Beyond Retail: What is the Future of Main Street?

About this issue

Issue number

Volume 48 – Number 1

Summary

As increasing numbers of retail establishments close, and more and more boarded up storefronts appear on our main streets, the question is ‘how do we maintain the social, economic, and cultural function of these streets? The contributors to this issue explore this all to evident problem and potential solutions from multi-disciplinary perspectives: not just of planning and architecture, but geography, sociology, business, and psychology.

Conrad Kickert

23 Mar 2022

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Guest Editors: CONRAD KICKERT and EMILY TALEN

Contents

• Beyond Retail: Envisioning the Future of Retail
  CONRAD KICKERT and EMILY TALEN
• The Past of Our Storefront Future: A Century of Post-Transactional Storefront Transformations in The Hague’s Urban Core
  CONRAD KICKERT
• The Future of Main Street: Retail Shrinkage
  EMILY TALEN          
• Gathering Spaces When No One Can Gather: Art and Community Third Places in the Age of Covid-19
  JEFFREY NATHANIEL PARKER 
• Music on Main: Supporting a Tangle of Main Streets during the Covid-19 Pandemic
  JACOB IZENBERG, DOUGLAS FARRAND, MOLLY ROSE KAUFMAN, and MINDY THOMPSON FULLILOVE 
• Rebuilding Cultural Ethos in Urban Storefronts: Two Arts Districts in Dallas-Forth Worth, Texas
  HYESUN JEONG  
• The Consumerization of Work in the Modern City: Storefronts, Coworking, and the Convergence of Production and Consumption
  PETER BACEVICE 
• Turning Shops into Housing? Planning Deregulation, Design Quality, and the Future of the High Street in England
  BEN CLIFFORD and MANUELA MADEDDU
• Publication review

Cover images: (front) In The Hague a creative firm occupies an erstwhile shop (photo: Conrad Kickert; (back) Anheuser-Busch workspace, New York, boarded up during the pandemic (photo: Peter Bacevice)

More from this issue

Main and high streets, Storefronts, Repurposing vacant retail buildings, Cultural placemaking, Urban revitalization

Meet the Editors

Conrad Kickert is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo....

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Editorial: Beyond Retail: Envisioning the Future of Main Streets

CONRAD KICKERT and EMILY TALEN As thousands of retail establishments close in cities on both sides of...

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