Urban Age Debates: Cities in the 2020s | Rationalising Shopping

welcome to the fifth and final urban age debate of this current cycle focusing on rationalizing shopping our new patterns of consumption and opportunity for reinventing urbanity the urban age debate series is organized by lse cities the alfred hairhouse and gazelle shaft and the lse school of public policy my name is philip roder and i'm the exec director of lse cities and i will co-chair the next 60 minutes with jonathan demello who is equity partner at the retail consultancy cwm on behalf of both of us a very warm welcome to our three panelists thomas heatherwick the designer and founder of heatherwickstudio andrew murphy who is exec director of operations at the john lewis partnership and eva westermark an architect and partner at gale architects in copenhagen llc cities will be live tweeting during the event and if you want to join the discussions on twitter the hashtag is urban age debates this event is being live streamed on youtube through our urban age channel and will then be made available as a podcast from then on we're going to structure our discussion into three rounds they will be rapid and quite fast moving round one will focus on covet 19 as accelerator of urban retail change with questions about e-commerce experience retail and maybe a revival of independent shops round two will shift to peak stuff from black friday to the new awareness of the social and environmental costs of consumerism and then in round three we really bring it back to the city a meaningful urban marketplace question mark can the public space function of retail be reinvented please make use of the q a throughout we hope to take about one to two question for each of the rounds but adding your views and question comments will also help to broaden the perspectives throughout as they can be seen by everyone so you should have the qo a qa button readily available let me now hand over to jonathan for the first round jonathan over to you hi everyone um so the first round is cover 19 is an accelerator of urban retail chains and so what i'm going to cover with this short introduction before i hand over to the panelists is really the fact that clover has catalyzed e-commerce considerably over the past couple of years that we've had covered in the lockdowns that we've seen so e-commerce penetration globally has risen from 14 in 2019 to 20 in 2021 but that actually marks the fact that some markets have never had a developed e-commerce platform so the likes of the us the uk and european markets have seen a doubling in e-commerce spend actually over the last two years um in terms of spend people have been spending their money on new laptops monitors they've been working from home so all the products that are involved in terms of working from home diy garden products have been very um bought you know bought considerably as well by these individuals and also netflix subscriptions too so we've seen a lot of spend increases in certain categories to the detriment of others but you know online grocery spenders actually doubled too and this grocery represents 50 of all of our spend collectively typically especially in certain more developed markets you know that doubling has led to huge logistical pressures on the ability to deliver this is why it's hard to get a slot sometimes you know when you're looking to get home delivery of groceries and so that has created logistical pressures and you know the demise of department stores globally administrations yeah lots of retailers falling by the wayside has led to big vacancies on our high streets and so i guess one of the things that we're going to be exploring as part of this is what does that mean for the high street we've seen repurposing of space from retail converted to officers residential even logistics what does that mean for cities going forwards and you know even though physical sales are starting to bounce back we are seeing a sea change in the way that our high streets and our malls and our cities are are these days you know from a retail perspective so it's really just to hand over to the panelists to discuss this we're going to start with andrew to give a retailer perspective thanks jonathan good afternoon everyone um so i'll maybe try and put some dimensions around the the shift as as we see but just to maybe start with one of the fundamentals is that this is a this is an economic challenge for the retail business model um it will only reverse if somebody uninvents the internet that seems unlikely on balance and therefore we we should take the consequences of it as being somewhat absolute so an example of that would be the oversupply of retail space in towns and city centers the western developed economies is an absolute it will not change there is simply no need for that amount of physical retail space and so for all retailers you have a choice you can try and repurpose that space within your own business model to add sufficient value to offset its cost or you can start to close some or all of it and to give you an idea about how that works is one of the department stores that's uh that's imperiled uh in the uk we're now the only national department store sixty percent of our sales are online uh uh now compared to forty to forty three percent pre pandemic having said that and having closed 16 of our 51 shots during the pandemic so basically being two-thirds of the physical size that we wear our sales are plus two percent 2021 versus 2019 and that what that tells you is that um if the 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 and so when we think about what does that mean 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 um mixed mash and blend of retail residential hospitality uh event space etc and indeed you're already beginning to see this in the big global cities and in larger town centres i do think there's a challenge however i don't think that will be as easy an economic or physical proposition to get um sustainably established in smaller towns i think when we think about this i think we need to think about different scales in that sense thanks very much well we'll move on to eva now to get her views on this yes so thank you andrew i think i can continue where you left off um with this interesting uh topic of scales and different places that people need like we 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 some