 Welcome to the fifth and final urban age debate of this current cycle, focusing on rationalizing shopping, our new patterns of consumption, and opportunity for reinventing urbanity. The urban age debate series is organized by LSE Cities, the Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft, and the LSE School of Public Policy. My name is Philip Rohde, and I'm the Executive Director of LSE Cities, and I will co-chair the next 60 minutes with Jonathan Demelo, who is equity partner at the retail consultancy CWM. On behalf of both of us, a very warm welcome to our three panelists, Thomas Heatherwick, the designer and founder of Heatherwick Studio, Andrew Murphy, who is Executive Director of Operations at the John Lewis Partnership, and Eva Westermark, an architect and partner at Gale Architects in Copenhagen. LSE Cities will be live tweeting during the event, and if you want to join the discussions on Twitter, the hashtag is Urban Age Debates. This event is being live streamed on YouTube through our Urban Age channel, and will then be made available as a podcast from then on. We're going to structure our discussion into three rounds. They will be rapid and quite fast moving. Round one will focus on COVID-19 as accelerator of urban retail change with questions about e-commerce, experience retail, and maybe a revival of independent shops. Round two will shift to peak stuff from Black Friday to the new awareness of the social and environmental costs of consumerism. And then in round three, we really bring it back to the city, a meaningful urban marketplace question mark. Can the public space function of retail be reinvented? Please make use of the Q&A throughout. We hope to take about one to two questions for each of the rounds, but adding your views and question comments will also help to broaden the perspectives throughout as they can be seen by everyone. So you should have the QA button readily available. Let me now hand over to Jonathan for the first round. Jonathan, over to you. Hi, everyone. So the first round is COVID-19 as an accelerator of urban retail change. And so what I'm going to cover when this short introduction before I hand over to the panelists is really the fact that COVID has catalyzed e-commerce considerably over the past couple of years that we've had COVID and the lockdowns that we've seen. So e-commerce penetration globally has risen from 14% in 2019 to 20% in 2021. But that actually marks the fact that some markets have never had a developed e-commerce platform. So the likes of the US, the UK and European markets have seen a doubling in e-commerce spend actually over the last two years. In terms of spend, people have been spending their money on new laptops, monitors, they've been working from home. So all the products that were involved in terms of working from home, DIY garden products have been very bought considerably as well by these individuals and also Netflix subscriptions too. So we've seen a lot of spend increases in certain categories to the detriment of others. But online grocery spenders actually double too. And this grocery represents 50% of all of our spend collectively, typically, especially in certain more developed markets. That doubling has led to hugely logistical pressures on the ability to deliver. That's why it's hard to get a slot sometimes when you're looking to get home delivery of groceries. And so that has created logistical pressures. And the demise of department stores globally, administrations, lots of retail is falling by the wayside, has led to big vacancies on our high streets. And so I guess one of the things that we're going to be exploring as part of this is what does that mean for the high streets? We've seen repurposing of space from retail to converted to officers, residential, legal logistics. What does that mean for cities going forward? And even though physical sales have started to bounce back, we are seeing a sea change in the way that our high streets and our malls and our cities are these days, from a retail perspective. So it's really just to hand over to the panelists to discuss this. So we're going to start with Andrew to give a retailer perspective. Thanks Jonathan. Good afternoon everyone. So I'll maybe try and put some dimensions around the shift as we see it. But just to maybe start with one of the fundamentals is that this is an economic challenge for the retail business model. It will only reverse if somebody uninvents the internet. That seems unlikely on balance. And therefore we should take the consequences of it as being somewhat absolute. So an example of that would be the oversupply of retail space in towns and city centres in Western developed economies is an absolute, it will not change. There is simply no need for that amount of physical retail space. And so for all retailers you have a choice. You can try and repurpose that space within your own business model to add sufficient value to offset its cost. Or you can start to close some or all of it. And to give you an idea about how that works is one of the department stores that's that's imperiled in the UK. We're now the only national department store. 60% of our sales are online now compared to 42, 43% pre-pandemic. Having said that and having closed 16 of our 51 shops during the pandemic. So basically being two thirds of the physical size that we were. Our sales are plus 2% 2021 versus 2019. And what that tells you is that if the overall business model is healthy, the switched online does not mean that retail as an industry is disappearing. It is simply a format change and a form change. And so when we think about what does that mean for urban space, it has to mean less probably owed by retailers less of what is there being for the direct function of transactional retail. But it doesn't mean that retail shouldn't be present. But I strongly suspect what we'll see is a much more mixed mash and blend of retail residential hospitality, event space, et cetera. Indeed, you're already beginning to see this in the big global cities and in larger town centres. I do think there's a challenge. However, I don't think that will be as easy an economic or physical proposition to get sustainably established in smaller towns. I think when we think about this, I think we need to think about different scales in that sense. Thanks very much for what we've got to even out to get her views on this. Yes, so thank you, Andrew. I think I can continue where you left off with this interesting topic of