Town centre management: developing new strategies based on the e-technology challenge

Over time, the Town Centre has always had an important role in the development of local economies (McAteer and Stephens, 2011), experiencing periods of growth and decline that influenced its physiognomy. The Town Centre’s decline was caused by several different factors, such as the decentralization of retail activities away from, and on the edge of, the Town Centre (Schiller, 1986; 1988), and the development of new forms of selling over the Internet (Bhatti, 2007; Ickler, et al., 2011). All in all, this has led to a crisis for Town Centre’s retailers, prejudicing their development and enhancement (Alzubaidi et al., 1997; Thomas and Bromley, 2003). In order to contrast the pauperization of the Town Centre and to improve its growth, during the last decades in several European Cities was created the Town Centre Management (TCM) schemes, to find practical responses to the emerging complexities of urban revitalisation (Coca- Stefaniak et al., 2009). Taking into consideration this scenario, the aim of this work is to further the understanding of the role-played by TCM’s over time in revitalizing the commercial activities in the Town Centre. Studying TCM programs and activities carried out in different European cities will work towards that better understanding of their effectiveness. By investigating the TCM programs in some Swedish and Italian cities, this study aims at identifying the core elements in the TCM strategies related to improving and developing the Town Centre. This thesis is organized in three autonomous papers, where each of them constitutes a specification of one general topic. The first paper aims to analyse the existing literature to highlight scholars’ point of view and, to verify whether the retail activity maintains the central role in the perspective of the Town Centre revitalization, or if the attention has shifted to other activities. One question of this analysis is: What are the research lines that emerge as attracting interest for future development regarding the Town Centre revitalization? This paper built the review of the literature (Roley and Slack, 2004) by using a retrieval procedure based on the combination of several keywords in order to identify the journals where the considered topic assumes relevance. The purpose of the second paper is to understand the way in which the TCM, through the adoption of practical strategies, tackles problems related to the decentralization of retail activities away from the Town Centre. More precisely, the research questions are: what are the answers that Cities gave to the development of Town Centre problems? In the European context what kind of organizations has been created to pursue the goal to revitalize the Town Centre? Does an accord exist between scholars to the most effective initiatives that Cities have to adopt? To answer these questions a qualitative method based on multiple case study methodology was adopted (Eisenhardt, 1989; 1991; Yin, 1994; 2009). The multiple, case study permitted to make a comparison between different realities, providing a stronger base to clarify the several multifaceted aspects of the same phenomenon. From the analysis of the literature and empirical cases, studied in the first two papers, it emerged that the use of Internet and ways to sell through it (Bhatti, 2007; Ickler et al., 2009; Curty, and Zhang, 2011) are rarely adopted as tools able to revitalize the Town Centre. Inasmuch, the third paper aims to highlight what kind of e-technologies - after a specific analysis of each of ecommerce, s-commerce and m-commerce - are more suitable than others to help Town Centres retail activities to regain their past glory. The research questions are: What are the reasons for the development of new forms of selling? What are the new forms of sale over the Internet developed in the last decades? And, in what way is it possible to connect old and new forms of selling in order to improve the retail attractiveness of Town Centres? To find a way by which it is possible to connect old and new forms of selling that could improve the retail experience in Town Centres, a model has been proposed. The implications of this thesis are both theoretical, since it contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between TCM and the renaissance of the retailing activities (in order to support the urban revitalization), and practical, as it emphasizes the role of the internet and new forms of selling over it that could be integrated within traditional forms of selling within fixed location stores in the Town Centre.