RETAIL PLANNING FOR THE RESILIENT CITY 147 8 Urban Retail Dynamics From shopping spaces to consumer places 1 Herculano Cachinho 1. Introduction Retailing has always been par excellence an urban activity. The requirements of centrality and accessibility are the main factors responsible for this pattern of location. It was so in the past, it still is nowadays, and despite the potential of e-commerce it is likely to continue in the near future. In fact, when there is a dearth of customers as happens in villages and small towns, retail shops tend to disappear or curtail their activity to cover only the barest essentials, low order goods and services. Other businesses earning their living on the sale of high order goods seldom last long in these places. Instead, every so often, “roving shops”, which are vans belonging to the modern-day travelling salesman, make their rounds, and fairs become “temporary shopping malls” held on different days of the week and in different places (Cachinho, 2002). The links between retailing and the city have been lost over the years. If not all cities are “daughters of traders”, as the historian Henri Pi renne (1969) once suggested, urban life has never blossomed in any civilisation without the presence of stores (Barata Salgueiro, 1996). Retailing is one of the city’s raison d’être (Fernandes, 1997); it makes city life feasible; it explains its inner cohesion and it justifies a good deal of the city’s dynamic. Through 1 In T. Barata Salgueiro & H. Cachinho eds. (2011). Retail Planning for the Resilient City: Consumption and Urban Regeneration, CEG, Lisbon: pp.147-168