. The sanitising, renewing operation is so

important that “it is not so much by the things that each day are

manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but

rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new.

So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really the enjoyment of new

and different things and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding,

cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.” (Calvino, 1990: 115).

Leonia is one of Italo Calvino’s multiple discourses to speak to us

about Venice. However, this discourse can hardly fail to go unnoticed by

those who seek to understand the changes in the retail landscapes and their

appropriation by the consumers. In fact, Leonia breaks into our thoughts

making us believe that from the point of view of consumption, the true genius

loci of the city and its commerce is found less in the cityscape, in its physical

panorama domesticated by its shops that sometimes gather into clusters,

while at other times spread out alone or line up in ribbons, than in the

mindscape, in the panorama of the soul that feeds on the life, habits and

experiences of consumers. However, more important than even the brilliant

way in which Leonia is described, the words leave less impression on us than

what comes into our imaginations. Calvino makes us see, for example, that

the urban space is much more than just a physical, visual portrait that consists

of a material and functional dynamic. Following Baudrillard (1972; 1975), the

on-going need to renew, upgrade, replace the old with the new, tells us that,

apart from the traditional use and exchange values, consumer objects, stores

and the shopping districts in the city also have a symbolic-value and a sign-

value which strongly affect the consumer behaviours (Barata Salgueiro &

Cachinho, 2009).

If we can learn anything from Leonia, it is that in order to perceive the

relationship between cities and retailing in postmodern society, it is absolutely

vital to incorporate into our study the symbolic dimension of consumption,

the retail spaces and the city. A close look at the impacts produced by the

retail revolution in last few years show that we are moving gradually from a

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system based on “retail spaces” to another anchored in “consumer places”,

powered by the sign-value and symbolism of shops, environments and

commodities. In fact, this passage summarizes the main metamorphoses

undergone by retail spaces, thanks to marketing strategies and design geared to

seduce consumers. What we can identify during this period is a process

whereby retail facilities have been transformed from point of sales into

commodities to be “consumed”, in the same way that goods and services are

sold and purchased inside (Barata Salgueiro & Cachinho, 2002).

The role of the symbolic content and sign-value in the identity of the

new retail facilities is best understood in contrast with the period dominated

by Fordism, as model of production and urban fabric (Table 1). Fordist

consumption used to be an answer to the modern mass-market rationale,

homogenised and standardised by the technology in which the vital condition

for manufacturing cheaper goods and extending markets lay in mass

assembly-line production (Alonso, 1999). The Postmodern condition has

changed this rationale by breaking up traditional lines into a diversity of

niches, each guided by different values and lifestyles leading to growing

individualisation. During the modern era the price and quality of merchandise

used to determine the segmentation of supply and the hierarchical ranking of

shops. However, in the postmodern marketing approach these principles have

lost much of their strategic value. In order to respond to consumer demands,

where consumers seek to build their identities in the dialogue with the objects

and shopping places, the more enterprising retailers have segmented their

merchandise into multiple niches and have resorted to a fountainhead of

cultural values constructed out of eclectic, paradoxical practices. The retailer

has ceased to view the consumer as “easy game” without a will of his/her

own who looks on passively as the consumer performance is played out.

Instead, the consumer is now being regarded as a whole, as a thinking person

capable of using consumption as a language in which to communicate with

the self as well as with others (Morace, 1990).

This new way of looking at consumption and consumers goes along

with deep changes in the conception of retail spaces and the functions they

are required to undertake. Of course, the shop’s role is none other than selling

commodities and, by means of this exchange, reproducing the investor’s

capital. Nevertheless, to continue carrying out this function efficiently, it has

become increasingly obvious that shops need to be anything but spaces in

which transactions occur (Goss, 1993). In contemporary society, retail spaces

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are no longer simple places of exchange; places where people go to obtain

supplies. This rationale does not even transpire in the hypermarket, which is

the blueprint for mass consumption. Like other stores, not only does the

hypermarket sell merchandise but it also transforms itself into a commodity

(Figure 4). Nowadays many shops, by means of architecture, design,

environments, brands, performance and the symbolism of the objects, are

making an effort to offer the consumer real life experiences (Ritzer, 1999). In

new retail environments, people can not only get supplies and satisfy their

consumer needs, but they can also enjoy themselves, fulfil their desires, make

their dreams and fantasies come true, and “act out many different styles of life

with the aim of acting out their own particular style” (Morace, 1990).

