If Christmas showed us anything, it is that the high street is dying in most of our towns and many of our cities. Figures emerging from the main high-street shops covering the Christmas trading period show that a combination of falling disposable incomes and internet shopping seriously dented sales.

Next was one of the first fashion retailers to reveal that its festive cheer had all been online, where sales rose 13.6%. Its high-street stores suffered a 6.1% slump.

It’s a trend seen by all the major retail chains in recent years that appears to be accelerating – especially when “smart speakers” such as the Amazon Echo were among the must-have presents under the tree.

The Echo and its rival Google Home can be purchased in major stores, but it is almost counterintuitive to buy a gadget from a shop when that gadget is designed to help consumers avoid buying any goods or services from a bricks-and-mortar business.

Debenhams was among the worst-hit chains. The department store saw its share price fall 20% after it announced a steep drop in December sales. Marks & Spencer will tell all this week, but a better than expected performance – which is possible following improved reviews for its women’s clothing – won’t disguise a shop empire in decline. M&S bosses are still planning to close 30 stores, among them prominent outlets in Portsmouth, Slough, Warrington, Wokingham and Worksop.

This trend poses a huge problem for town councils and the government, and yet there remains a head-in-the-sand attitude that could condemn hundreds of towns to a long slow death.

If profit margins – or profits of any kind – are in jeopardy, then the value of commercial town centre land becomes a fraction of what it once was. So rents will need to come down, and business rates – which account for £27bn of government income – will have to fall.

Former prime minister David Cameron acknowledged the danger when he commissioned the Portas review of Britain’s high streets in 2011. Mary Portas, known as the queen of shops following her popular retail-makeover TV programmes, was deeply concerned that some 25,000 stores had closed since the turn of the century.

At the time she said: “Many [high streets] are sickly, others are on the critical list and some now are dead. They have reached a crisis point. Unless urgent action is taken much of Britain will lose, irretrievably, something that is fundamental to our society.”

But the Portas review and the recommendations that it spawned were based on an approach that deemed shops to be the heart of a town. Bring back the shops with a mixture of tax cuts and a spruced-up environment, went the argument, and the town should be saved.

Town councillors, landlords and HMRC tax collectors would be thrilled if that were true. The hundreds of millions of pounds spent tarting up dilapidated shops and watering hanging baskets wouldn’t have been wasted.

Unfortunately, a town’s success is really based on something else: jobs, access to amenities and transport links.

Contrast Newbury and Coventry. Newbury spent millions giving its high street a facelift and tackling parking problems. The aim was to keep shoppers from heading to nearby Reading and Swindon (or, more likely, the brand-tastic retail phenomenon that is Bicester Village).

Yet the town thrives more because of its transport links to London than the council’s spending, however much the townspeople appreciate the sensitive upgrade. As with so many commuter towns, a reliable train service is the key to prosperity; the shops follow.

Coventry has done things the right way around. It saw that its newly thriving university presented the city with an opportunity. Rather than have students based on a campus near the outskirts, it invited expansion on the city’s central square, knocking down its own worn-out buildings to make way for new university towers. Students are a shock to any town not used to them, but they bring employment and spending that generates private-sector investment, including revamped shops – saving council cash.

Bradford has pinned its hopes on the new Westfield Broadway shopping centre, when the magnificent arcades in Leeds town centre are only a stone’s throw away. Other councils have borrowed vast sums to spend on ageing retail parks in the forlorn hope that they can maintain or even increase their value.

Andrew Carter, from the thinktank Centre for Cities, said when the Broadway opened that shopping could not save any city, “even those cities which have a really thriving, bustling retail offer like Manchester, Leeds or London”.

Retailing is not the draw that councillors believe it to be. Employment, cinemas, parks, libraries and swimming pools are a better bet. It’s these things that draw people in – and then they go to shop, says Carter.

An attractive town or city needs to invite people with safe streets (those that demote cars and accommodate cycle lanes) and offer space for the things people want – cultural events, markets or new parks. This is only possible when the value of land declines, making it available for a wider range of activities. It shouldn’t need cities to be destroyed, like Detroit, for them to reinvent themselves. Yet that might be how it happens.