scales and different places that people need. Like we at Gail, we look at maybe not so much where people are spending money, but where they're spending time. So during COVID, we could really see this shift in that some environments like the retail streets that are more multifunctional, like the city centre's traditional use, they're hurting badly. And we all saw that, we experienced it. But the places that had more of a robust mix of uses that already, because of course this trend was just accelerated during COVID, it started long before that. So we could see that those cities that had really invested in adding more everyday functions to the city centres, like layering things, bringing back schools, adding playgrounds, thinking also recreation and nature as part of the city centre, they were more robust because they had wider reasons for people to come. So that's like one trend we can see in the city centres where I think we have to even go further in the future. But also that we need to concentrate the city centres, like shorten the walking streets, layering these functions on top of each other three-dimensionally and also using time to think how users can shift over the day, over the week, over the month or the year. So that's like one really strong tendency that we have to, our cities have to adapt to in our planners and our private sectors. And the other tendency is the opposite then, that we can see that people were spending so much more time in their local neighbourhoods and connected to the everyday use and that the shrinking, maybe we went from not even a 15-minute city, but two-minute city, the five-minute city, like it got really, really local. And I think that that's another opportunity where the retail actors, whether or not we go online and buy things, there's always a place where we receive the goods. Whether that's picking it up at the local supermarket or close to home, there's always a place. So I'm thinking that there is a great opportunity for retail, like the private sector and retail actors, to become more, think about place-making retail. So what can you do to actually help the local community to become more attractive, to be able to support authentic places? So tapping into the needs of a local community in a stronger way, because thinking of that chain, trying to control the full shopping experience, of course, that receiving the package is also part of that experience. And so that to me presents a great opportunity to move both ways, like both strengthen the city centres and become more robust and more connected to everyday life, but also really focusing on the neighbourhood scale and see how we can tap into this authentic identity and strengthen communities. Let's hear from Thomas now. Hello everybody. Well, in a way, I think what I'm going to be saying is building on what Eva was talking about. It feels like we had all these public bits of our country with all the towns and cities that the vast proportion of people are in, dominated lazily, in a way, by places that the retailers felt like they were essential infrastructure. So they could sit there, if they'd muscled their way on and they sold types, or they sold your medicine, or whatever that was, they could be there and get away with being sort of above and people were below. And the acceleration of what's happened with COVID really pushing the online shopping side is that it feels that we, lazy placemaking, can't happen anymore. And that suddenly we have to think really of emotion as a function. And that's something that I've been interested in for a very long time as to how we spoke about functionalism, about this is functional placemaking, functional, and seem to forget that emotion was a function. And now it's really let forward that it's really thinking about human motivation. Why do you go somewhere? How many steps? What boredom is a thing that we don't really talk about enough, I don't think, and in streets. And the work that Jan Gale did and that Eva does is really understanding how you feel when you move around a place. And I've just got more and more interested in that. And I find it incredible how insensitively most places have been being made up until very, very, very recently. It's also then interesting when we think about what's the role of shopping places. I think shops have been too big for too long. So you walk along a street and you're kind of walking past these big places. And that means they're expensive because they're big. And the more smaller places you can get, the more a place becomes interesting and engages your emotion, your senses. So I think that's the screeching halt for people suddenly they've got to really get involved with emotion. But then I think we, with digital, I mean, it felt like everyone was rushing to the online world. But it's a pretty packed place to be. If I was to tomorrow try and start something and do it online as to selling things to people and connecting, it how do you stand out online? So I think moving from the essential infrastructure suddenly, if I'm on physical, I know how you grab people's attention and connect with people emotionally. So I think that the retail has become media, in fact. So it suddenly it's a way to connect with people physically. But separate from experience, it sort of jumps and grabs your emotion as a physical in a way that the flat shining screen, whatever you put on it, doesn't connect in that way. So I'm interested in multiple different dimensions here and what a huge gap there is for an emotion as function led placemaking. Some really good points there by everybody. And I think we're now going to go into a discussion on those points, Phillip. Absolutely. And I want to come back to Andrew. And I would be curious to see what's your response, what you have heard from the designers in this panel. In particular, what Thomas just said about the physicality grades almost like a local monopoly for connecting with people, with local people. And that may be more powerful than we are currently thinking if we're looking at the statistics which you so powerfully presented up front. Andrew, back to you. Thanks, Phillip. I think, philosophically, many retailers are in exactly the same place when it comes to the concept of placemaking and the desire to play a positive part in that. The sad and difficult truth is that the economics of retail currently have it as a very low margin, not to say also quite a low wage industry. And so I guess the encouragement I would give to