Consumption and Retail in Urban Spaces: Studies on Italy and Catalonia

Abstract

Th e choice of a shopping street in UK as the cover picture gives me the opportunity to introduce this special issue: in this country, the health of town centres and high streets has been under scrutiny for the past ten years, at a time when the eff ects of the global economic crisis were already becoming evident. As evidence of the interest in this topic, in 2011 the report Revitalising High Street1 was published, as well as an article in which Wrigley and Dolega – using the concepts of resilience, fragility and adaptation – analysed the performance of more than 250 urban centres and high streets in four regions of the country, and their reconfi gurations following the economic shock. A vivid debate followed, marked by diff erent contributions. We have no way of accounting for the variety of opinions and positions expressed; suffi ce it to mention the works of scholars sometimes directly involved in the planning and management of retail areas, who focused their attention on specifi c issues: the challenges posed to the high street because of the impact of online retailing, of the rapid growth of the so-called convenience stores, of the consolidation of the night-time economy and of the new factors infl uencing consumer behaviour (Wrigley, Brookes 2014), or again the trends of commercial and social spaces characterised by an “adaptive fl exibility” (Wrigley, Lambiri 2014, 919) that had kept them alive in the past and still constituted a creative presence. Not only for high streets, these are phenomena and issues that, although articulated in diff erent ways from a geographical point of view, also had several eff ects in Italy, over the last decade. On the occasion of an international seminar, I had the opportunity to focus on such dynamics: “half a century aft er the beginning of the transition to the post-Fordist city, we are observing transformations, not only in the central areas, which require us to integrate the interpretation of the changes of the urban economic base with new con-