Practice of Consumption and Spaces for Goods/Retail Futures

Design innovations for contemporary interiors and civic art / Luciano Crespi, editor.

Interiors, intended as the discipline able to build (not only) physical connections in between spaces, people and objects, has deeply changed in the last decades, assuming new roles and aims. Both theory and practice, thanks to its continuous updating, have being able to generate innovative and collaborative insight and solutions, moving fast towards new contents, new tools and different strategies focused on the contemporaneity. In this framework, retail design, both in research and profession, is particularly interesting as an expression of this disciplinary shift, with an approach characterized by multidiscipli-narity, experimentation and a strong relational dimension. The change in the significance of goods is a process that, ever since the end of the Industrial Revolution, has triggered far-reaching changes in society as the term has lost any meaning in relation to its purely functional character and increasingly come to represent symbolic and cultural contents. " Practice of Consumption and Spaces for Goods " has the aim to investigate contemporary retail spaces as complex places combining many aspects that go beyond the spatial and functional to include the physical, social, cultural and economic.

2012

A+ArchDesign , 2018

Public spaces like shopping areas are indispensable places for human. The buying and selling of goods played a very important role in the development of towns and cities (1). Shopping places has been changed with modern movement. At the same time, these spaces embrace particular events that have collective social, historical and cultural associations; projections of these events influence the physical transformations, which can each be re-identified through time. One of the basic features of traditional shopping areas is the association between urban fabric and social structure (2). However, contemporary shopping places has been emerged as closed box independent from tissue of city which lost their spatial values. Therefore, especially in historical cities, the unity of 'urban fabric-shopping place' is impaired. The "space-time" relation in modernity shifts because of breaking ties of societies with the traditions and is leading to the loss of identity (3). This study discusses the space design of contemporary shopping areas as important public city places and the interpretation of traditional impression in today's modern architecture to refer to values of place. With this aim, "Mediacite" shopping center in Belgium designed by Ron Arad and eastern covered bazaar will be examined as case study. The "Mediacite" was created in the context of modern design criteria, although the architect has revived the sense of traditional design principles in the place. This project ties together all the disparate elements of its site to create a new axis through the city of Liege (4).

SpringerBriefs in Geography, 2020

The texts useful for us, the descriptions, the maps, the cadastral maps, are not objective documents. Every reading is, inevitably, a critical interpretation. We read things with our eyes and elaborate images with the mechanisms that our mind, unique and unrepeatable, uses in design: at the end we find, however many objectivity efforts can be made, what we are looking for (Strappa 2012, 19).

The demand for centrality and accessibility have made retailing an essentially urban activity. It was so in the past, it still is in the present and, despite the potential of e-commerce, it is likely to continue in the near future. However, from a spatial point of view, the relationship between retailing and the city have not always followed the same paths. The secular marriage between the principles of centrality and proximity was followed by convenience linkages favouring accessibility, circulation and parking facilities. More recently, some outlets turned inwards, seemingly divorced from the public city. In the metropolitan areas, where retail precinct organization is more complex, the changes in the relationship between the city and retailing express clear centre / periphery dialectics. This chapter aims at providing additional insights into the evolution of city / retail relations, according to a dual reading. On the one hand, we have the visible world appraisal of retail lands...

Craig, Christopher; Del Bene, Marco; Fongaro, Enrico (ed. by), Continuity and convergence in revolutionary times. A comparative view of the Long 1960s in Japan and Italy, Mimesis International, 2022

This essay is focused on the relationship between consumption models and the transformation of retail venues, during the Sixties in Italy. In the past, historiography – especially Marxist-inspired literature – has largely ignored the role of mediation between supply and demand; today, however, it is difficult to view the physical spaces built for business and commerce – small stores and supermarkets, department stores or shopping malls – as merely neutral containers, playing but a passive role in consumerism. On the contrary, when retail venues act as frames around products, showcasing them, they undoubtably play a direct role in influencing people to make purchases, transforming the very psychology of consumption. To apply this understanding to the 1960s means, in practice, asking how the transformation of the consumer model tied to the advent of large-scale retail distribution, and how the latter contributed to influencing the mindset and preferences of consumers

Environment and Planning D-society & Space, 2002

Retail Design Theoretical Perspectives, published by Routledge, 2017

Chapter 5 Retail Environments The changing relationship between producers and consumers, the growth of service industries, and the opportunities for shopping as a leisure activity have significantly influenced where retailing takes place through the use of internal and external spaces. The opportunities for consumption beyond the selling of products, have embraced the development of the 'third place' and the design of explicitly experiential retail environments. The focus on consumer experience but also the convergence of commerce, service, leisure and culture has contributed to both the hybridity and fluidity of the designed environment. Fluidity extends to the physical retail space itself, as it becomes permeated by online connectivity to the virtual environment. The spatial theme is one of increasing complexity as the boundaries between transaction and leisure have become blurred; stores have a commercial, sales function but also showcase the brand, communicating its values and providing a sensory leisure experience. With its extension into cultural institutions, retailing has had to negotiate its commercial function with predominant educational and recreational functions. More generally retail outlets have contested or enhanced public space. Their appearance at airports and railway stations, sports venues and tourist attraction provide further insights into the diversity of retail formats, sizes and purposes, and the temporality of space. This chapter commences with a more detailed exploration of the theoretical contexts of place and space, and their influence on the diversity of retail formats and their design. It continues by explaining how stores can be distinguished by their 'atmosphere', and experiential properties. The development of the 'third place' concepts leads to further consideration of the possibilities for more complex sensory environments in two contrasting formats, flagship, especially luxury, stores and pop-up stores. The final section of the chapter extends these environments into the online sphere, and the ways in which digital technologies challenge notions of retail space. It concludes with the problem of stores as showrooms or showcases for online shopping. In so doing, the chapter reflects the dimensions of the retail environment from more bounded, visual places, focused on products and display, to the fluid, consumer engaging spaces of experiential and sensory stores. Perspectives on retail environments: place and space Retailing is a global activity, but one not necessarily requiring a global solution. Buildings and the streets and malls that contain them, provide the contexts for the empty retail 'shell' (Plunkett and Reid 2012). Towns and cities offer both idiosyncrasies and less anonymous spaces, but bring with them the homogeneity of multiple store brands. The environments of retailing, and their design, are determined by their relationship to concepts of place and space. These define the possibilities for design, through their location, the built environment, the size of store and its internal conceptualisation.

Progress in Human Geography, 2003

2016

As the birth of the covered arcade was a turning point in shopping scenery, making a clean, safe, ideal environment for shopping in 18th century, the emergence of the pedestrianized shopping streets is as well a new turning point for the retail landscape of European cities. This turn has a prominent implication for shop organization and the space. The higher the traffic of people on foot, the better business runs. And eventually the more the number and status of shops grow, eventually the rents increase. At a result you will see many international, multinational, or national chain stores replacing the old local single owned businesses. As Zukin mentions; "the creative destruction of the landscape." Among studies regarding retail and different forms of consumption, the influence of changes in the retail structure on space in our ever-globalizing world has been overlooked. This research is addressing central city European shopping streets as spaces of consumption and spaces ...