Can everybody hear me?

I thought I'd start off with just a couple of straw polls.

Who here has never been to an Ikea store?

It's a very small number, probably about 5%.

Who here enjoys shopping at Ikea?

Now, that's interesting.

We're getting about 25% of the audience there.

Well, I hope to sort of end up with a bit of enlightenment

about the nature of Ikea, because there are a lot

of people who go there who don't enjoy it

but still seem to keep going.

But what I thought I'd do is start off with a bit of science.

Now, shopping and the way we shop is something that's been

going on for a long time, and broadly I think,

people find it an enjoyable experience.

I'm going to go into some of the reasons why this is the case

and how it takes place as we go through.

Shopping forms the hearts of our cities,

and I think that the retail experience,

the shopping experience, even if it's just window shopping,

informs the way we think about and look at our cities

as we move around them.

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>> What a shop is is an interface to the street.

And so to make sure the threshold from looking

from the inside to the outside and looking

from the outside inwards, are 2 quite different experiences.

And I'm going to be talking about the nature

of that threshold, as you step over from the urban realm

into the shopping interior, what takes place.

What I'll eventually say is that as you step over the threshold,

you exchange a contract with the shop owner, so the relationship

between the shopper and the shop owner is one

about contract exchange.

Let me give you a very simple representation of a little bit

of a city, and let's do a trick to it.

Let's take each line -- maybe those are streets --

and represent them as a dot, and then connect them

to the lines that cross them.

So that's the streets that meet that intersect, and then those

in turn and finally that one there.

We've now represented a street pattern

as what a mathematician calls a graph.

Now, a second trick.

Let's look at it from this point of view, and let's lay it

out in terms of going from street to street to street

as you turn corners as you move through urban space.

It looks like that.

Let's look at it from a different point of view.

It looks like that.

Intriguing thing is that the same pattern

of space is objectively different from different points

of view, so from the blue dot on the left,

the rest of the world is distanced from you;

you're relatively isolated.

And from the right-hand dot, the rest of the world is close

to you; you're relatively accessible or integrated.

So we can color up a map, according to the deck,

if you like, of everywhere else from here,

and you go through the spectrum from blue bits that are isolated

through to red bits that are relatively accessible.

Now, there are three rules for retailing

that any retailer will tell you,

the location, location, location.

And what I'm going to suggest is that the sort of map

of accessibility is the thing that gives rise to this property

of location that the retailer finds so important.

Let's look at London, and this is coloring

up on exactly the same method, but with all of these lines,

all the streets that you have within the north

and south circular roads in this case.

I should make it a bit darker in here so you can see this.

Is that more visible?

Intriguingly, the red line

in the center there is Oxford Street.

It turns out to be the shallowest

and most accessible street in the whole of that map of London,

but you can say similar things about the King's Road,

or maybe the Holloway Road.

You can spot them.

Now, this is purely an analysis of how the street system

of London connects together.

Let's zoom in.

That's Camden Town.

You can see Regent's Park is marked off,

with all its pedestrian routes through it.

And there are the locations

of each retail outlet in that little area.

Two kinds.

There are the areas where they aggregate together

into big clusters along the main streets,

along Camden High Street and so forth,

and then there are the disbursed convenience corner shops off

in the back streets.

You can do a similar thing, looking again

at the Oxford Street area.

Here's the map of Oxford Street and Regent's Streets,

and then that's the map of Land Use where red

in this case is the retailer, and you can see

that these clusterings are part of what we understand

about cities as we move around them.

You turn the corner, you're into a major shopping street,

you turn off the street into a line

that is slightly more isolated, the number of shops will drop,

you turn a corner again and you can be

in a completely quiet area devoid of any kind

of retail activity at all.

Now, there are some other facts.

If we go out and we count the way that people move

around in this sort of space, what you find is

that the more integrated and accessible a space,

the higher the flows of people moving through it,

whether those are pedestrians or whether they're vehicles,

the lower and more inaccessible, the fewer people move through.

So you've got a bit of a thesis here.

The structure of space

in the city attracts pedestrian movement,

and the reason why location is so important

to the retailer is they need passing trade;

they need people walking past the door.