Table 1 – Retail changes: from retail spaces to consumer places

ATTRIBUTES MODERNITY

(Until 50-60S)

POST-MODERNITY

(70-90s)

HYPER-MODERNITY

(After 90s)

Kind of retail

spaces

Traditional stores

owned by small

shopkeepers

New retail concepts

and formats owned by

multiples and big

corporations

Diversity of retail

concepts and formats

owned by multiples and

big corporations

Spatial

organization

Hierarchical structure

dominated by the city

centre, based on

centrality and

proximity

Centre-Periphery

dialectics based on

accessibility,

circulation and

parking facilities

Post-hierarchical

structure based on

topological and hyper-

real spaces and virtual

places

Retail offer Goods and services

according to

standardized mass

production lines

Goods and services

according to a wide

variety of lines and

market segments

Brands, signs, ambiences

and experiences

Functions Shopping places as

utilitarian premises

Economy of needs

Stores as spaces of

synthesis:

retailtainment

Economy of signs

Stores as places of life

experiences

Economy of fascination

Source: adapted from Barata Salgueiro T. & Cachinho H. (2009).

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Figure 3 – The hypermarket as an excitement space

The tendency for shops to progress from being simple spaces in which

to buy things to places that offer experiences, as put forward by Pine and

Gilmore (1999), Hetzel (2002), Mikunda (2006), Coleman (2006) and

Klingman (2007), was tested in two Portuguese medium-size cities from a

consumer’s perspective (Cachinho, 2002; Barata-Salgueiro et al., 2007).

Consumers were asked what meanings they gave to the shops and retail

districts they patronised. A large number of consumers tended to describe the

shops by referring to a set of attributes that clearly transcended the material

dimension, carrying them into the world of the intangible, of signs and

symbols which nurture consumer experiences. Similar to what has been

observed in the case of the products, many stores have also become a source

of pleasure, fun, exoticism, prestige, nostalgia, friendliness, tradition, identity,

sociability, responsibility,… For many consumers, it is these attributes, rather

than the merchandise, that influence their decision to patronise particular

retail spaces (Figure 4).

Of course, not all people award the same values to the same shops and

not all the shops working in the same branch of trade communicate the same

values. For example, as regards the fast-food chain McDonald’s, while some

consumers who are in a hurry value the fast service, the youngest customers

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162

usually go to these spaces to hang out because of their sociable environment,

their party-spirit and liveliness. While some consumers think the quality/price

relationship and getting the best out of it are important, others esteem

McDonald’s for its laxity where they can break the rules, as for instance,

eating with their fingers and pushing aside good table manners. In any event,

these features have already been exploited by the company itself in its

advertising strategies.

Source: adapted from Barata-Salgueiro T. et. al. (2007)

Figure 4 - Values assigned by consumers to retail spaces in the city of Évora

When studying the relationship between retailing and the city,

readdressing attention to symbolism obtains another interpretation of retail

spaces. This naturally leads to other meanings and functions that are exerted

by such spaces in the city on the daily habits of consumers. At this point it is

useful to make a distinction between the shops conceived by retailers and

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163

interiorised by consumers as simple spaces of exchange, places where they

may do their shopping or get in supplies, and other sorts of stores drawn up

by architects, designers and marketers thereby going beyond their material

nature to take on the function of “merchandise”-spaces or consumer objects.

In other words, it is necessary to counterpoise the spaces that are devoid of

symbolic meaning for the consumer but still work as mere places where one

can exchange money for goods and services, and the stores that have invested

in creating a mise-en-scène for their articles in a contrived theatrical

environment, and enhancing the symbolic settings of the objects which

exploit the consumers imagination and provide them with real living

experiences. Resorting to an old modernist classification, while the former

shops satisfy simple needs which, at times, only exist in the minds of retailers,

the latter exploit hyper-reality, the capacity to create an illusion of their

merchandise, and through these contrivances, sell the consumer dreams and

desires.

