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The study investigates the cross-format shopping behaviour in the apparel sector. The purpose of this paper is to relate the number of store formats patronized to a set of consumer characteristics under a unifying theoretical framework emphasising cost-benefit analysis.

The research involved questionnaire telephone surveys from a sample of 1,722 apparel shoppers in a European region.

Among shoppers’ socio-demographic characteristics, age, gender, employment status and citizenship were found to have an impact on multi-store format patronage patterns for apparel purchases. Moreover, the store format preference and the sale proneness proved to be additional determinants of cross-format mobility.

The findings provide retail managers with valuable insights for effective marketing strategies aimed to exploit customer loyalty potential.

Despite consumers’ regular use of various alternative store formats for apparel purchases, literature on the determinants of cross-format mobility is scarce. Addressing the inter-type cross-shopping behaviour of consumers from a cost-benefit viewpoint, this study makes a new contribution in the area of customer loyalty and the complementarity and substitutability of store formats.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the influence of three selected physical components of the urban environment – physical design, space layout and functionality, and store external appearance – on consumers' perceptions of service quality and behavioural intentions (desire to stay and repatronage intentions).

The research framework is based on the atmospherics, servicescape and service quality literatures. The proposed model is tested with a survey conducted in an inner‐city shopping street in Benevento (Italy).

Results show that physical space functionality and store appearance provide cues upon which customers base their perception of service quality provided in the shopping street and that service quality inferences, in turn, are able to affect desire to stay and repatronage intentions.

Findings are able to provide policy makers and retailers with suggestions in developing appropriate strategies for managing the urban setting with particular reference to individual shopping streets with the objective of improving customers' perception of service quality and subsequent behavioural outcomes.

The paper contributes to both retail and place marketing literature in that it is one of the few empirical studies aiming to investigate the influence of atmospheric stimuli on consumers' perception in an urban setting.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea of transplanting the institution of homeowner associations or similar to existing urban neighbourhoods in order to correct imbalances in patterns of incentives and responsibilities that threaten the liveability and sustainability of cities.

The paper compares a recent published proposal for privatising existing neighbourhoods with the current Taiwan Government's attempt to assist shops on retail streets to create their own micro‐governance associations. The paper takes a strongly normative approach, using propositions from economic theory.

The paper identifies several crucial factors in designing an institution for privatising existing commercial neighbourhoods; notably the usage of coercive power and the efficient alignment of property rights.

The discussion in the paper rests on a small number of case studies in Taiwan and on qualitative information collected by interviews with key informants. This information is sufficient to illustrate our normative theoretical arguments about institutional design.

The paper offers some useful insights for public officials and private entrepreneurs seeking solutions to the problem of regeneration using voluntary urban neighbourhoods management.

The paper is the first published work to explore the adoption of homeowner associations in commercial neighbourhoods. It is one of the few papers to analyse the issues arising, using an institutional framework based on the new institutional economics.

China represents around 20% of the world's population, and her economy is still performing well under economic crisis. Historical events have shaped different parts of China with different economic developments and cultural encounters. The most prominent difference is between Hong Kong and the Mainland. This chapter would like to examine the development and issues of fashion retailing in China. For better understanding, this chapter starts with a brief discussion on apparel industry development and fashion culture in Hong Kong and the Mainland, follows by historical development and then presents systems of fashion retailing in both Hong Kong and the Mainland. Desktop research and exploratory research techniques were employed. Stores of international fashion luxury brands in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing were visited. Comparison of branding issues, particularly for luxury market in Hong Kong and the Mainland are discussed, so are future directions of fashion retailing in these places.

This paper aims to join a growing movement in marketing history to include the voices of consumers in historical research on retail environments. It aims to show that consumer perspectives offer new insights to the emergence and reception of large-scale, pre-planned shopping centers in Australia during the 1960s, and allow one to write a history of this retail form from below, in contrast to the top-down approach that is characteristic of the broader literature on shopping mall development.

Written testimonies by consumers were gathered using a qualitative online questionnaire. The methodology is related to oral history, in that it seeks to capture the subjective experiences of participants, has the capacity to create new archives, to fill or explain gaps in existing repositories and provide a voice to those frequently lost to the historical record.

The written testimonies gathered for this project provide an important contribution to the understanding of shopping centers in Australia and, particularly Sydney, during the 1960s, the ways that they were envisaged and used and insights into their reception and success.

As with oral history, written testimony has limitations as a methodology due to its reliance on memory, requiring both sophisticated and cautious readings of the data.

The methodology used in this paper is unique in this context and provides new understandings of Australian retail property development. For current marketers, the historically constituted relationship between people and place offers potential for community targeted promotional campaigns.