designers, architects, civic leaders, etc., is to recognize that if you see retail as part of your experience and service mix for the inhabitants of our town and city, be aware that the economics of retail will very much limit and define what the retailers feel able to contribute. And whatever vision we might have, shared vision we might have for the future, the cost of change is significant. And so we have to be very hardheaded about this. And the number of shop closures that you see happening isn't a result of people just giving up and deciding to rather do something else. It's an economic consequence. And so I'm very much an advocate for bringing that strong and enriching philosophy together with the economic and operational reality of the industry that we currently think of as retail. Thank you very much. We've seen a lot of comments here popping up on chat. Do contribute? Do also highlight those which you like to be answered. I'll come back to them in a moment. Eva, maybe a response again to Thomas's provocation to let's move beyond the functionalism in a traditional sense and embrace the emotional as part of a fundamental function? I mean, 100% with that thinking. Just imagine like how the question, how do we design empathic spaces or spaces that make people be more empathic to other people? And I think that if we see how the public life has changed over the course of the last 100 years, before we had like the majority of life in our streets was necessary. It was actually doing trading goods and it was needing to be out there. And then we had this huge shift of optional activities. We only spend time in the street or in the public space if we like it because it's optional. We don't need to. We can actually sit in our homes by ourselves buying things, connecting with people. So suddenly the public spaces needs to be attractive. They need to be safe in order for people to even use them. And that's where all the emotions come in. Of course, it's about emotions, about feeling safe, about feeling included, about meeting other people. So I think that emotion as a function is right on spot in terms of how we have to think about space. And just to add to that in terms of what Andrew just said, that what is maybe interesting than in this trajectory from necessary activity to optional activity is that now we can see a need to combine the two again. So having like adding these necessary activity going to school, going to work, everything we do every day, we have to combine that with the destination spaces in order for them to be robust. So we're sort of doing, I think, coming back to full circle, but really I think that the emotion as a function is a very good way to describe it. And it's not at all fuzzy or it's hardcore, real stuff we have to deal with. Thank you Eva. And I want to come back to Thomas who set us up around this track of thinking. Linking on the one hand to what Eva said earlier about the localization of retail. Some people even refer to the hyper localization, the things coming closer, the physical things closer to where we live, where we have our life worlds. And I want to also connect it to John of Hughes Commons in the chat, where he notes that the next sort of obvious thing to do with available space that may have been retail until recently is to convert it into residential. And that's of course a big debate in planning in many countries at the moment. Thomas, what about this relationship where you live and where you shop, where you live, where you have retail and the proximity? Is that needed for the sort of emotional function which you alluded to or is it actually absolutely doable even if it remains a more remote or inner city district where you do go about your shopping and retail activities? I suppose I'm not thinking of this as a shopping conversation. I'm thinking of this as a public life conversation. And this, I've always found it funny in the world of architecture that the premium project for a designer building was an art museum because that was culture. And I just always found that really funny because I thought, well, where are most people? It's on the streets. And so I found it for me that the thing we call shopping has been a way that we see each other. How do we come together? Where else? We thought that we would all see each other online and that online was this great place where everyone would be. And then we discovered that the algorithms didn't let us really see each other. And the the fantastic unexpected things that real public life should be layering. And so how do we really allow us to see each other? There was this wrong construct that shopping and councils thought shopping and developers thought shopping is culture is public life. And in a way there's it's both terrible and some kind of relief to say no, it isn't because we were pushing out and we're working in Nottingham at the moment in the center of the city where there is a shopping mall that failed that was built in the 70s. And it's that big thing squeezed out. Where are the older people? Where are the younger really early years, later years? And so you get public life squeezed and isolated all around the edge and then we don't see it. And then we're surprised when everyone votes for Brexit, things like that. So I suppose going to Andrew's point, I think we shouldn't give up on how important that public life space is and how much we need to see each other physically because there's something you can trust about that that an algorithm isn't controlling. I guess I'm not the world's expert on this, but things like business rates for shopping spaces. We probably need the government to find some way to tax in the online world and to incentivize the street world because at the moment it's penalized and it's powerful what Andrew was just saying and so that we can breathe more life. And so in Nottingham and our project, half of this shopping mall building was already demolished and we're at this early pre-visioning sort of visioning stage and our first thing was stop demolishing the rest of it because to Andrew's point about economy, there isn't money, but so if you knock it all down, you're going to, what are you building from zero in such precious heart of the town? But instead we can mine that existing structure. It's in a sense turn it into our blessing that we're getting and all the carbon you would be washing away and having to get going all over again to muster up new shiny neutral structures. And how can we fold back the flour