Main street / suburban mall / power centre: emerging retail synergies and resilient urbanity
This thesis explores a range of emerging shopping morphologies and their capacities for resilient urbanity. Twentieth century shopping centre development was largely marked by the rise of the suburban mall and power centre (big box store cluster) and the decline of the main street, along with a drift towards car-dependency and privatisation. Twenty-first century retail landscapes, however, increasingly form synergies between these three retail types, and these synergies are not well investigated in the existing research. Deploying a mix of assemblage, resilience thinking, and typomorphology, this thesis comprises a study of one hundred cases of contemporary retail synergies with a broad global spread. Detailed mapping and diagrammatic analysis are supplemented with interviews and observations from selected agents and shopping centres. These cases show a diverse range of emergent shopping morphologies: from simple combinations of any two retail types, to highly-experimental and complex assemblages of two or more synergies. Thirteen key forms of emergent retail synergies are identified, showing a trend towards more fine-grained, multi-functional, and pedestrian-friendly shopping morphologies consistent with more resilient forms of urbanity. Many retail synergies, however, continue to embody anti-urban tendencies including entrenched car-dependency and strong private control.