SHOPPING IN THE FUTURE

The current financial crisis is going to make a substantial impact on the pattern of our shopping developments: it seems likely that many expensive town centre schemes will have to be abandoned, and neither shall we see multi‐storey car parking going up on the scale we have become accustomed to. Instead, cheaper forms of improvement will become more common — pedestrianisation of shopping streets, the development of well‐located suburban centres, and an increase in massive low‐cost single‐storey units such as hypermarkets and large supermarkets. Ronald Gammie delivered this paper at a recent IBC conference in London on the future of shopping centres.