Street Life After Retail: 5 Scenarios That Imagine the Future

A visual tour of how e-commerce and digitization might impact city streetscapes — for better or worse.

This post was co-written with Planning and Development Director Johanna Greenbaum and Director of Design Jesse Shapins.

Early last week, Apple’s senior vice president of retail, Angela Ahrendts, proclaimed that the company’s stores aren’t stores at all any more: “We call them town squares.” That association isn’t especially new. Since the dawn of the pre-industrial city (think the agora in Ancient Greece), street-level commerce has been a key component of vibrant urban life. But Apple’s announcement does reflect the way urban retail is currently undergoing a significant transformation.

Over the last decade, the meteoric rise of online shopping has disrupted the day-to-day operations of brick-and-mortar retail across the U.S., affecting the viability of small mom-and-pop shops as well as giants like Barnes & Noble and McDonald’s. In some cities, the impact of e-commerce, long-term lease agreements, and soaring rents — which incentivize landowners to hold out for high-value retailers — have led to the papered windows and vacant streetscapes now characteristic of retail blight.

A strikingly different landscape of physical retail feels more inevitable every time we click on our carts. But in some places and sectors, retail footage is actually growing, as companies pivot to prioritizing the retail “experience” of the store, or the service it provides, over pushing products alone. From pop-up shops to maker spaces to local artisans, retail’s impact on the city is changing dramatically.

This shift could be a good thing, provided the new retail “experience” is less theme park and more 21st-century agora. After all, lively streets are the hallmark of great cities. The sidewalk is where people converge, converse, and exchange — not just goods and services but ideas and opinions. In an age when digital echo chambers threaten to undermine our openness, finding ways to enhance social cohesion and personal interaction on city streets has never been more vital.

So how can cities retain the vibrant street and sidewalk life that define great neighborhoods in a future when traditional retail, as we know it, may no longer exist?

To explore this question, we embarked on a thought experiment around how increasing digitization in the retail realm might impact urban streetscapes. We examined how innovation has changed the urban retail experience over time—from covered arcades to supply-chain logistics to the rise of suburban malls — and teased out the trends that could potentially reshape it moving forward. We explored old technologies and new, and considered how, as future technologies change the physical form of these new spaces, their relationship to the street will change, too. Using the principles of Design Fiction, we extrapolated these technological and social trends, paying close attention to “weak signal” behaviors and existing frictions, and imagined provocative near-future states.

What emerged from this exercise were five scenarios for the future of urban retail. These scenarios are not meant to predict the future but rather to spark conversation and debate: some are whimsical and exciting, others are unnerving, a few are both (as the future may well be). All potentially reflect a new normal. Ultimately, we hope they push cities and companies to think carefully about what the retail experience could become in the digital age, and about how to shape it for the good of the urban environment.