environments like the retail streets that are more malfunctional like the city centers traditional use they're hurting badly and we all saw that we experienced it but the places that had more of a robust mix of uses that already because of course this trend will trend was just accelerated during covid it started long before that um so we could see that 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 because they had a wider wider reasons for people to come and so that's like one trend we can see in the city centers where i think we have to even go further in the future but also that we need to concentrate the city centers like shorten the walk-in streets layering these functions on top of each other three-dimensionally and also using time to think how users can can shift over the day over the week or whether the month or the year so that's like one really strong tendency that we have to uh our cities have to adapt to in our planners and our private sectors um and the other tendency is the opposite then that we could see that people were spending so much more time in their local neighborhoods and and connected to the everyday use and that the shrinking maybe we went from not even a 15-minute city but a two-minute city the five-minute city like it got really really local and i think that that's another opportunity where the retail actors like 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 like the private sector and retail actors to become more think about place making retail so what can you do to actually help the local community to become more attractive uh to to be able to support um often authentic places um so tapping into the needs of a local community in a stronger way because thinking of that chain trying to control the full shopping experience of course that receiving the package is is also part of that experience and so that to me presents like a great opportunity to do to move both ways like both strengthen the city centers and become more robust and more connected to everyday life but also really focusing on the neighborhood scale and see how we can tap into this authentic identity and strengthen communities let's see from thomas now uh hello everybody uh well in a way i think what i'm going to be saying is building on what eva was talking about um it feels like we had all these public bits of of our country with all the towns and cities that the vast proportion of people are in dominated lazily in a way by by places that the retailers felt like they were essential infrastructure so they could sit there if they'd muscled their way on and they sold tights or they sold your medicine or whatever that was they they they could be there and get away with being uh with being sort of above and people were below and the extent the acceleration of what's happened with kovid really pushing the online uh shopping side is that it feels that we lazy placemaking can't happen anymore and that suddenly we have to think really of emotion as a function and that's something that i've been interested in for a very long time as to how we spoke about functionalism about this is functional place making functional and seemed to forget that emotion was a function and now it's really let forward that it's really thinking about human motivation why do you go somewhere how many steps what what boredom is a thing that we don't really talk about enough i don't think and and in streets and the work that yangel did and and that eva does is really understanding how you feel when you move around a place and and i've just got more and more interested in in that and i've 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 through big places and that means you they're expensive because they're big and the the more smaller places you can get the more a place becomes interesting and engages your emotion in your senses so i think that's the the screeching halt for people suddenly they've got to really get involved with emotion but then i think the we with digital i mean it felt like everyone was rushing to to the online world but it's a pretty packed place to be if i was to tomorrow try and start something and do it online and to selling things to people and connecting it how do you stand out online so i think moving from the essential infrastructure suddenly if i'm not physical i know how you grab people's attention and connect with people emotionally so i think that the retail has become uh media in fact so it's suddenly it's a way to connect with people physically separate from experience it's sort of it jumps and grabs your emotion as a physical in a way that the flat shiny screen whatever you put on it doesn't connect in that way so i'm interested in multiple different dimensions here and what a huge gap there is for an emotion as function led placemaking some really good points there by everybody and i think we're now going to go into a discussion on those points phillip absolutely and i want to come back to andrew uh and uh i would be i'm curious to see how what's your response what you have heard from the designers in this panel in particular what thomas just said about the physicality crates almost like a a local monopoly for uh connecting with people uh with local people and that that's may that may be more powerful than we are currently thinking if we're looking at the statistics which you so powerfully presented up front uh andrew back to you i think philosophically many retailers are in exactly the same place when it comes to the concept of place making and the desire to play a positive part in that um the the the the sad and difficult truth is that the economics of retail currently have it as a very low margin not to say also are quite a low wage industry and so i guess the encouragement i would give to um you know designers architects um civic leaders etc is to recognize that if you see retail as part of your experience and service mix for the inhabitants of our town and city be clear that the economics of retail will very much limit and define what the retailers feel able to contribute and whatever vision we might have shared vision we might have for the future the cost of change is significant and so we we have to be very hard-headed about this um and the number of shop closures that you see happening isn't a result of people just giving up and deciding they'd rather do something else it's an economic consequence and so i'm very much an