Urban retail

Chapter 5 of the New Urbanism Best Practices Guide

How to create walkable, mixed-use retail at a time when national retail chains often have unyielding formats geared toward the automobile? This chapter explores the challenges of big-box and several other forms of retail. Consultant Robert Gibbs examines corner stores, convenience stores, neighborhood centers, community centers, and regional centers. Goody Clancy Associates lays out steps for matching the volume of retail to the number of households and their spending power. Urban retail expert Richard Heapes distinguishes between lifestyle centers and New Urbanism. Stephen Mouzon explains how to place large stores in urban blocks in various Transect zones.

New Urbanism attempts to bring stores back into mixed-use neighborhoods and town centers — placing them on streets where they define the public realm. Many of these centers include civic buildings such as town halls, libraries, schools, and performing arts centers, to broaden the centers’ appeal. Chains are agreeing to occupy two-level, urban-format retail spaces in some locations. Some of the most successful recent centers are redevelopments of failed shopping centers and malls, and they include significant housing.

This chapter looks at ideas from Australia and the US about how to connect the “Movement Economy” (traffic on thoroughfares) to mixed-use centers. The “Lake Forest model” positions one side of a public square where it opens onto an arterial road. Other projects have a new main street perpendicular to the arterial. Orenco Station near Portland, Oregon, positions some of its commercial buildings directly on an arterial. Downtown Albuquerque contains some storefront retail only 30 feet deep on the perimeter of theaters and parking garages. Also discussed are “A” and “B” streets, drive-through retail, virtues of small interiors, and how to partly or fully wrap a big-box store.