Welcome to a breakfast seminar about retail and place development, with insights into how people perceive urban retail environments and what this tells us about the role of retail in places and their development.
Retailing plays a key role in local and regional development. An attractive and well-functioning retail offer can be crucial to a place’s identity, vitality, and capacity to develop. At the same time, place development is a complex process involving several interconnected dimensions, including retail location, consumer behaviour, the design of the physical environment, and the relationships between different actors. Social, economic, and environmental sustainability are central to this development.
In this seminar, Sara and Ghita present a collaboration exploring the role of retail in place development and how retail environments can be understood from multiple perspectives. Results from a study that investigates how perceived place vitality, i.e. how lively and attractive a place feels to its users, varies across environments, evolves over time, relates to retail structure, and is shaped by individual user evaluations will be shared. The study measures this through a perception-based indicator derived from sentiment in Google Maps reviews collected for six retail areas in Gothenburg over the period 2018–2025.
The breakfast seminar is a collaboration between Handelsrådet, HUI, and the Centre for Retailing at the School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg.
The seminar will be held in English.
Welcome!