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This chapter offers a specific point of view on the Town Centre retail, in ­order to develop a new way to enhance the customer retail experience in this place. The combination of shopping over the Internet and the interactive technologies represents for Town Centre retailers one of the possible solutions in the creation of a multisensory experience for people living in and visiting this urban area. By welcoming the challenge of creating multisensory experiences, “bricks and mortar” stores need to integrate digital solutions to create and handle experiences. Customers can interact with people and contents via digital technologies such as Quick Response, Electrochromic Glass, Touch Systems, Outdoor Totems, Holographic Technology, and Augmented Reality. From the analysis of the academic literature emerges an agreement that the use of the Internet and interactive technologies are not totally exploited as tools able to revitalize the Town Centre retail and create animated, lively streets that offer multisensory experiences. Based on the above considerations, this chapter provides a theoretical model in order to create an immersive retail experience within the physical store by combining the use of the Internet to conduct shopping and the interaction with several kinds of technologies.

This chapter describes and explores the relationship between formal and semi-formal systems of programme and project management and broader strategic programmes and leadership approaches in the academic and research library context.

The leadership perspective of this chapter allows assessment of the contribution of programme and project management techniques to the strategic development of the library. A case study approach is taken, and the methods used for programme and project management arise mainly from the UK’s Office of Government Commerce.

The chapter provides insight into how a variety of practical project management techniques can be bound together within strategic programmes, together with appropriate governance structures for monitoring and judging successful outcomes.

The chapter describes the application of programme and project methods in two research libraries, but the techniques used have been used widely in many organizational settings and so should be transferable to other research library contexts.

The cases in the chapter reveal the social world of the academic and research library, illuminating the real-life experience of project work within the library and its broader institutional context.

The chapter presents an original typology for differentiating projects in the research library. The chapter is unique both in describing 30 years of continuous application and development of programme and project methodologies and frameworks, and also in its leadership perspective.

British New Towns represent not a single homogeneous set of experiences, but lessons learned derive as much from their differences as their similarities. The chapter studies two British New Towns– Harlow and Thamesmead – identifying the main features of their master plans and analysing their trajectories and outcomes as actually built.

Harlow could be regarded as a typical British New Town. Designated in 1947, it is one of the first New Towns built around London, following design principles of the first (Mark I) generation. In contrast, Thamesmead was built within the city limits of London, but could be included in the second generation of the New Towns.

The towns’ plans have a number of commonalities, in the provision of green areas, employment, commercial areas and services for their population; but their locations, urban structure, land use and physical relation to their surroundings are quite different as they followed different concepts and evolving planning ideas. Even more striking contrast may be found in the way that these towns have grown and matured in different ways. This chapter therefore scrutinises the two towns’ plans, and what was actually built, drawing lessons for New Towns more generally.

Reflecting their extensive domestic programmes, the UK and France became major exporters of New Town planning expertise during the later twentieth century. Yet each country delivered its expertise in markedly different ways. Drawing on the UK’s own New Towns programme begun in 1946, a public-sector international New Town planning agency, the British Urban Development Services Unit, was created in 1975. However, it quickly proved unsuccessful and was abandoned in 1978. Instead, national expertise was exported by UK private planning consultants, with strong government encouragement. By contrast France, whose own Villes Nouvelles programme started in 1969, created a single public-sector planning agency, the Groupement d’intéret économique Villes Nouvelles de France, in 1984 that operated successfully overseas (latterly under a different name) until 2013. The chapter briefly considers the international efforts of the two countries, targeting oil-exporting countries, their respective former colonial empires and elsewhere. It also interprets their different approaches in light of their different political histories. Thus, the UK was much earlier affected by neo-liberal, pro-market political ideologies that instinctively favoured private- rather than public-sector approaches. This was especially so given the already established position of its private planning consultancies both in international work and in preparing the original master plans of many UK New Towns. In France, by contrast, the public sector remained strong and structured the export of planning expertise while private planning consultancies were much less important. The chapter ends by briefly considering the wider impacts of the two countries’ different approaches.