The city which emerges from the retail spaces dedicated to exploring

their symbolism through communication, has very little in common with the

city that may be directly perceived by the senses, and that have been described

by geographers in their writings and thematic maps, working according to

different perspectives and models more or less complex. When we come

down to it, we realize that this city is hyper-real because almost all is

simulated; the closest version we can get to this kind of city is the one we see

at the theatre or the cinema (Amendola, 2000). And similar to what is found

at the theatre, the (consumer) show is paramount, using the same props to

produce the staging of the performance. The single aim is to underscore the

sentiment of its play.

Because they are deeply entrenched in the primacy of “indirect

commodification2” (Crawford, 1992) and “adjacent attraction3” (Sennett,

1977), in the symbolism represented by the architecture and the design, and in

the sign-value of the merchandise, the new retail spaces cast the city into a

show where the consumers are both the spectators and the actors. In this

2 A process by which nonsaleable objects, activities and images are purposely placed in the commodified world of the mall (M. Crawford, 1992: 14-15). 3 The basic marketing principle by which the most dissimilar objects lend each other mutual support when they are placed next to each other. Richard Sennett (1977) explains this effect as a temporary suspension of the use value of the object, its de-contextualised state making it unexpected and therefore stimulating.

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kind of city, material reality in the retail spaces only works as a pre-condition

of its own existence. The spaces are necessary because they act as a stage, as

the props and the scripts for representations that feed consumer experiences.

However, they are not enough in themselves owing to the fact that it is on the

symbolic level and in the dialogue happening with the consumer that the

show, its representations and its narratives are carried out. In order bring this

about, the city becomes real, or rather, it begins to become a part of each

person’s imaginary. So as people may experience and appreciate it, it is

necessary for consumactors4, who are the new flanêurs of postmodern times

(Clarke, 2003), to be able to travel beyond the landscaped patchwork that they

look at. They need to immerse themselves in a world of fantasy, dreams and

illusion emanating from the hidden agenda of the merchandise, the

theatricality of recreational environments and the sensations awakened by

lived experiences (Cachinho, 2006). In the postmodern metropolis of new

retail spaces and consumer places, deliberately planned to seduce, intercept

and create consumactor expectations, the border between the stage and stalls

disappears and all the spaces tend to become “places of liminality” (Goss,

1993). The individuals making use of them wind their ways from one

representation to another without ever really getting to know where fiction

ends and reality starts. But it does not really matter. In a purely simulated,

disguised setting, where social representation does not imitate the real thing

but rather the imagined thing, the world necessarily has to be real because this

is the one that is sought after and not the imaginary one (Amendola, 2000).

The new retail spaces with their dreamscapes, their merchandise sign-

values and their consumer experiences are everywhere, in the city centre, in

the ever-expanding axes, in residential quarters with their different urban

styles and status, in the new suburban clusters, or on the reclaimed

waterfronts. They are building a completely new city where its geographical

contours have little in common with the city we once learned to interpret by

referring to the classical models rooted in the primacy of distance, use-value,

merchandise exchange and the shop’s functionality. The new retail spaces

have been conceived as a world set apart that has broken away from the

surrounding environment. They have reduced the space occupied by a good

part of the city’s daily life to condense it in scenic outlets linked up by

4 The expression consumactor has been used here to designate the kind of consumer who normally goes to shopping malls as if s/he is on the stage playing with consumption; this is an activity through which the tendency is permanently rebuilding one’s identity (Cachinho, 2006). Some authors, like Bäckström (2006), classify this kind of consumers as recreational shopper.

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motorways and interspersed with non-descript areas. These large retail spaces

suppress the continued order of reality and the linkages between places, and

impose an imaginary order upon things. The consumers, who are called upon

to play the roles of spectator and actor at one and the same time, are not

offered a single global view of the city. All their attention is directed to the

places deemed productive or useful, or conceived to satisfy desires nurtured

by hyper-reality (Chaplin and Holding, 1998).

In short, from the viewpoint of the physical and material environment

of retail spaces, or the retailscapes, the city might even be shaped by distances;

it might even be made of centralities and peripheries, of localities provided

with better or weaker accessibility, organising itself according to hierarchical

principles and for investors to manage things in accordance with ideas based

on the economic rationale. Nevertheless, from the viewpoint of the

consumers, retail landscapes go far beyond their material and spatial confines,

and only from a reductionist stance can these factors be likened to a simple

stage. The power of the symbolic dimension of the built environment,

exploited by architects, designers and marketers, leads to the emergence of

another city, rooted in the landscape of symbols and signs, invisible to the

unsuspecting but no less felt for all that. Actually, its existence and form is

limited only to the imaginative and representational capacity of the

consumactors.