mill, the boxing club and overlay as much as possible the things that normally don't see each other because I think whether we realize it or not we're hungry to see each other and that clumsy shopping world that was what councils thought and everyone thought that just pushed all the other life out. This is our opportunity to put it back in. Maybe it's still too big but let's give it a chance but we need government to support that chance. Thank you very much Thomas and we will have to centrally return to this question you put on the table in the second half of the debate but we need to do one important detour. We can't avoid the question and you already mentioned carbon, a code for a much bigger issue also when it comes to the retail economy. So back over to Jonathan to introduce the second round. So this second round is about peak stuff essentially the awareness of the social and environmental costs of consumerism. So I guess starting out this introduction some sectors like fashion over the years have seen significant price deflation. It's almost just been a race to bottom in the sense that it's all about cutting prices, fast fashion, value. Primark has come to the fore in that sense and it's one of the most popular retailers in the UK and globally in fact these days. Because of that it's obviously this rise of fast fashion disposable items it's led to lower quality products in general and as such it's had an environmental cost with obviously increased consumerism but more importantly wastage. So the low quality of these products means you have to replace them more often because they fail, they go out in the wash etc. So fast fashion now accounts for about 2.1 billion tons of CO2 emissions which is crazy and it's growing as more and more people want disposable fashion. There's a human cost too you know so maintaining those low prices has led to sourcing in extremely underdeveloped countries and that sourcing has led to you know essentially low wages, poor working conditions and the things we saw in Bangladesh you know over the course of a number of different factory fires we've seen 1,300 people die in Bangladesh as a result of sourcing in that particular market so you know it's been really erased the bottom in terms of cost and therefore passing that lower cost onto the consumer. There's also e-waste or electronic waste you know that's led to 57 million tons of wastage worldwide in that sector and only 17% of that's properly recycled according to the UN so you know the byproduct of e-waste like mobile phones and all the rest of it has led to mercury being released into the atmosphere which is harmful to human life and the final thing to mention on online is 30% of online orders are returned versus 6% in store so that's the case and if you look at how much that's been returned 20% of that actually ends up in landfill because the retailers online aren't able to resell the product so that's another big impact on the environment right there so with that I'm going to hand over to you the first panelist which is going to be Andrew again on this one. Thanks Jonathan. I think the starting point in the conversation around fashion is important and I think when we think ultimately about our built environment retail's presence how it shows up there we have to be really conscious of that as an end-to-end process that is much longer and more complex than the retail front part. Strange to think that fashion used to be measured almost generationally certainly fashion would be something of a number of years not a number of months and it's very difficult to disconnect this conversation from what people want and I think particularly and probably a vulnerability of our conversation today is that we don't have anybody under 20 years old contributing to the conversation. It's very very easy for a group of middle-aged people to pontificate about what's good, what's bad, what can be done, what's attractive. In my experience people under 20 have quite a different view of that than people who 40, 50 years old and are now in the positions of power to run retailers and design buildings and streetscapes. Recycling, rental of product, reuse, subscription models all these things are happening and will undoubtedly grow. I think in many ways they're the less controversial end of this conversation and possibly the less difficult to adapt to. I think the role of the car in town centres is an unresolved problem and I've never yet met a local authority that doesn't engage in some acts of self-harm as it attempts to appease its social conscience on the one hand and have a thriving community in the city centre on the other and the anti-car lobby have a lot to answer for. The answer can't be to not have cars, the answer has to be for it to be proportionate and clean and it feels like progress is being made on that front but I can't overstate how important car-borne customers are to most retailers not just because of the convenience but also because if we want people to have their vacuum cleaner repaired and we want that to happen in an urban environment then we have to enable the vacuum cleaner to be brought back to the store and just to give that as one one example. Final point, every endeavour I've ever been involved in to improve a city centre life, city centre economy, the built environment there are four actors who constantly have to be brought together and who typically struggle to align government, local authority, the space users and the landlords and any conversation about meaningful change and positive evolution for our town and city centres has to start and end with those four groups aligned and that's often no easy thing to do. Thanks very much Andrew, let's move on to Thomas and the ASB's on this. Well I think that it's about bringing the streets alive and I think that there are organisations who are hidden around us and at one example and it's about bringing them to the street and so there is I think that my brain is going in two different directions so one side is about as Andrew said the the culture of repairing things and and not just having to always throw away and and a street used to have repair was one of the things that was on the street repairing shoes repairing clothes and those and it's not just about the literal repair there's about relationships and I think we need to talk about how the street starts to move to relationships and exchange not just exchange of money for a thing but exchange of services on that street not just things