Title: Metropolitan Activity Centre Planning in Australia: Implications of Millennial Consumption Practices
Abstract: AbstractAustralian state planning authorities, in seeking to impose order in activity centre networks, prepare high-level strategic plans to regulate the distribution, composition and size of activity centres in metropolitan areas. Typically, these plans are descendants of metropolitan plans prepared in the 1950s, which had a strong retail and master planning focus. Their intellectual foundation, however, lies in classic spatial economic theory from the 1920s and 1930s. Whilst these theoretical underpinnings may have sufficed a decade or more ago, this article argues that normal supply and demand models cannot explain the impact of changing retail consumption practices on activity centres. Accordingly, the article discusses the development of online marketing channels from the beginning of the millennium and the role experiential retailing will play in activity centre development. The article presents an integrative conceptual model highlighting the main relationships between retail consumers, retail businesses and planning regulators, and introduces utilitarian and hedonic consumption as the main drivers of retail demand. The article finally suggests how the changing nature of demand will affect retail formats and ultimately the composition and nature of activity centres.澳大利亚政府规划部门为了在活动中心网络中建立秩序,制定了高层战略规划,规范城市地区活动中心的分布、构成和规模。这些规划通常延续了1950 年代的城市规划,那时的规划明显地侧重于零售业和总体规划。其知识基础却是1920年代和1930 年代的经典空间经济学理论。在十几年前,这些理论基础还够用,但是,本文指出,常规供求模式已无法解释零售消费习惯的改变对活动中心的冲击。因此,本文探讨了21 世纪以来网上销售渠道的发展,以及体验性零售业在活动中心发展过程中的作用。本文提出了一个整体概念模式,突出零售业消费者、零售业和规划管理者的主要关系,指出实用主义和享乐主义消费是零售业需求的主要动力。本文最后就需求性质变化对零售模式的影响,以及最终对活动中心的构成及性质的影响,提出了看法。Keywords:: Metropolitan planningactivity centresshopping mallsretail consumptiononline shopping AcknowledgementsThe author wishes to thank Associate Professor Paul Maginn for his encouragement and reviews of early drafts of this article. Thanks are also extended to the anonymous referees for their constructive comments.Notes1. Paul Drechsler is a planning practitioner with over 30 years experience in senior positions in the private sector.2. Interestingly, similar findings have been made about the anti-competitive nature of the planning system on the retail sector in the UK (Cheshire et al., Citation2011).
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-05-15
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 6
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