Urban retail public spaces – creation, disruption, and transformation

The project is carried out at Said Business School, University of Oxford, UK, under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan Reynolds.

The main aim of the project is to investigate the impact of e-commerce and managed shopping centres on the traditional retail urban public spaces (understood as high street) in the resilience context, using Oxford City Centre as a case study. The starting point of the research is the retail resilience analytical framework developed by Dolega & Celinska-Janowicz (2015). One of the assumptions of the research is that results of competitive impact of online retail and new shopping formats on high street retail public spaces depends on their resilience. Retail public space resilience can be roughly defined as a type of adaptive, thus dynamic and evolutionary process of adaptation of public space in retail areas to changes, crises, and shocks without failing to perform its functions in a sustainable way. The adaptive changes can be an effect of independent or joint decisions and actions of various actors, including retailers and other business operators, private organisations, public authorities, and consumers.

Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0