Local Rules: The Death (and Rebirth) of Retail
How the internet means only the end of useless physical retail, and affords the opportunity for the re-birth of local, independent and genuinely meaningful retail in return
Ed. Back in March 2011, I wrote a piece on retail for Architectural Review Australia, published in the June 2011 issue as ‘Local Rules: The Death (and Rebirth) of Retail’. This edit was published at cityofsound.com on 6 June 2011. It’s dated, as a result.
Thanks to Maitú Ward at AR for commissioning this piece, which is not actually ‘just about retail’, as it touches on distribution patterns, fabrication, local economies and localism, and of course cities — but this is partly as retail is so core to what contemporary cities are about. I don’t mean that as any kind of paean to consumerism at all; far from it. More a recognition that cities are about exchange, either cultural or commercial (or both), and that the marketplace, and its descendants, has always been a core component as a result.
The article was written with Australia as the focal point, as you’d expect (Ed. I lived there then), and many of the specific examples are drawn from that culture, but its general arguments probably apply more widely, and draw from experience…
