“The Community Builders Handbook” was written by the “community builders council” of the Urban Land Institute in 1947 to advance “… the creation of enduring values of neighborhoods…”. This coincides with the time that builders were working out the theories of retail we still use today. Basically, the work sets out to describe how to build things like sub divisions and strip centers. However, the developers had a very different idea of what they were doing than the observable outcome of a generation of such development. From this slice of history, we see builders struggling with making suburban shopping centers work. They seem to have had an idea that the centers should be like “self sustaining” villages; small cities in and of themselves, with a mix of housing and business (1.5-2.5% of land for commercial uses.) And they took the logical steps in determining the size of the centers based on populations. It seems to me they had a very American ideal in mind- that of the neighborhood main street, with neighborhoods that supported local shops.

One of the important things about the context of the original theories is that they were developed for understanding traditional models of retail, and have been interpreted for new formats and conditions. Some subtleties of the theories have been lost; for example, that utility can be measured by square feet of space- while perhaps a good indicator of the quantity of available products, it is still a proxy to estimate the utility of the visit. Likewise, the term “agglomeration” was used to describe groups of stores operating in proximity, not the square or linear feet of shelf space of a single retailer. The theories of retail gravitation do not suggest that the old models of retail do not work, or are out-dated. Rather, they describe how the demographic shift in population to lower density regions and the highway and super-highway infrastructure shape the modern retail landscape, and hint at the preconditions for making retail succeed in urban environments.

-gk