Retail Policies and Urban Change in Naples City Center: Challenges to Resilience and Sustainability from a Mediterranean City

Abstract

Political discourses, public discussions, and studies in different fields have increasingly focused on the vulnerabilities affecting cities and on the possible responses to them, which are often traced back to urban resilience and sustainability. Research and debates in the field of retailing and consumption geographies are no exception. To carry out a critical analysis on the retail policies associated with the urban commercial change of the Naples city center, the case study is placed in the context of the literature review focusing on three concepts: spatial vulnerability, adaptive resilience, and territorialized sustainability. The analysis is conducted combining data, policy, and planning documents with long-term field research. The changing relationship between consumption practices, retail dynamics, and policies highlights a sort of hybridization of commercial and consumption central cityscapes, which is produced by the coexistence between retail-led phenomena of regeneration and forms of local resistance. The results of the research highlight, from a Mediterranean perspective, new general insights on the impact of selective forms of vulnerability and on the adaptive resilience strategies adopted, but most of all on the indispensable rethinking of the urban retail governance for the enhancement of urban livability, social cohesion, and locally sustainable lifestyles, activities, and places.

Assessing the Integration of Organizational Resilience and Sustainability: Insights from a Systematic Literature Review

“…To ensure that future generations' ability is not compromised in any way, for instance, in terms of the environment, the economy, or human health, organizational resilience is a fundamental component of sustainability [137]. Vulnerable groups or organizations will be particularly at risk from a lack of resilience, and these systems will eventually find it difficult to recover [138,139].…”

Tourism and Authenticity: Analyzing Retail Change in Lisbon City Center

“…In this latter case, online retail has recently seen its importance reinforced with the worldwide restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic [17]. Ingrained in this reading about the changes in retail in the last few decades is also the emergence of consumption and its interconnection with the retail sector and cities [18][19][20][21]. Underlying this emergence of consumption, in what some call the Consumption or Consumer society [22][23][24], are the intertwined social, cultural, political, and economic processes that, as Carreras [25] discussed, makes consumption a concept broader than the concept of 'Demand', which is traditionally used in economics.…”

Spatiotemporal Changes in Vertical Heterogeneity: High-Rise Office Building Floor Space in Sydney, Australia

“…However, the limitation is that the industry divisions that influence or impact the heterogeneity of cities are less commonly included. For instance, retail sectors tend to attract similar retail activity in urban renewal [24]. Furthermore, more detailed dimensions of the vertical mix, such as how different industries occupy the property, are less investigated, such as a high-rise office building, with the industrial mix of financial industries on upper levels and retail sectors on lower levels [25].…”