Supporting retail planning with territorial models: Approaches, innovations, and opportunities

Over the last twenty years, Italy experimented a deep transformation of its socio-economic and technologic conditions, which influenced, among others, shopping habits and customers’ consumption practices. In retail sectors these changes, overlay with an incremental deregulation process, that had a strong spatial impact related with the competitions of brands and formats, offer systems, etc.
At regional scale, the evolution of national regulation produced multi-channel systems marked by a heterogeneous complexity. Policy community needs innovative tools able to support an effective governance for sectoral planning and its territorial impacts. The aim of this paper is discussing different territorial models that authors implemented within the recent activities of URB&COM Lab (PoliMI), analyzing Lombardy region and especially the network of "retail polarities" that currently shows specific development trends as new openings, refurbishments, re-location, crises and dismantling, demalling, etc. which have effects on the whole system, integrating – and often competing with – the offer of urban retail systems. We present two different approaches to the modeling using as a support to the public strategies, that take in consideration “static” and “dynamic” data. The integration of these two approaches produces usable descriptions of current regional market competition and of the attractiveness – and the performance – of the retail polarities. Therefore, we explored the potential combination of those models with specific focuses based on Google Places service, that allow reflections about consumption practices and their working profiles. The result is an updated, interactive and original knowledge, that supports sectoral and territorial planning, providing a new, integrated point of view about retail poles and their impact on regional scale.