Retail location and urban resilience: towards a new framework for retail policy

This article reviews the literature on the interactions between retail activities and urban economic resilience with a primary focus on the U.S. The social, economic and environmental impacts of large-scale retail outlets on existing retail and urban systems and their sustainability have been extensively discussed in the urban planning literature. However, the survival of retail venues as a major land use, in a competitive, dynamic urban environment, has been discussed less. In particular, the adjustment of traditional city-center retailers facing an influx of new shopping venues is a timely issue. The literature offers a wide range of examples, from their disappearance to their role in the successful revitalization, vitality and viability of city centers, and their increased economic resilience. At the same time, the number of dead malls has been increasing in developed and developing countries, and in particular in the U.S., showing that large-scale shopping venues also need strategies for adaptation and change. This review explores the issues and policies that have altered urban dynamics in favor of traditional retailers and contributed to their resilience, identifies the role of the public sector in supporting city center revitalization, and develops a framework for the effective integration of retail planning into urban policy to enhance urban economic resilience

Retail development in Turkey: An account after two decades of shopping malls in the urban scene

The social, economic and environmental impacts of large-scale retail outlets on existing retail and urban systems have been extensively discussed in the planning literature. This article documents the last two decades of transformation in Turkey's retail sector, which have been characterized by a more organized development of the sector than traditionally existed. We begin our analysis with the late 1980s and early 1990s, when more-liberal and outward-looking policies began to emerge in Turkish economic policy. Changes in the economy and related legislation prepared a base for the subsequent transformations of that decade, culminating, especially in large cities, in the development of shopping malls as alternative retail spaces to traditional markets and stores on a shopping street. We believe that the Turkish case reveals specific aspects of resistance, adaptation and change, and thus needs a detailed account. After providing a general picture of retailing and its transformation in Turkey, we provide empirical evidence from Ankara, the capital city, through which all important dynamics of retailing are exemplified. To this end, we ask the following questions: What are the evolving processes behind the existing location patterns of shopping centres in Ankara? What is the extent of the change in definition of the new public realm? How do street retailers survive? Who are the actors and what are their approaches towards retail planning in Turkey? The answers to these questions may provide implications for urban policy and retail planning in Turkey. The case may also be interesting for countries experiencing similar patterns of change and development, that is, where the globalization process in retailing and consumption-related sites began later than in other countries and observed fast-paced development. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd

Spatial Statistics Methods in Retail Location Research: A Case Study of Ankara, Turkey

AbstractThis study, using two methods of spatial data assessment: 1) spatial autoregression (SAR) models (Cliff and Ord, 1981) and 2) geographically weighted regression (GWR) (Fotheringham et al., 1998), identifies the relationship between shopping centers attributes and trade area (TA) characteristics in Ankara, Turkey. Ankara has the highest level of shopping center gross leasable area per capita in Turkey, for this reason, is a unique case study. The two models provide information on distinctive characteristics of shopping center locations. The first one depicts the global relationship between shopping center supply, assessed by total gross leasable area in each district, and demand, assessed by demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of TAs, such as population, income, homeownership while accounting for the spatial dependence across the TAs. The second one, on the other hand, assesses local demand supply relations at the district level. These two models do not substitute but complement each other. SAR model results show that there is a positive relationship between shopping center supply and median age, and a negative relationship between supply and household size. These are expected results in compliance with the literature findings. The level of homeownership variable, however, illustrates a distinctive picture, unique to Ankara, in that there is a negative relationship between homeownership and shopping center supply. The GWR results show that it is easier to explain the level of variations in selected parameters in the suburbs than in inner city neighbourhoods, therefore, as expected, in car dependent suburbs stronger relations with shopping center locations are identified than mixed-use inner city neighbourhoods. The results are essential for identifying the spatial network of retail outlets in a city or region which guides urban developers, investors and public policy decision makers in site selection

Retail development in Turkey: An account after two decades of shopping malls in the urban scene

The social, economic and environmental impacts of large-scale retail outlets on existing retail and urban systems have been extensively discussed in the planning literature. This article documents the last two decades of transformation in Turkey's retail sector, which have been characterized by a more organized development of the sector than traditionally existed. We begin our analysis with the late 1980s and early 1990s, when more-liberal and outward-looking policies began to emerge in Turkish economic policy. Changes in the economy and related legislation prepared a base for the subsequent transformations of that decade, culminating, especially in large cities, in the development of shopping malls as alternative retail spaces to traditional markets and stores on a shopping street. We believe that the Turkish case reveals specific aspects of resistance, adaptation and change, and thus needs a detailed account. After providing a general picture of retailing and its transformation in Turkey, we provide empirical evidence from Ankara, the capital city, through which all important dynamics of retailing are exemplified. To this end, we ask the following questions: What are the evolving processes behind the existing location patterns of shopping centres in Ankara? What is the extent of the change in definition of the new public realm? How do street retailers survive? Who are the actors and what are their approaches towards retail planning in Turkey? The answers to these questions may provide implications for urban policy and retail planning in Turkey. The case may also be interesting for countries experiencing similar patterns of change and development, that is, where the globalization process in retailing and consumption-related sites began later than in other countries and observed fast-paced development. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Associating street-network centrality with spontaneous and planned subcentres

Scientific studies have long demonstrated how economic activities regularly distribute themselves within a city in response to geographical centrality. Following the growing interest in network geography in understanding urban dynamics, rather than measuring centrality (accessibility) by a priori knowledge of central business district (CBD) locations, in this article we measure the centrality of each link in a city’s street network, modelled as a topological graph. We use this to understand clustering behaviour of firms by industrial classification in the city of Ankara, Turkey. Our underlying hypothesis rests on the assumption that the geometry and topology of an urban grid contains accessibility information about the distribution of agglomeration economies and diseconomies, and that different types of enterprises are sensitive to this distribution in various ways. Among other things, the results of the study allow us to predict the evolution of what we call candidate centres (locations that could, by virtue of their connectivity footprint, become subcentres), actual subcentres and CBD functions in response to changes in a city’s street network. Decoding how commercial cluster locations interact with the detailed pattern of street-network-based centralities will be helpful for urban planning policy, in particular for commercial zoning decisions such as expanding CBDs and identifying locations for new subcentres that have an acceptable chance of success