advocate for bringing that strong and enriching philosophy together with the economic and operational reality of the industry that we currently think of as as retail thank you very much uh we're seeing a lot of comments here uh popping up on chat do contribute do also uh highlight those would you like to be answered i'll come back to them in a moment uh eva uh maybe a response again to thomas's provocation to let's move beyond uh the functionalism in a traditional sense and and embrace the emotional uh as part of a fundamental function yeah i mean i'm a hundred percent with that thinking um just just imagine like how the question how do we design empathic spaces or spaces that makes people be more empathic to other people and i think that if we see how the public life has changed over the course of the last hundred years before we had like the majority of life in our streets was necessary it was actually doing trading goods and it was needing to be out there and then we had this huge shift of optional activity so we only spent time in the street or in the public space if we if we like it because it's optional we don't need to we can actually sit in our homes by ourselves buying things connecting with people so suddenly the public spaces need to be attractive they need to be safe in order for people to even use them 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 so i think that um like emotion as a function is is right on spot in terms of how we have to think about space and just to add to that in terms of what andrew just said that uh what is maybe interesting than in this trajectory from necessary activity to optional activity is that now we can see a need to combine the two again so having like adding these necessary activity going to school going to work everything we do every day we have to combine that with the the destination spaces in order for them to be robust so we're sort of doing i think coming back to a full circle but really i'm i think that the emotion as a function is it's very good um way to describe it and it's not at all fuzzy or uh you know it's it's hardcore real stuff we have to deal with thank you eva and i want to come back to to thomas who set us up around this this track of thinking linking on the one hand to what eva said earlier about the localization of retail some people even refer to the hyper localization the things coming closer the physical things closer to where we live where we have our life worlds and i want to also connect it to john of hugh's comments in the chat where he notes that uh the next uh sort of obvious thing to do with available space that may have been retail until recently is to convert it into residential and that's of course a big debate in planning in many countries at the moment um thomas what what about this relationship where you live and where you shop where you live where you have retail and the proximity is that needed for the sort of emotional function which you alluded to or is it actually absolutely doable even if it remains a more remote or inner city district where you do go about your shopping and retail activities i suppose i'm not thinking of this as a shopping conversation i'm thinking of this as a public life conversation and this uh i've always found it i always found it funny in the world of architecture that the premium project for uh a designer of buildings was an art museum because that was culture and and i just always found that really funny because i thought well where are most people it's on the streets and the so i found it for me that the thing we call shopping has been a way that we see each other how do we come together where else we thought that we would all see each other online and the online was this great place where everyone would be and then we discovered that the algorithms didn't let us really see each other and and though they the fantastic um unexpected things that real public life should be layering um and so how how do we really allow us to see each other there was this wrong construct that shopping and councils thought shopping and developers thought shopping is culture is public life and in a way there's it's both terrible and some kind of relief to say no it isn't because we were pushing out and we're working in nottingham at the moment in the center of the city where there is a shopping mall that failed that was built in the 70s and it's that big thing squeezed out the where are the older people where were the younger the really early years later years and so you get public life squeezed and isolated all around the edge and then we don't see it and then we're surprised when everyone votes for brexit things like that so i suppose going to andrew's point i think we shouldn't give up on how important that public life space is and how much we need to see each other physically because there's something you can trust about that that an algorithm isn't controlling i guess i i'm not the world's expert on this but things like business rates for for for shopping spaces we probably need the government to find some way to to to attacks in in on the online world and to incentivize the street world because at the moment it's penalized and and it's powerful what andrew was just saying and so that we can breathe more life and so in nottingham and our project we we half of this shopping mall building was already demolished and we're we're at this early pre-visioning visioning stage and our first thing was stop stop demolishing the rest of it because to andrew's point about economy there isn't money but so if you knock it all down you're going to what are you building from zero in such precious heart of the town but instead we can mine that existing structure it's in a sense turn it into a our blessing that we're getting and all the carbon you would be washing away and having to get going all over again to muster up new shiny neutral structures and how can we fold back the the flower mill the boxing club and lo overlay as much as possible the things that normally don't see each other because i think whether we realize it or not we're hungry to see each other and that clumsy shopping world that was what councils thought what everyone thought that just pushed all the other life out this is our opportunity to put it back in maybe it's still too big but let's give it a chance but we need government to support that chance thank you very much thomas and we