Marketing Geography (RLE Retailing and Distribution) by Davies Ross;

Author:Davies, Ross;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1039355
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

6 Changes in the Urban Business Pattern

The last chapter was primarily concerned with providing a static assessment of the main features of the urban business pattern. Frequent attention had to be given, however, to the fact that the urban business pattern is continually changing, and in recent years the rate and magnitude of change has been greater than ever before. This warrants some further and more detailed consideration, though shortage of space again compels us to deal predominantly with examples of retail change.

In general, there are two main types of change to be recognised in the city. First, there are those changes which have largely come about through the effects of ‘free’ market forces, in what we might regard as the normal process of evolution (often described as a general process of decentralisation): these essentially include the relative decline of business facilities in the inner city and the expansion of trade in the suburbs. Secondly, sometimes reinforcing these trends and sometimes working against them, are those more specific changes which have been deliberately effected by planning: these are most in evidence in the form of inner city redevelopment schemes and the morphology of new types of outlying shopping centres.

The basic causes of decentralisation and the concurrent need for increasing planning controls are some fundamental changes in the nature of consumer demands and the methods of business supply. In broad terms, these may be summarised as:

1. Changes in the spatial composition of consumers. The continuing growth of the population as a whole has been accompanied by massive shifts in the locational pattern of different socio-economic groups. In general, the younger, richer and more mobile sections of society have migrated to the suburbs to create new, large sources of demand in areas where few, if any, shopping facilities had previously existed. The older, poorer and less mobile sections have tended to concentrate within the inner city, where their overall lower levels of purchasing power are insufficient to support the surfeit of shopping facilities that remain.

2. Changes in shopping habits and consumer tastes. Such diverse factors as the growth of female employment and car ownership, and the increasing use of deep freezers and other domestic appliances, have combined to produce some major changes in the life-styles of consumers, particularly in the suburbs, and to alter the traditional patterns and profiles of shopping behaviour. Most noticeably, there has been a reduction in frequent, daily trips to small local centres and much greater emphasis on single, weekly bulk-buying trips to the largest centres available. At the same time, there has been a growing demand for more convenience and comfort in shopping which newer rather than older centres can obviously better provide.

3. Changes in the scale-economies of businesses. Not only has there been an increase in the corporate sizes of the multiple chain groups of companies but, as we have seen, there has also been an increase in the floorspace sizes of individual stores. This has led to some major changes in locational requirements, with the

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