and exchange of emotional connections with people which is I think one of the joys of urban living or or town living or even village living is those exchanges that for your mental health as and that that grow us each and make us feel it integrated into something but I the the the other side was there are so many organisations who have lost their connection to us all and one example is when I was little I went into I was taken in by my one of my parents into a place on the Haymarket down from Lily White's and Piccadilly Circus to a place I called the design centre and the design centre was where the design council was and I walked into this place and they didn't charge you to go into the door and there was a plan for a new city being built the city of Milton kings there was a new kind of knitting machine there was a robotic arm that used no electricity and there were devices for your home and that's how I knew I walked in there and that's how I knew that that's what I was and I was a designer that's what and I used to go back in as a teenager if you're in the west then you could just pop in and for all sorts of reasons to do with cost cutting that it it's about 25 years ago it got taken away from the high street and there's someone I know who can justify it proudly how they saved on all the salaries of it being on the street but it meant that the little me's the little the kids and teenagers how do we know how do we connect if all we have is clothes shopping and there are so many there's a women's organisation that we're working with they might have sort of become any organisation I speak to it's like can we bring you to the ground how do and we're working on a London street where we're designing the whole of one side of a street and a major pedestrian route the whole side it's ridiculous to be thinking at scale when it used to be made incrementally and how to think while thinking at scale how to make sure we stay incremental in emotion but how we breathe the life and changes necessary in every few footsteps necessary to make somewhere that comes alive but I think that we are so stuck even thinking we are all so programmed to think that high street are jammed full of stuff you buy and I think that we can there's a real opportunity to rethink that and and still give business to Bangladesh and still give business to other places in the world it's not either or fully agree with that I'll pass on to Eva thank you there's so many things that sparked my mind when I hear you speak one thing about doing this how do we do this transformation that we need to do that everyone knows like we have this sense of urgency we have to address and of course that's all a good incentive for change when you have a sense of urgency but change making starts to doing things differently so what do we have to do differently I think one thing is addressing this you said lazy place making Thomas but I think also like just a complete maybe it's the same thing but really lazy use of space like we have to use what we have already so much more efficient and better and that goes for everything but if we take the street as an example just be very concrete and and coming back to this topic that is always the hot potato the parking you know I mean you may be surprised to hear this from a gale person but I kind of like a parking space not because it's for a car but it's so defined as a space it's a small unit it's like two times five meters or something like that 10 square meters and just illustrating what you could do with that how hard can that space actually work in terms of delivering quality and creating a more sustainable environment and most of you might have heard about this park ledge movement that we have seen in many cities started in San Francisco as parking days like just paying the meter on the parking spot and parking turning it into a park so public space and then that then has transformed into a city led initiative that you can have two parking spaces transformed locally all of them are different so it's a public public private partnership so the shop owner the landowner can actually contribute to turning this like super tight space into something where it's actually working much harder so maybe we keep one parking space so on the each side but they should also be working much harder so not having a park car like really short term making sure that every space is used in its absolute optimal way so I think that's part of this transformation of thinking of how can we reduce waste how can we increase use and and at the same time still making a stimuli for people to meet like the social dimension on this and I think that one part of then the private sector but then the public sector how they have to in order to address this go from this two-dimensional zoning to not three and maybe not four but five-dimensional so or five five-dimensional planning so can we layer functions horizontally sorry vertically can we use time much more efficient in terms of thinking that into zoning and planning and I think maybe the fifth dimension is then how we work together like how do we collaborate how do we get all these four key parties that Andrew mentioned also working together to the same goal so we really have to layer things we have to I think time is maybe the most underutilized asset we have in in cities in order to get more out of what we already have and then anchoring this into local needs and local context so always making something very specific thank you but we'll pass on to Philip then to leave the debates around this particular topic thank you very much and I want to connect what we are again seeing in in the chat I mean on the one hand there's Christian Bernard who is really emphasizing this question around do we really need to produce so much I guess but certainly what is it we really need to produce and emphasizes the broader sustainability value and it got sort of voted very much up and I guess what we need to connect this with is then the second highly rated question by Nicholas Falk who reminds us that a lot of investment is pretty much locked into an existing business model and it's starting to no longer payback and maybe let's start with Andrew I mean it was a bit of a footnote Andrew where you said sure there is something bubbling up around the repair and the maintenance economy and the more circular approach but what are the maybe innovative pilots even your own corporation is advancing that may provide an answer to Christian and Nicholas