will have to centrally return to this question you put on the table in the second half of the debate but we need to do one important detour we can't avoid the question and you already mentioned carbon a code for a much bigger issue also when it comes to the retail economy so back over to jonathan to introduce the second round yeah so this uh second round is about peak stuff essentially the awareness of the social and environmental costs of consumerism so i guess starting out this introduction um some sectors like fashion over the years have seen significant price deflation has almost been erased to bottom in the sense that you know it's all about cutting prices fast fashion value primark has come to fall in that sense you know and it's one of the most popular retailers in the uk and globally in fact these days um because of that it's obviously you know this device for fast fashion disposable items it's led to lower quality products in general and as such it's had an environmental cost with you know obviously increased consumerism but more importantly wastage so the load quality of these products means you have to replace them more often because they fade you know they go out in the wash etc so you know fast fashion now accounts for about 2.1 billion tons of co2 emissions which is crazy and it's growing as more people want disposable fashion um there's a human cost too you know so maintaining those low prices has led to sourcing in extremely undeveloped countries and that sourcing has led to you know essentially low wages poor working conditions and the things we saw in bangladesh you know over the course of a number of different factory fires we've seen 1 300 people die in bangladesh as a result of sourcing from that particular market so you know it's been really a race to the bottom in terms of cost and therefore passing that lower cost onto the consumer there's also e-waste or electronic waste you know that's led to 57 million tons of wastage worldwide in that sector and only 17 of that's properly recycled according to the un so you know the byproduct of e-waste like mobile phones and all the rest of it has led to mercury being released into the atmosphere which is harmless and harmful to human life and the final thing to mention on online is 30 of online orders of return versus 6 in store so if that's the case and if you look at how much that's been returned 20 of that actually ends up in landfill because the retailers online aren't able to resell the product so that's another big impact on the environment right there so with that i'm going to hand it over to the first panelist which is going to be andrew again on this one thanks jonathan um i think the the starting point in the conversation around fashion is important i think when we think ultimately about our built environment retail's presence how it shows up there we have to be really conscious of that as a as an end-to-end um process that is much longer and more complex than the retail front part um strange to think that fashion used to be measured almost generationally certainly a fashion would be something of a number of years not a number of months and it's very difficult then to disconnect this conversation from what people want and i think particularly and probably a vulnerability of our conversation today is that we don't have anybody under 20 years old contributing to the conversation it's very very easy for a group of middle-aged people to pontificate about what's good what's expanded what can be done what's attractive in my experience people under 20 have quite a different view of that than people who 40 50 years old and are now in the positions of power to run retailers and design buildings and streetscapes um recycling rental of product reuse subscription models all these things are are happening and will undoubtedly grow um i think in many ways they're the less controversial end of this conversation and possibly the less difficult to adapt to i think the role of the car in town centres is an unresolved problem and i've never yet met a local authority that doesn't engage in some acts of self-harm as it attempts to appease the social conscience on the one hand and have a thriving community in the city center on the other and the and the anti-car will be having a lot to answer for the answer can't be to not have cars the answer has to be for it to be proportionate and clean and it feels like progress is being made on that front but um i can't overstate how important carbon customers are to most retailers um not just because of the convenience but also because if we want people to have their vacuum cleaner repaired and we want that to happen in an urban environment then we have to enable the vacuum cleaner to be brought back to the store and just to give that as one one example final point every endeavor i've ever been involved in to improve uh city centre like city center economy the built environment there are four actors who constantly have to be brought together and who typically struggle to align government local authority the space users and the landlords and any conversation about meaningful change and and positive evolution for our tennis city centers has to start and end with those four groups aligned and that's often the easy thing to do thanks very much andrew let's move on to thomas and hear his views on this um well i i think that we [Music] this it's about bringing the streets alive and i think that there are organizations who are hidden around us and at one example and it's about bringing them to the streets and and so there is i think that um my brain's going in two different directions so one side is about as andrew said the the culture of repairing things and and not just having to uh always throw away and and a street used to have repair was one of the things that was on the street repairing shoes repairing clothes and those and it's not just about the literal repair there's about relationships and i think we need to talk about how the street starts to to move to relationships and exchange not just exchange of money for a thing but exchange of services on that street not just things and exchange of emotional connections with people which is i think one of the joys of urban living or town living or even village living is those exchanges that for your mental health as and that uh that grow us each and make us feel integrated into something um but the the