A public space is a place of significance when it fulfils the human need for social interaction and attachment. However, the scarcity of public spaces poses a challenge to support socialisation for people within a defined social and cultural group. The purpose of this paper is to explore the association between place attachment and social interaction within public spaces in the city centre of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Face-to-face interviews with urban users were conducted to examine the users’ engagement in three main public spaces in the city and the significance of these spaces to everyday social interaction. Field observations were carried out to examine patterns of users’ activities and interactions.

The authors uncover a lack of multi-functional spaces to support diverse forms of interactions in the city. A street has an important function to generate activities. However, spaces for people to sit and stay remain scarce, and are in most cases consumed by extended commercial use and thus considered private. Opportunities for social interaction are very limited. The significance of the places relates strongly to commercial and tourism functions, and hence place attachment evolves around those activities. Participants associated their familiarity and engagement with interaction between familiar people, close ethnic relationships and business acquaintances.

The authors argue that more robust and socially responsive public spaces should be reclaimed for the culturally diverse users.

Development of attachment through meaningful spaces for people to stay and interact could enhance the role of public spaces in the city.

By understanding the social meanings of places, particularly in a multi-cultural setting, a stronger basis for designing and managing urban places towards resiliency and social sustainability can be provided.

Inner city centers not only provide opportunities for shopping, dining, and entertainment, but with their lively atmosphere and other vital attributes, also create attractive destinations for residents and tourists alike. However, inner city retailing, potentially the most important reason to visit an inner city, is facing serious competition from e-commerce and out-of-town shopping malls. Dying inner city centers have become a severe issue in recent years, worldwide. To counteract this devastating trend and ensure the vitality and viability of inner city centers, stakeholders from the public and private sectors regularly join their forces in initiatives to strengthen urban structures. However, academic insights into the contribution of retailing on perceived city attractiveness remain sparse. Relying on an extensive data set that combines survey and observational data, the authors are able to quantify a variety of inner city characteristics, ranging from its store and service provider portfolio to its ambience and accessibility, and measure their association with its perceived attractiveness. They show that a city's portfolio of retail stores is not only related to people's perceptions of the city's overall attractiveness but also perceptions of its ambience. However, not all retail categories contribute the same way; while the presence of clothing stores or booksellers is strongly associated with cities' ambience as well as attractiveness, other retail categories such as optometrists or electronics stores are negatively associated with consumers' inner city perceptions. Importantly, these relationships also depend on the size of the focal city. Based on their results, the authors provide important managerial and societal implications on how to leverage the local retailing environment to improve inner city attractiveness. For example, the results may inform (local) governments on which sectors to subsidize in order to attract those store and service provider categories that benefit inner city attractiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between Leeds Shopping Week and city centre regeneration. It looks at the way in which shoppers and retailers interact with other stakeholders to deliver innovative place marketing by offering a richer more engaging retail experience.

The regional economic development context provides the background against which this case study rests. It draws on shoppers' experiences and puts forward a number of recommendations for future years.

Leeds Shopping Week is a marketing communication tool that can be used to enrich shoppers' experiences and drive forward economic regeneration. It enriches the retail experience, adds a sense of occasion to civic life and acts as an economic stimulant to the local economy.

This paper discusses issues of theoretical and applied policy relevance that can inform and develop retail, city and economic development knowledge and practice.

Two metropolitan cities of similar size and less than 400 Kilometres apart, yet London and Paris display vastly contrasting patterns of retailing. Retailing, unlike manufacturing industry, has yet to go truly multi‐national in its organisation; but the trends in this direction are clear. Retail organisations in England and France, however, will have to contend with very different patterns of retailing in the two metropolitan cities should they decide to set up in them. The reasons for these differences are partly historical and partly administrative. Since 1945 the outward growth of London has been limited by an extremely powerful system of land‐use planning. This has had the effect of stopping London at the point that its outward growth had reached prior to the outbreak of World War II. By 1938, aided by the development of suburban electric railways in the two decades since 1918, the suburbs of London had sprawled out 19 to 24 Km from the centre. In that year, an Act of Parliament created the Green Belt, which provided a means of restraining further development. The area within the Green Belt is now the province of the Greater London Council, the strategic planning authority for London set up in 1964. Beyond the Green Belt, in the Outer Metropolitan Area, some 40 to 50 Km from Central London, a series of new towns has been built. While Greater London has lost population and jobs since the war, this area beyond the Green Belt has witnessed a major growth of population and jobs in the same period. (Milton Keynes, for instance, is planned to accommodate 500,000 people and by 1977 a covered shopping centre of 84,000 m2 will be open, rising to 172,000 m2 of shopping space by 1991 with 28,000 car parking spaces).