So what do you do?

Well, shops follow people.

The way the shops are located in the city is an attractor effect

in that the retailers are attracted by the pedestrians

who are there because of the way the structure

of space links together.

People are then attracted by the shops,

until you've got a multiplier,

and that is why this is an emergent phenomenon,

that something which is quite difficult to plan

for until you understand the principles,

but once you understand the principles you can then guide

them if you like.

But if you take a really isolated location and put a shop

in it, essentially that shop has to do a lot of marketing,

handing out very good quality value goods in order

to overcome the separation of space.

Now, this is something which has always been the case and happens

in all parts of the world under different cultures.

And here are some work done by a Ph.D. student

of mine Nazarene Hussein (phonetic), several years,

where she looked at the growth of the city of Dhaka

and Bangladesh and in particular looked at retail.

So in 1952, this is a map, an analysis of the city of Dhaka,

and the sort of black dots along some of the streets,

those are the retail shopping areas of the old city of Dhaka.

As the city grew in 1962, the pattern --

the city has grown enormously, as you can see --

but then the pattern of shops has taken up new areas

and expanded, and then going on again 10 years later, 1975,

it's grown further, and by the time you get to 1995,

you've got a very interesting and coherent pattern by which

as the city expands, new spaces become accessible

in the larger city, and those

in turn then attract the retail functions and those

in turn attract more shoppers and so forth.

What kind of retail is this?

Well, in a city like Bangladesh, or like Dhaka and Bangladesh,

it is relatively unregulated.

Even if there is regulation, people tend to get

around it in various ways.

And so you've got a relatively perfect market taking place

without regulation, an interesting thing.

And that makes it particularly interesting for those who want

to study how shopping takes place.

What Nazarene did was she went out and she surveyed a number

of these market buildings that characterize this kind of area.

Many of these are multi-floor, three floors in this case.

They've grown up over many years.

They're relatively unplanned and undersigned.

But they're designed, if you like, on the ground,

so they tend to make sense.

She looked in each of them at the different range of kinds

of things that were being sold, so that maybe areas

which are selling men's Western clothing or Saris

or accessories, jewelry and so forth, cassettes and snacks,

and things of that sort.

She then went on to survey a series of the shop owners,

and asked them who their clients were.

But even more interesting,

she went to survey the shoppers themselves.

And she asked them a series of very simple questions.

She said, what did you plan to buy when you came here?

And they would give a list of things.

They'd say, I'm going to buy my husband some shirts.

What did you end up buying already?

Where else have you gone?

And they would give a list of things.

They'd say, oh, well, I went to the cassette shop

and bought a cassette.

And then they'd say, where else do you plan to go on shopping

at the end of the trip, before the end of the trip?

And they'd say, oh, I'm going to get some lunch or I'm going

to buy some more clothes for myself or whatever else.

This allowed her to split the stated reasons why people came

there from those that just seemed to happen as a byproduct

of them being in the place at all.

What was it that was the reason they came

from what were those things,

which were really impulse purchases?

And she managed to do this for different markets,

and they have different answers.

Sorry, these diagrams were difficult to read,

but the way to think about it is is that this one is food

and snacks, and that some people planned to come

to this market for food and snacks.

A lot of people didn't plan to come to it for that,

but people who planned to come

for these things never bought them just by impulse.

So certain parts of these markets are

at generator functions.

People will come for specific things.

Other parts are what are called suscipient.

That means you come there, you purchase from them,

just as a byproduct of the fact that you're there already.

And what was interesting was that the layout

of where things are that are generator functions,

they cluster together into big lumps

and quite often they will go onto the upper floors.

The ones that are the suscipient functions that depend

on a passing trade separated from each other --

they're colored yellow on this diagram --

by and large they separated from each other,

and they located themselves in the most accessible areas,

so next to the staircase, next to the entrance,

and predominantly on the ground floor.

And the reason for that is that if you're not the main reason

that somebody has come to a particular market, then you need

to take advantage of spatial location

to give you accessibility, but you also are

in competition with your neighbors.

So you're in competition

with somebody else who's having a snack,

because it's the first snack that you see

when you're hungry that you buy.