the other side was there are so many organizations who have lost their connection to us all and one example is when i was little i went into i was taken in by my one of my parents into a place on the hay market down from lily white's in piccadilly circus to a place called the design center and the design center was where the design council was and i walked into this place and it they didn't charge you to go into the door and there was a plans for a new city being built the city of milton keynes there was a new kind of knitting machine there was a robotic arm that used no electricity and there were devices for your home i think and i that's how i knew i i walked in there and that's how i knew that that's what i was and uh i was a designer that's what and i used to go back in as a teenager if you're in the west and you could just pop in and for all sorts of reasons to do with cost cutting that it it about 25 years ago it got taken away from the high street and there's someone i know who can justify proudly how they saved on all the salaries of it being on the street but it meant that the little me's the little teenage the kids and teenagers how do we know how how do we connect if all we have is clothes shopping uh and there are so many there's a women's organization that we're working with they they might i've sort of become any organization i speak to it's like can we bring you to the ground how do we and we're working on a london street where we're designing the whole of one side of a street and a major pedestrian route the whole side it's ridiculous to be thinking at scale when it used to be made incrementally and how to think while thinking at scale how to make sure we stay incremental in emotion um but how we breathe the life and changes necessary in every few footsteps necessary to make somewhere that comes alive but i i think that we are so stuck even thinking we are all so programmed to think that high streets are jammed full of stuff you buy and i think that we can there's a real opportunity to to rethink that um and and still give business to bangladesh and still give business to other places in the world it's not either or i fully agree with that um i'll pass on to eva thank you yeah there's so many things um that sparked my mind when you when i hear you speak um one thing about doing this how do we do this transformation that we need to do that everyone knows like we have this sense of urgency we have to address and of course that's all a good incentive for change when you have a sense of urgency but change making starts through doing things differently and so what do we have to do differently i think one thing is addressing this you said lazy place making thomas but i think also like just a complete maybe it's the same thing but really lazy use of space like we have to use what we have already so much more efficient and better and that goes for everything but if we take the street as an example just be very concrete and and coming back to this topic that is always the hot potato the parking you know um i mean you may be surprised to hear this from a gale person but i kind of like a parking space not because it's for a parked car but it's so defined as a space it's a small unit it's like two times five meters or something like that uh 10 square meters and just illustrating what you could do with that how hard can that space actually work in terms of delivering quality uh and and creating a more sustainable environment and most of you might have heard about this parklet movement that we have seen in many cities started in san francisco as parking days like just uh paying the meter on a parking spot and turkey turning it into a park so public space and then that then has transformed into a city-led um initiative that you can have two parking spaces transformed locally all of them are different so it's a public public private partnership so the shop owner the landowner can actually contribute to turning this like super tight space into something where it's actually working much harder so maybe you keep one parking space or on each side but they should also be working much harder so not having a parked car like really short term making sure that every space is used in its absolute optimum way so i think that's part of this transformation of thinking of how can we reduce waste how can we increase use and and at the same time stim making stimul stimuli for people to meet like the social dimension numbers and um i think that one part is in the private sector but then the public sector how they have to in order to address this go from this two-dimensional zoning to not three and maybe not four but five dimensionals or fine five-dimensional planning so can we layer functions or um horizontal sorry vertically can we use time much more efficient in terms of thinking that into zoning and planning and i think maybe the fifth dimension is then how we work together like how do we collaborate how do we get all these four key uh parties that andrew mentioned also working together to the same goal so we really have to layer things we have to i think time is maybe the most underutilized asset we have in in cities in order to get more out of what we already have and then anchoring this into local needs and local context so always making something very specific thanks steve but we'll pass on to philip then to lead the debates around this particular topic thank you very much and i want to connect what we are again seeing in in the chat i mean on the one hand there's christian bernard who is really emphasizing this question around do we really need to produce so much i guess but certainly what is it we really need to produce and emphasizes the broader sustainability uh value and it got uh sort of voted very much up uh and i i guess what we need to connect this with is then the second uh highly rated question by by nicholas falk who reminds us uh that a lot of investment is pretty much locked into an existing business uh model uh and it's starting to no longer pay back and maybe let's start with andrew i mean it was a bit of a footnote andrew where you said sure there is something bubbling up around the repair and the maintenance economy and the more circular approach but what are the maybe innovative pilots even your own corporation is advancing that may provide an answer to christian and nicholas and then for our designers uh if we are thinking