Post-debate Film | Rationalising Shopping | Urban Age Debates: Cities in the 2020s

[Music] kobe's been very impactful to retailers in general but also all the suppliers to retail and also landlords that the retailers pay the rent to we've seen very strong sort of movement towards online retail and therefore things like logistics are very important because you know how do you get your product to the consumer there's been a backdrop of obviously government incentive packages which have helped retailers to an extent but that hasn't offset the reduction in demand to a large degree at gale we look at maybe not so much where people are spending money but where they're spending time so during covert we could really see this shift in that the retail streets that are more malfunctional like the city centers traditional views they are hurting badly and we experienced it but the places that had more of a robust mix of uses those cities that had really invested in adding more everyday functions to the city centers like layering things bringing back schools adding playgrounds thinking also recreation and nature as part of the city center they were more robust this is an economic challenge for the retail business model it will only reverse if somebody uninvents the internet we should take the consequences of it as being somewhat absolute and so for all retailers you have a choice you can try and repurpose base within your own business model to add sufficient value to offset its cost or you can start to close some or all of it having closed 16 of our 51 shots during the pandemic our sales are plus two percent 2021 versus 2019 and what that tells you is that if the overall business model is healthy the switch to online does not mean that retail as an industry is disappearing it is simply a format change and a form change i think there's several important lessons that kovid taught us about retail streets and inner cities the first one is what we thought might be similar type streets can really be radically different and so we can begin to understand nuance about what's the population density near that street is it predominantly monofunctional towards work is it an area that has true mix of users versus just mixed use so that has forced us to look more at the everyday rhythm and routines of people before the offer might have been mediocre now with all those commuting patterns being disrupted the offer has to be truly unique and special and not something that only just attracts you know the the lowest common denominator of of need i'm interested in the street as a social theatre which means you need to start really by thinking of activities rather than thinking of just one-way traffic of buying from someone how are we going to get the economics right and i think less of the priority of how much bronze is there and what was the fancy this or that but the luxury is the activity and the focus on the the exchange and the social dimension for us all for urban space it has to mean less probably owed by retailers less of what is there being for the direct function of transactional retail but it doesn't mean that retail shouldn't be present but i strongly suspect what we'll see is a much more mixed mash and blend of retail residential hospitality event space there's definitely a shift towards more conscious consumerism you know through an awareness that the environment is deteriorating if we don't do something drastic about it and so a lot of the retail chains that you see are offering a level of rental or repurchasing services you know where you can recycle up cycle products so return it and then the retailer sells it i care for example do furniture rental in that sense it's still definitely not as prevalent as maybe it should be in the market and perhaps it needs to be more regulated where these services need to be offered in some sense by brands in general the researchers from u.s telling us that people are buying 400 more close today than only a few decades ago fashion consumption has accelerated extremely over the past 10 years another one is that 70 70 of all our clothes is passive we only use 30 of the clothes we have which is of course a huge waste of resources and the more curious back from a danish research the young people in denmark tend to buy new clothes instead of washing their dirty clothes and it's not because people are stupid in denmark it's because of the system itself before eight you had fashion brands normally putting out two to four collections per year but after 2008 were my budgets were really under pressure the brand suddenly put out 20 30 collections per year and that means that the window you have per collection where the clothes is new and relevant for the consumer is so small today and that means all clothes sold today is sold with a discount is even not profitable any longer we have to be really conscious of that as an end-to-end process that is much longer and more complex than the retail front part fashion used to be measured almost generationally a number of years not a number of months recycling rental of product reuse subscription models all these things are happening will undoubtedly grow to re-engineer the business model of a very big retailer is no small thing it takes time but it also takes investment and even if i chose to be optimistic about the rate of growth of those models i would still struggle to see this representing more than 10 to 15 of our total business activity in a decade's time compounded by the fact that change for any business is easier to deliver and cheaper to deliver in a digital environment than it is in a physical one there will be very few solutions that make sense on oxford street in london that also makes sense in a small provincial town and many of the examples that i put forward would either only be possible with the way of a big retailer behind them and others that really only make sense for an owner operator with one doer in one location so i think that it's a totally different mindset moving from thinking about myspace to our space or thinking from like a one-way conversation through design to a dialogue it has to be less controlled i think in order to invite people to think of things being remade being maintained being not finished but actually always constantly in this circle how can we create local meeting places hubs in a neighborhood how we put it into the system of this like place making and it's not just about the literal repair there's about relationships and not just exchange of money first exchange of emotional connections with people which is i think one of the joys of urban living or town living or even village living it's those exchanges that grow us each and make us feel integrated into something whether or not we go online and buy things there's always a place where we receive the goods whether that's picking it up at the local supermarket or close to home there's always a place so i'm thinking that there is a great opportunity for retail to become more think about place making retail so what can you do to actually help the local community to become more attractive to be able to support authentic places if we like it because we don't need to we can actually sit in our homes by ourselves buying things connecting with people so suddenly the public spaces needs to be attractive and that's where all the emotions come in of course it's about emotions about feeling safe about feeling included about meeting other people it feels like we had hounds and cities that the vast proportion of people are in dominated lazily in a way by places that the retailers felt like they were essential infrastructure so they could sit there and the acceleration of what's happened with kovid really pushing the online shopping side is that it feels that lazy placemaking can't happen anymore and that suddenly we have to think really of emotion as a function that it's really thinking about human motivation why do you go somewhere and i find it incredible how insensitively most places have been being made up until very very very recently it's also been interesting when we think about what's the role of shopping places i think shops have been too big for too long so you walk along a street and you're kind of walking past these big places and that means they're expensive because they're big and the more smaller places you can get the more a place becomes interesting and engages your emotion in your senses it jumps and grabs your emotion is a physical in a way that the flat shiny screen whatever you put on it doesn't connect in that way i suppose i'm not thinking of this as a shopping conversation i'm thinking of this as a public life conversation where are most people it's on the streets for me the thing we call shopping has been a way that we see each other how do we come together [Music] you