High Street UK 2020: Transferring knowledge to facilitate the repositioning, reinventing, rebranding and restructuring of sustainable retail centres.

英国零售业性质的变化给消费者带来了许多好处，但也给社区和零售商本身带来了重大后果。2012年，54家零售公司倒闭，关闭了3951家门店，影响到48,142名员工(资料来源：零售研究中心)。近30年来，MMU的学者一直在研究和预测商业街的大规模变化，但尽管进行了所有这些研究，来自商业街数据提供商的越来越多的证据，以及政府委托的报告和广泛的媒体报道，很明显，零售商和负责管理商业街变化的当地行为者和机构不知道如何有效地应对。例如，最近(2013年3月14日)《每日邮报》的一篇文章的标题是：城镇只花了玛丽·波塔斯1000万GB基金的7%来拯救商业街……其中大部分都花在了驯鹿和小猪佩奇的服装上。MMU在提供支持零售和地点变化的干预措施方面有着成功的记录，该项目的PI(Cathy Parker教授)在过去10年中运行了价值超过800万GB的相关项目，因此我们有信心我们拥有帮助商业街利益相关者应对变化的知识、经验和声誉。由地方管理研究所选择的10个城镇(如康格尔顿)和城市(如布里斯托尔)设计的知识交流活动，将把地方提供可持续商业街所需的知识直接带给决策者。首先，我们将综合现有广泛的学术研究基础，通过利用跨学科的专家评审小组和成熟的排名方法，在宏观、中观和微观层面上对零售变革/商业街变革的驱动因素进行同行评议研究。这将使一个互动工具得以开发，各个地点可以用来预测其商业街的变化。该项目的第一阶段将在10个合作伙伴地点举办一系列当地讲习班，将零售商、当地行为者、机构和学者聚集在一起，共同探索和了解该地点面临的零售挑战的性质。虽然变革的驱动力是复杂的和跨学科的边界，但该项目的第二阶段将专注于从管理和营销文献中建立一个管理变革的框架。该项目将在“重新定位”、“重塑”、“品牌重塑”和“重组”的大类下，审查和提炼与地方干预措施及其影响有关的证据。例如，一个地点可能需要重新定位和重塑为当地中心，而不是地区中心--相关的零售/服务组合，以及所有相应的品牌重塑和实体重组(例如，将某些空间的使用从零售改为住宅)。关于这些重大主题的国家讲习班将由学术专家(他们都是该项目的访问研究人员)领导，并由合作伙伴商业街参加。这些广泛的方法将与10个用户社区合作，由一位拥有20多年经验的城镇/城市中心经理推动，以便这些单独的商业街确定2020年可持续的替代未来和实现这一目标的行动计划。该项目的所有交付成果将通过场所管理研究所的网站在网上免费提供，从而向更广泛的受众传播这一宝贵知识，例如目前参与波塔斯试点和相关计划的400个城镇。此外，还将根据4个主要干预主题(重新定位、重塑、品牌重塑和重组)出版《场所管理与发展杂志》的特别《知识交流》版。这些主题中的每一个都将通过从合作伙伴所在地抽取的案例研究来探讨。

The changing nature of retail in the UK brings many benefits to consumers but has significant consequences for communities and retailers themselves. In 2012, 54 retail companies failed, closing 3,951 stores between them, affecting 48,142 employees (Source: Centre for Retail Research). Academics at MMU have been studying and predicting large-scale change on the high street for nearly 30 years, but despite all this research, the ever-growing body of evidence from high street data providers as well as government-commissioned reports and extensive media coverage, it is clear that retailers and local actors and agencies responsible for managing change on the high street do not know how to respond effectively. For example, a headline from a recent (14th March 2013) Daily Mail reads "Towns have spent just 7% of Mary Portas' £10million fund to rescue High Streets... and most of it went on reindeer and Peppa Pig costumes". MMU has a successful track record of delivering interventions to support retail and location change, the project's PI (Professor Cathy Parker) has run relevant projects worth in excess of £8m over the past 10 years, therefore we are confident we have the knowledge, experience and reputation to help high street stakeholders to respond to change. The knowledge exchange activities, designed with 10 towns (such as Congleton) and cities (such as Bristol), chosen by the Institute of Place Management, will bring the knowledge places need to deliver sustainable high streets, directly to decision-makers. Firstly, we will synthesise the existing extensive academic research base of peer-reviewed studies of drivers of retail change/high street change at macro, meso and micro level through utilising an interdisciplinary expert review panel and a well-established ranking method. This will enable an interactive tool to be developed which individual locations can use to forecast change on their high street. The first stage of the project will culminate in a series of local workshops in the 10 partner locations bringing together retailers, local actors and agencies and academics to jointly explore and understand the nature of the retail challenge faced by that location. Whilst the drivers of change are complex and cross discipline boundaries, the second stage of the project will focus on building a framework for managing change, from the management and marketing literature. The project will review and distil the evidence relating to place interventions and their implications, under the broad categories of 'repositioning', 'reinventing', 'rebranding' and 'restructuring'. For example, a location may need to reposition and reinvent itself as a local centre rather than district centre - with the relevant retail/service mix, and all the corresponding rebranding and physical restructuring (changing the usage of some space from retail to residential, for example). National workshops on these major themes will be led by academic experts (who are all Visiting Researchers within this project) and attended by the partner high streets. These broad approaches will then be contextualised in partnership with 10 user communities, facilitated by a town/city centre manager with over 20 years' experience, so those individual high streets identify an alternative, sustainable future for 2020 and an action plan for achieving that aim. All the deliverables from the project will be available online, free of charge, through the Institute of Place Management website, thereby disseminating this valuable knowledge to a much wider audience, such as the 400 towns currently involved in the Portas Pilot and associated schemes. In addition, a special 'knowledge exchange' edition of the Journal of Place Management and Development will be published based on the 4 key intervention themes (repositioning, reinventing, rebranding and restructuring). Each of these themes will be explored through a case-study drawn from the partner locations.