once again around uh places that offer repair and maintenance services what are the spatial implications uh is it different to the sort of one-off contact point handing over product which then uh is going only one direction but let's start with andrew innovative practices thanks uh thanks for uh they're um the areas that we'd be most uh active in are uh furniture rental and in um active recycling where we're encouraging return of used products to our stores or via online sometimes for a discount on future perks purchases sometimes not and it's quite interesting to look at the different customer behaviors around around those concepts um a couple of points that i'd make about that and um to the to the first of the two questions that you picked out um 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 was optimistic about the chose to be optimistic about the rate of growth of those models and even if i envisaged that there over the next 10 years there was some um aggressive help from legislators to push us in that direction to incentivize the consumer to make the economics easier i would still struggle to see this representing more than 10 to 15 of our total business activity in a decade's time um so there's there's a lot to be thought through there 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 and so anytime you ask yourself the question even if you started from a physical place making a physical retail perspective you might find yourself ending up answers that are delivered digitally and that's before we even let the um the word of the year metaverse into the conversation and start to think about what opportunities or distractions that that may bring so i think it's a really valid conversation and i think eventually we will look back to the importance that some of the viewers have commented on which is 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 hear put forward are quite polarized in that they would either only be possible with the weight of a big retailer behind them and others that really only make sense for uh an owner operator with one door in one location who could potentially make a living themselves out of those options and so i think we have to think in quite a discriminating way about some of the models and the opportunities that we that we propose thank you andrew so two very strong warnings uh not to be very focused on very exceptional high streets or inner city retail conditions you mentioned oxford street and appreciate that the majority looks very different and second that the physical retail is even more locked in and maybe has even greater difficulties to transition than more fluid already virtualized or half virtualized e-commerce that essentially says to me that if we want to take sustainability uh seriously we would have to start the transition immediately in the physical context and that's where i want to hand back to thomas and eva if you had to really now transition to design for maintenance and repair economies is it any different from the retail environments we know today or is it more or less the same you just replace a repair shop with something that before was pure selling are there any paradigmatic opportunities for designers to reinvent also the territory that shapes those activities yeah so i think that it's a totally different mindset uh like moving from thinking about myspace to our space or thinking from like a one-way conversation through design to a dialogue so how do we go from the monologue design to a dialogue design it has to be less controlled i think in order to invite people to think of things being remade being maintained being um not finished but actually always constantly in this circle um and and i think that is a really good opportunity to think of how do we address the our space or the our design which what is different compared to actually being in control of the shop's interior like how do we make that connection and one of the ways is of course tap into people's needs and listen to people and and and understanding people's everyday life and actually talking to people's needs so let's say we have a repair place i'm thinking of what you just said andrew in terms of that you know we have to get the vacuum cleaner back to the store but maybe there's opportunity to have something really local so there's a need to create jobs locally uh is there there's a need on a personal level not needing to carry this big thing or putting into the car driving to the original store like how can we create local meeting places hubs in in a neighborhood on a neighborhood scales that can do all of these things so how we put it into the system of this like place making regenerative design thinking that is much more about what's ours what's common than what's mine what i'm selling to you so it's how do we actually come together around that but it looks differently definitely thank you eva thomas do you agree is it very different yes uh i think that uh going back to that point about exchange the street as a place of exchange rather than the street as a place of just selling flogging stuff to people um i mean 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 one-way traffic of buying from someone and i think the i i had a very powerful visit last week in i went to reading and visited a project which is a cinema set up by the really local group and they also have a project in catford in lewisham and it was so interesting meeting the owner being shown around because the they had got an inexpensive space and had focused not on lavish interior design not on bundles and bundles of consultants all clocking up their time and that they just boil down to the absolute essential of a of some cinema spaces some projectors just put plywood on the walls and it meant that i think a cineworld ticket is 12 pounds 50. they're their tickets are six pounds 50 and they've got loads of space so they don't have pressure to sell you a coffee they don't have pressure to rent that space to you so there's public spaces with tables and seats which is like a village hall and it's to andrew's point about 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 the luxury is the activity and the focus on the the exchange and the social dimension for us all because the other thing is gentrification and the more is how do you find something that can feel true for all of us but not actually push a bunch of us out i've got also