and then for our designers if we are thinking once again around places that offer repair and maintenance services what are the spatial implications is it different to the sort of one-off contact point handing over product which then is going only one direction but let's start with Andrew innovative practices thanks thanks so there the areas that we'd be most active in are furniture rental and in active recycling where we're encouraging return of used products to our stores or via online sometimes for a discount on future purchases sometimes not and it's quite interesting to look at the different customer behaviors around around those concepts a couple of points that I'd make about that and to the to the first of the two questions that you picked out to re-engineer the business model of a very big retailer is no small thing it takes time but it also takes investment and even if I was optimistic about the choice to be optimistic about the rate of growth of those models and even if I envisaged that over the next 10 years there was some aggressive help from legislators to push us in that direction to incentivize the consumer to make the economics easier I would still struggle to see this representing more than 10 to 15 percent of our total business activity in a decade's time so there's there's a lot to be thought through there compounded by the fact that change for any business is easier to deliver and cheaper to deliver in a digital environment than it is in a physical one and so anytime you ask yourself the question even if you started from a physical place making physical retail perspective you might find yourself ending up at answers that are delivered digitally and that's before we even let the the word of the year metaverse into the conversation and start to think about what opportunities or distractions that that may bring so I think it's a really valid conversation and I think eventually we will look back to the importance that some of the viewers have commented on which is there will be very few solutions that make sense on Oxford Street in London that also make sense in a small provincial town and many of the examples that I hear put forward are quite polarized in that they would either only be possible with the weight of a big retailer behind them and others that really only make sense for an owner operator with one door in one location who could potentially make a living themselves out of those options and so I think we have to think in quite a discriminating way about some of the the models and the opportunities that we that we propose thank you Andrew so two very strong warnings not to be very focused on very exceptional high streets or inner-city retail conditions you mentioned Oxford Street and appreciate that the majority looks very different and second that the physical retail is even more locked in and maybe has even greater difficulties to transition than more fluid already virtualized or half virtualized e-commerce that essentially says to me that if we want to take sustainability seriously we would have to start the transition immediately in the physical context and that's where I want to hand back to Thomas and Eva if you had to really now transition to design for maintenance and repair economies is it any different from the retail environments we know today or is it more or less the same you just replace a repair shop with something that before was pure selling are there any paradigmatic opportunities for designers to reinvent also the territory that shapes those activities yeah so I think that it's a totally different mindset like moving from thinking about my space to our space or thinking from like a one-way conversation through design to a dialogue so how do we go from the monologue design to a dialogue design it has to be less controlled I think in order to invite people to think of things being remade being maintained being not finished but actually always constantly in this circle and and I think that that is a really good opportunity to think of how do we address the our space or the our design which what is different compared to actually being in control of the shop's interior like how do we make that connection and and one of the ways is of course tapping into people's needs and listen to people and understanding people's everyday life and actually talking to people's needs so let's say we have a repair place I'm thinking of what you just said Andrew in terms of that you know we have to get the vacuum cleaner back to the store but maybe there's opportunity to have something really local so there's a need to create jobs locally is there there's a need on a personal level not needing to carry this big thing or putting into the car driving to the the original store like how can we create local meeting places hubs in in a neighborhood on a neighborhood scales that can do all of these things so how how we put it into the system of this like place making regenerative design thinking that is much more about what's ours what's common than what's mine what I'm selling to you so it's how do we actually come together around that but it looks differently definitely thank you Eva Thomas do you agree is it very different yes I think that going back to that point about exchange the street as a place of exchange rather than the street as a place of just selling vlogging stuff to people I mean I'm interested in the street as a social theatre which means you need to start really by thinking of activities rather than thinking of just one one-way traffic of buying from someone and and I think the I I had a very powerful visit last week in I went to Reading and visited a project which is a cinema set up by the really local group and they also have a project in Catford in Lewisham and it was so interesting at meeting the owner being shown around because the they had got an inexpensive space and had to focus not on lavish interior design not on bundles and bundles of consultants all clocking up their time and that they just boil down to the absolute essential of a of some cinema spaces and projectives just put plywood on the walls and it meant that I think a cineworld ticket is £12.50 their their ticket to £6.50 and they got loads of space so they don't have pressure to sell you a coffee they don't have pressure to rent that space to you so there's public spaces with tables and seats which is like a village hall and it's to Andrew's point about how are we going to get the economics right and I think less of