Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

The constant growth of online sales seems unstoppable. New kinds of department stores are being built no longer occupying Haussmannian buildings but are made out of pixels and go by names such as Amazon or Alibaba. But what does the escalation of the online retail mean for our cities? In addition to the gigantic and hybrid (part architecture, part infrastructure) Fulfillment Centre of the world’s largest corporations, which enable the movement of goods from supplier to warehouse, to shelf to shopping cart, and whose trajectories are quite relevant to questions of architecture, urbanization, and the built environment more generally, many others forms of “real” spaces are emerging from the “online” shopping. Cashierless grocery stores, low-cost solarpowered mobile retail units, self-driving food delivery vehicles, walls of QR codes in public places, etc. Furthermore, new innovative concepts and new roles for street shops are taking shape almost everywhere. While we witness the construction of a spectacle, on the other, we observe the abandonment of the uniformity of global taste to embrace local uniqueness and simplicity. Personalization and hyper-localization are the other newest two retail watchwords. This paper takes the newest real commercial places as a study field to document the emergence of new organizational forms space and to identify its main spatial characteristics.