interested and with a a new organization called make space for girls uh and and i don't know if you your um the listeners and views of have known of them but they they weren't looking at how we look and in the world of design and um so there's all these things where you look at what's good public space oh yeah look there's a skate park and yeah okay look there's um there's skating going on there's football and basketball going on it's a great public space and then you stop and say well how many girls are there in these spaces that you're saying a good public space and that actually the girl numbers are very small and so where boys feel safe and where girls feel safe is so different actually and we're ticking as success when it isn't really a success if it isn't space for girls how do you design space for girls and if i flip that into my life with my daughter who's a teenager and then you see where does she feel safe she doesn't feel safe going to oxford street and wandering around the west end like i might have done or cycling around um and then you get into another funny thing which we haven't spoken about yet is the privatized public spaces and so there's you know a lot of criticism put at uh potential sort of cynical uh creation of spaces but it was interesting when speaking to my daughter and her friends the for example in king's cross the the kings cross development there they feel safe being there because because it's private space it means that there is they have a sense that they're safe because there's security in that space and that's another thing that things like the westfield big spaces have and so i think my interest is isn't buying and selling things it's how you make people actually have space where we see each other which the online doesn't do and so i think that's that's very very interesting but i think gentrification and focus but is an issue but focusing on activity rather than um rather than luxury thomas that's very helpful and indeed almost a transition now to our final round here which also connects by cassie iats and monica milenska comments they're both really concerned and interested hearing more about it's almost beyond retail around the public space function and that is of course the question we want to now really leave it with how can we transition towards a meaningful urban market place can retail ever again sort of embrace some of the public space qualities which many of us uh know of course of certain markets and even in other parts of the world of bazaars and how can physical spaces that include retail remain inclusive or in other words does inclusivity and commodification maybe rule out each other to some degree um and finally uh if we are really designing for the next market places that have this public space qualities which we have heard now from all of you repeatedly what are the really the key objectives for the design of these places and who are we designing for this is a question i borrow from thomas from our front conversation uh who who are we designing for in these cases we'll take in this instance our designers first uh with eva thomas uh and then almost have have andrew react to to their propositions uh so eva if i can invite you first and then thomas thank you um but i think it's really interesting just a question you know can can can we ever come back to the to the qualities of a market space um or a bazaar and to me it's um it's maybe strange because that's if i take an example concrete example when i worked in christchurch after the earthquake and we did this recovery plan and the whole city center was just completely shut off no one could use it so there was not a meeting place in the city anymore the first thing that happened was through the desire to meet this um market space that started to pop out up in neighborhoods around the city centers as a way to for people to come together but also to exchange good it was like farmers markets but also selling other types of goods so it was really like a multi-functional market space and and to me the interesting part of this is that how quickly the market can respond to a crisis or to a change because it is like the beauty of of the flexibility of not having just one place but actually being a function or a concept that can move and adapt to different places so the need for that flexibility to be able to tap into also where people are so addressing who are we designing for if we have more of a flexible mindset about where how to consume thing or how to produce things so can we actually make this offer uh be paired with what we know what we know is the everyday life of people and be really really focused on making sure that we know that the people that have the less possibilities or or um people that are under underserved underserved communities they are so in so many ways cut off from possibilities to even like shop fresh food or it's much harder for them to have a healthy life lifestyle so if we can try to think of this combination of understanding people's everyday life routines knowing where people enjoy spending time already today and then inviting marketplace to where people are i think that's that's an interesting way to think of the reverse like like actually shopping coming to people and then addressing this social dimension at the same time so offering not only one good but like a lot of like this great variety of offers that invites different types of user groups so we have this social media thing thank you eva i'm aware of time so uh thomas and andrew if we can keep it to a minute so you have one final round as well thomas over to you i think we are refreshed at sort of trying to get rid of uh the somehow i think there's something about being feeling invigorated and i it's it's not for no reason that the uh i've got my double negatives or whatever that the farmers markets have have risen up i mean many markets they're not cheaper than if you buy something in a shop why is it that we are invigorated what is it that connects what is about that energy that we thrive off it's also very interesting i think that how we used to spend time outdoors only in sort of july august uh and i know yan gales wrote a lot about this but then gradually that's expanded round where we went even in helsinki you know in in november we're willing to be sit outside it's like our senses want invigoration and i think we have a an urge for a truth and i think