the priority of how much bronze is there and what was the fancy this or that but the the luxury is the activity and the focus on that the exchange and the social dimension for us all because the other thing is gentrification and the more is how do you find something that can feel true for all of us but not actually push a bunch of us out I've got also interested and with a a new organisation called make space for girls and I don't know if you do your the listeners and viewers have have known of them but they they were looking at how we look and in the world of design and there's all these things where you look at what's good public space you go oh yeah look there's a skate park and yeah okay look there's there's skating going on the football and basketball going on it's a great public space and then you stop and say well how many girls are there in these spaces and that you're saying a good public space and that's actually the girl number is very small and so where boys feel safe and where girls feel safe is so different actually and we're ticking a success when it isn't really a success if it isn't space for girls how do you design space for girls and if I flip that into my life with my daughter who's a teenager and then you see where does she feel safe she doesn't feel safe going to Oxford Street and wandering around the West End like I might have done or cycling around and then you get into another funny thing which we haven't spoken about yet is the privatised public spaces and so there's you know a lot of criticism put at potential sort of cynical creation of spaces but it's interesting when speaking to my daughter and her friends the for example in Kings Cross the Kings Cross development there they feel safe being there because because it's private space it means that there is they have a sense that they're safe because there's security in that space and that's another thing that things like the Westfield big spaces have and so I think my interest is isn't buying and selling things it's how you make people actually have space where we see each other which the online doesn't do and so I think that's that's very very interesting but I think gentrification and focus but is an issue but focusing on activity rather than rather than luxury. Thomas that's very helpful and indeed almost a transition out to our final round here which also connects by Kasia Iets and Monika Milenska's comments they're both really concerned and interested hearing more about it's almost beyond retail around the public space function and that is of course the question we want to now really leave it with how can we transition towards a meaningful urban marketplace can retail ever again sort of embrace some of the public space qualities which many of us know of course of certain markets and even in other parts of the world of bazaars and how can physical spaces that include retail remain inclusive or in other words it does inclusivity and commodification maybe rule out each other to some degree and finally if we are really designing for the next market places that have this public space qualities which we have heard now from all of you repeatedly what are the really the key objectives for the design of these places and who are we designing for this is a question I borrow from Thomas from our front conversation who are we designing for in these cases we'll take in this instance our designers first with Eva Thomas and then almost have Andrew react to their propositions so Eva if I can invite you first and then Thomas thank you I think it's really interesting just a question you know can can can we ever come back to the to the qualities of a market space or a bazaar and to me it's maybe strange because that's if I take an example complete example when I worked in Christchurch after the earthquake and we did this recovery plan and the whole city center was just completely shut off no one could use it so there was not a meeting place in the city anymore the first thing that happened was through the desire to meet this market space that started to pop out up in neighborhoods around the city center as a way to for people to come together but also to exchange good it was like a farmers markets but also selling other types of goods so it was really like a multifunctional market space and and to me the interesting part of this is that how quickly the market can respond to a crisis or to a change because it is like the beauty of of the flexibility of not having just one place but actually being a function or a concept that can move and adapt to different places so the need for that flexibility to to be able to tap into also where people are so addressing who are we designing for if we have more of a flexible mindset about where how to consume thing or how to do things so we actually make this offer be paired with what we know what we know is the everyday life of people and be really really focused on making sure that we know that the people that have the less possibilities or people that are under underserved communities they are so in so many ways cut off from possibilities to even like sharp fresh food or it's much harder for them to have a healthy lifestyle so we can try to think of this combination of understanding people's everyday life routines knowing where people enjoy spending time already today and then inviting the market space to where people are I think that's that's an interesting way to think of the reverse like actually shopping coming to people and then addressing the social dimension at the same time so offering not only one good but like a lot of like this great variety of offers that invites different types of beauty groups so we have this social mixing thank you Eva I'm aware of time so Thomas and Andrew if we can keep it to a minute so you have one final round as well Thomas over to you I think we are refreshed at sort of trying to get rid of the bullshit somehow I think there's something about being feeling invigorated and I it's it's not for no reason that the I've got my double negatives whatever that the farmer's markets have have risen up I mean many markets they're not cheaper than if you buy something in a shop why is it that we are invigorated what is it that connects what is about that energy that we thrive off it's also very interesting I think that how we used to spend time outdoors only in sort of July August and I know Jan Gales wrote a lot about this but then gradually that's expanded round where we went even in Helsinki