This way of interpreting the retail urban landscape follows the line of

thought suggested by authors who believe that the social world may be seen

as a set of symbols and signs that are possible to read and interpret through a

semiotic (Gottdiener and Lagopoulos, 1986; Duncan and Duncan, 1988;

Barnes and Duncan, 1992; Short, 1996). From this point of view, the city and

the retail spaces are texts that may be read from many angles owing to the

different ways in which the consumer-individuals perceive the messages,

interpret them and decodify them in consumer acts. Lefebvre (1981) and Soja

(1996) have convincingly demonstrated that the city is at one and the same

time, real, imagined and perceived. It is through a combination of these

elements that the city gains shape and becomes meaningful to the common

citizen (Jayne, 2006). Even if the retail space owns up to some specific

characteristics, we believe that the semiotic and holistic concepts of the urban

space’s social production which were put forward by Lefebvre and Soja,

provide a coherent conceptual framework that can be used successfully for

showing how retail landscapes are produced and appropriated by consumers

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166

through their multiple daily experiences. In fact, if the increasing trend among

retailers is to conceive and promote their stores as places of experiences

(Hetzel, 2002; Coleman, 2006; Miles, 2010), and consumers choose the stores

due to the imaginary worlds conjured up by the merchandise and the shops’

atmosphere (Cachinho, 2006; Barata Salgueiro & Cachinho, 2009), then it is in

the crossroad between the built environment and the mind world with its

symbols and signs that the retail spaces should be interpreted, including of

course their locations in the city. Studying retail areas and simultaneously

backing it up with these two analytical dimensions would allow us to single

out a whole collection of retail spaces and locations in the city promoting

different kinds of experience. Such spaces would range from the utilitarian

cluster of stores based on use-value and destined to satisfy the consumers’

basic needs, to the hyper-real, spectacular, theatrical spaces rooted in the sign-

value of the goods and consumer atmospheres that take advantage of the

“economies of fascination and attention” (Schmid, 2009) of consumer-

individuals.

This approach of shopping spaces and retail locations in the city also

falls in line with the analysis carried out in marketing through the lens of the

consumer culture theory (Arnold & Thompson, 2005) and the resource-based

theory (Vargo and Lusch, 2004). According to Arnould (2005:89), the

Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) allows us to capture the motivating social

and cultural contexts of retail patronage and purchase behaviours and the

myriad motivating factors behind the retail purchase decision. People have a

variety of projects that tend to realize through shopping, and retailers offer

the range of resources they need to accomplish such projects. In fact, the

analysis of consumerscapes can tell us much about the real meaning that retail

premises and shopping districts in the city have for consumers, which

experiences they live and what personal and social projects they pursue that

can be accomplished by the process of consumption.

5. Conclusion

This chapter has sought to describe the evolution in the relationship

between retailing and the city and the way in which geography has attempted

to interpret the changes in its spatial organisation. Centrality and proximity

have always been considered factors of the utmost importance in a city’s

organisation and in the localisation of retailing. This is why the first models

and theories used them as foundations of their explanations. Nevertheless,

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with the retail revolution happening in suburbs (owing to the more

widespread use of motorcars) and the diversification of retail formats, based

on functional rationales and different locations from their predecessors, these

models were soon perceived to be inadequate. This fact smoothed the way for

the development of new interpretations which, because they had ousted the

traditional hierarchical classifications, generally came to be known as post-

hierarchical models.

Nevertheless, in postmodern times, even if we continue to travel across

a space made of distances and polarities, and even if the city continues to be

organised around a set of real localities that have distinctive attributes based

on centrality and accessibility, from the perspective of consumer experiences,

buying habits and supply routines, there is an increasing tendency to

appropriate this situation and fragment it into enclaves that are experienced

on a symbolic level of signs and meanings called up by retailscapes. Such

landscapes are meticulously conceived and managed so as to transcend the

material nature of space and thereby transport the consumers to a world of

recreation and fantasy. On the evidence of this fact, we have room to call for

a change in the way we analyse the relationship between retailing and the city.

The approaches and typologies of retail areas now need to integrate the

material built environment with the symbolic dimension of retail places used

strategically by proactive shopkeepers to produce the consumer experiences.

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