within a market there's a feeling that no one's pulling a layer over you and i think in whatever our high street's off an hour now there's even the question do we need the glass anymore in all of these places and how do we make something that flexes and changes without that stiffness so i think we're in a time of very interesting exploring our own truth and and of each other thank you thomas andrew does this resonate what we have just heard from evan thomas how does it land on your desk [Music] i think the inevitable focus of the conversation towards centrality around food um is is right in fact i would go as far as to say there will be no physical market place for general merchandise in other words you know kind of manufactured consumer goods in our towns and city centres um in in the future um there's there's simply no customer or commercial advantage to at scale and candidly the internet is simply too good at meeting functional needs of that sort um hence my rather good comment about uninventing the internet because as a vehicle for needs as opposed to wants and desires it is simply too efficient and business models at scale have grown up that can service that i think then food and social interaction and emotions the center around being together with others both those you know and those who don't know the affirmation that comes from sharing in a collective uh moment in you know inspiring or at least acceptably pleasant space these are the fundamentals and um i don't think we should see that as something to fear or something to be negative around but i do think again we need a realism around the version that we could get excited about within an italy type marketplace that's 100 000 square feet and attracts tens of thousands of people is a great solution for a city like london or milan or new york it's not going to be the answer for uh bockner or hull and um we need to not be too inadvertently elitist in the solutions that we reach for thank you andrew now instead of me doing a summary i i suggest we do one final round uh we'll run over by two minutes but i hope the audience will be remaining with us but just one sentence for uh the four of us so of you including jonathan what of the debate over the last 60 minutes may stick with you is there was there sort of one moment or one argument one perspective uh which also maybe in the framing of it uh you uh sort of will will carry forward and i want to invite jonathan to come first it's a reconciliation at some points that we've heard here you know from andrew which obviously it's all about the commercial side to a large degree you know it's got to make it's going to make money sense to be able to invest in things but equally you know what thomas was saying about the emotional i think is also worth bringing in and i think you can marry the two together you know if you think about online retail and how it's pushed forward into our psyche and consumer spend it's been one of those things where it's hard to measure the benefit of physical stores in that context and so what i think is important is to understand the halo effects you know of a physical store and what it does for online channels and i think measuring that and monetizing that is key for retailers going forward so they can purely evaluate not just the emotional side but also the monetary side of things bring the two together thank you eva yes i think if we can we have some good numbers for that as well actually which is really good um to me it's all about the social dimension of shopping to tap into that to think social dimension and place as a key driver to our habits and consumption and etc so so how can retail be much more of a place making a social catalyst for unique and authentic neighborhood thank you uh eva and andrew well i'm aware that i've probably been quite kind of cold and hard and rational through the conversation i'm very i'm very struck with uh what thomas said and a lot of slightly paraphrase um the kind of disaggregation of design into art and function um and then inhabited by emotion and i think as a retailer in our essence most of us who spent our career in retail that's actually what we're around about in terms of product place and people and i do think the the coming together of the the commercial animals the operators the designers and the kind of the property owners whether a local authority etc i do think that's probably the point on which we commune and where our interests align and so i do think it's important not to lose that albeit as i've pointed out a number of times that there are complexities at scale and in terms of business models in order for us to to make the best job of that in the future but that that will definitely stay with me thank you andrew and thomas well i i mean everyone's made incredible points and i've i've found this a really heartening uh uplifting conversation very moving in many ways and um we've got the spookiness that i'm sitting here with a weirder setup than i even look like i had to have my notes around me alone in some weird biggish room in my studio just thinking how hungry we all are to be together and this is about togetherness and the how we come together we all are want to be together and that's a need we will always have and these are the about excuses to be together and how we make the emotion the interestingness the absence of that boringness stimulate and invigorate ourselves and see each other which is what i want and i think what so many of us want thank you very much thomas and in the spirit of emphasizing togetherness i want to express a few thanks uh first of all of course to our audience today and really many things for now in total 54 comments have a look at them they were all really interesting we could only take a few of course i want to thank the panel andrew murphy eva westermark thomas heatherwick and my co-chair uh jonathan demello many thanks also to our colleagues in berlin at the alfred halhausen society that have helped prepare this debate elizabeth munfeld and alexandra hunger and then my own colleagues here at the lse emily cruz tayo isa daniel jennifer ho and tianji i hope you enjoyed this debate stay tuned there will be more to come and very importantly we will of course publish not just this particular debate in full but we'll produce what we call a legacy film which goes to the main arguments thank you so much to everyone and have a nice week