Environment and Planning A 1998, volume 30, pages 481-498 Creating competitive space: exploring the social and political maintenance of retail power T Marsden, M Harrison, A Flynn Department of City and Regional Planning, University of Wales Cardiff, PO Box 906, Cardiff CF1 3YN, Wales; e-mail: MarsdenTK@cf.ac.uk; FlynnAC@cf.ac.uk Received 13 August 1996; in revised form 13 November 1996 Abstract. The authors explore the processes by which British corporate retailers are maintaining their predominance in food provision in the 1990s. Taking the 'new retailing geography' literature as a context, they first outline the key features (spatial, sectoral, and supply related) of retailers' dynamic competitive space. They then examine the regulatory mechanisms used to influence policy develop- ment. The authors begin to address the ways in which combinations of regulatory and consumer culture influence the uneven development and maintenance of corporate retailing and food provision in the United Kingdom, focusing specifically on retailers' definitions and strategies associated with the provision of food quality. Introduction: the uneven development of retailing and the new retail geography The 1990s have witnessed intense corporate-retailer competition and the maintenance of a small group of retailers dominating the British market. At the same time, however, national public and government concerns about the quality of food and its provision have also intensified. The growing corporate power of retailers in the provision of food, together with the decreasing public confidence in food products, provides a major conundrum for government. How can the state best regulate food provision given its priorities for continuing to 'deregulate' the economy but encouraging the 'health of the nation'? How are consumers best represented through state, market, or interest-group activities? These are broad questions which currently lie at the heart of British policy concerning food. One important consequence is that the maintenance of corporate retailers' market power is increasingly dependent upon their social and political actions both towards state agencies and towards consumers. It is through these actions that market 'spaces' can be kept open and legitimated. In this paper we explore the current processes by which British corporate retailers are maintaining their predominance in food provision despite the intensity of competi- tion, threats to their legitimacy by the rise of 'more careful' forms of food consumption, and the multifarious development of regulation which could threaten their 'room for manoeuvre'. The paper falls into three parts. First, by developing some of the argu- ments in the literature associated with 'the new retail geography' we outline the main features of retailers' competitive space: that is, the ways in which economic competition is created and played out within different regulatory parameters. Second, we focus on the mechanisms by which corporate retailers develop regulatory relationships with government, given their increasing need to influence both the formation and the implementation of regulation so as to maintain competitive space. This involves the development of microcorporatist relationships between government and retailers. In the third part of the paper we examine the content of these relationships, particularly concerning the ways in which retailers convey and construct what are seen by govern- ment officials, inter alia, to be legitimate conceptions both of consumer interest and of food quality. These legitimate conceptions are, in the current phase, 'up for grabs', and thus need to be continuously constructed by corporate retailers through their innovative