Adaptive resilience and the competition between retail and service agglomeration formats: an international perspective

This paper investigates the competitive relationship between dominant urban agglomeration formats (traditional ‘evolved’ town centres and ‘created’ shopping malls) and the drivers of competiveness in the form of key agglomeration resources (accessibility, parking condition, tenant mix, atmosphere). Based on a consumer survey (n, 2,161) across three distinctive European capital cities, covariance-based structural equation modelling reveals remarkably limited differences between formats in terms of the investigated drivers of competitiveness. Positive relationships of patronage towards both formats in all cities and the significant difference in why respondents patronise them suggest a partly complementary existence of the two types of agglomeration. We explain this apparent complementarity through the theory of adaptive resilience that has seen evolved agglomeration formats develop to provide a differentiated offer and consumer attraction compared with enclosed malls.