you know in in November we're willing to be sit outside so our senses want invigoration and I think we have a an urge for a truth and I think within a market there's a feeling that no one's pulling a layer over you and I think in whatever our high streets offer now now there's even the question do we need the glass anymore in all of these places and how do we make something that flexes and changes without that stiffener so I think we're in a time of very interesting exploring our own truth and and of each other thank you Thomas Andrew does this resonate what we have just heard from Ivan Thomas how does it land on your desk I think the inevitable focus of the conversation towards centrality around food is is right in fact I would go as far as to say there will be no physical marketplace for general merchandise in other words you know kind of manufactured consumer goods in our towns and city centres in the future there's there's simply no customer or commercial advantage to it at scale and candidly the internet is simply too good at meeting functional needs of that sort hence my rather go up comment about uninventing the internet because there's a as a vehicle for needs as opposed to wants and desires it is simply too efficient and business models at scale have grown up that can service that I think then food and social interaction and emotions that centre around being together with others both those you know and those you don't know the affirmation that comes from sharing in a collective moment in in a inspiring or at least acceptably pleasant space these are the fundamentals and I don't think we should see that as something to fear or something to be negative around but I do think again we need a realism around the version that we could get excited about within an Italy type marketplace that's 100,000 square feet and attracts tens of thousands of people is a great solution for a city like London or Milan or New York it's not going to be the answer for Böckner or Hull and we need to not be too inadvertently elitist in the solutions that we reach for thank you Andrew now instead of me doing a summary I suggest we do one final round we'll run over by two minutes but I hope the audience will be remaining with us but just one sentence for the four of us so of you including Jonathan what of the debate over the last 60 minutes may stick with you is there was there sort of one moment one argument one perspective which also maybe in the framing of it you sort of will will carry forward and I want to invite Jonathan to come first thanks for reconciliation at some points that we've heard here you know from Andrew which obviously it's all about the commercial side to a large degree you know it's got to make it's got to make monetary sense to be able to invest in things but equally you know what Thomas was saying about the emotional I think is also worth bringing in and I think you can marry the two together you know you can think about online retail and how it's pushed forward into our psyche and consumer spend it's been one of those things where it's hard to measure the benefit of physical stores in that context and so what I think is important is to understand the halo effects you know of physical store and what it does for online channels and I think measuring that and monetizing that is key for retailers going forward so they can purely evaluate not just the emotional side but also the monetary side of things bring the two together thank you Eva yes I think if we can we have some good numbers for that as well actually which is really good and to me it's all about the social dimension of shopping to tap into that to think social dimension and place as a key driver to our habits and assumptions and etc so so how can retail be much more of a place making a social catalyst for unique and authentic neighborhood thank you Eva and Andrew well I'm aware that I've probably been quite kind of cold and hard and rational through the conversation I'm very I'm very struck with what Thomas said and a lot of slightly paraphrase the kind of disaggregation of design into art and function and then inhabited by emotion and I think as a retailer in in our essence most of us who spent our career in retail that's actually what we're around about in terms of product place and people and I do think the coming together of the the commercial animals the operators the designers and the kind of the property owners whether a local authority etc I do think that's probably the point on which we commune and where our interests align and so I do think it's important not to lose that albeit as I've pointed out a number of times that there are complexities at scale and in terms of business models in order for us to to make the best job of that in the future but but that that will definitely stay with me thank you Andrew and Thomas well I mean everyone's made incredible points and I've I've found this a really heartening uplifting conversation very moving in many ways and we've got the spookiness that I'm sitting here with a weirder setup than I even look like I have to have my notes around me alone in some weird biggest room in my studio just thinking how hungry we all are to be together and this is about togetherness and how we come together we all want to be together and that's a need we will always have and these are the about excuses to be together and how we make the emotion the interestingness the absence of that boringness stimulate and vigorate ourselves and see each other which is what I want and I think what so many of us want thank you very much Thomas and in the spirit of emphasizing togetherness I want to express a few thanks first of all of course to our audience today and really many thanks for now in total 54 comments have a look at them they were all really interesting we could only take a few of course I want to thank the panel Andrew Murphy Eva Westermark Thomas Heatherwick and my co-chair Jonathan Demelo many thanks also to our colleagues in Berlin at the Alfred Herrhausen Society Gesellschaft that have helped prepare this debate Elizabeth Munfeld and Alexandra Hunger and then my own colleagues here at the LSE Emily Cruz Tio Issa Daniel Jennifer Ho and Tian Ji I hope you enjoyed this debate stay tuned there will be more to come and very importantly we will of course publish not just this particular debate in full but we'll produce what we call a legacy film which goes to the main arguments thank you so much to everyone and have a nice week