Leisure, food & beverage, office space, co-working, residential, healthcare, wellbeing, and logistics are all transforming the face of mixed-use retail destinations and lifestyle centres, with the newest mixed-use schemes aiming to fulfill a wide range of visitor’s needs and to address ever-changing lifestyle requirements.
Mall owners move sustainability to the center
Where once the retail industry welcomed a host of new shopping centre schemes every year, now not only are there less ground-up development projects but there are few that do not combine a range of uses and purposes. And most of these projects also interact far more closely with their environment, featuring externally facing restaurants and bars, public spaces, and open entrances and walkways that make the buildings part of their location.
In our latest, exclusive MAPIC whitepaper, Thomas Rose, co-founder at P-Three, has highlighted eight of the best and most important mixed-use projects currently under development across Europe – some set to open soon, somewhere the early phases are already operational, with further stages and uses being added as the schemes head towards completion.
Many reflect the growing importance of destination, both for local and national, and international visitors with travel becoming the norm once again.
The emergence of co-working and remote working, blended-living solutions, including mixed-use residential and retail development, right across the real estate industry is also ensuring that the idea of combining work, living, and leisure time in one location is becoming commonplace in most markets.
The search for other complementary elements has also renewed interest in hotel anchors – often boutique or bespoke offers – for mixed-used schemes, and all these alternative uses are also reshaping the retail mix.
In this special white paper for MAPIC, Rose has identified some of the most influential projects currently underway and also a number of common themes that link them around:
- Heritage buildings
- Large public spaces and greenery
- A vibrant mix of uses across retail, leisure, culture, and restaurants as a recipe for success.
Indeed, successful development in the retail sector has always been about helping customers to stay ahead of the trends. But the latest mixed-use retail development projects are evolving fast, with different uses helping to offset some of the risks around the longer-term trends in retail space while combining mixed-use elements to create a ‘halo effect’ across the entirety of a scheme.
At the heart of much of the new design and reconfiguration of such projects is a desire to make the centres more relevant to their local area and also to introduce new, complementary uses that not only aid the commercial viability of the projects but also make them more useful for residents and workers.
Such mixes also extend the economic hours of projects, with gyms open from early to late, residents requiring convenience retail and services, hotel guests in need of entertainment, dining and bars, plus office workers in need of facilities around their working day.
In fact, what the pandemic has changed and highlighted is that people enjoy the convenience of facilities on their doorstep and have reengaged with their local vicinities and as a result they expect more. That means that mixed use developers need to be more agile, but it also creates great opportunities for new players and operators to take space within multi-use city structures with retail at the core of this evolution.
The huge shift to work-at-home during the pandemic can only intensify this trend: This has also opened up more new opportunities, because as previous hot spots become less busy, other locations will become more popular and have higher footfall, providing a big opportunity for new local players and shifting the dynamics within cities.
Mall owners move sustainability to the center
Sustainability is also key. By appealing to a more local consumer, worker or resident, mixed use developments can play their role in keeping people more local, reducing transportation requirements and especially the use of cars. At the same time, construction and design are also crucial to ensuring that the next generation of developments out-perform their predecessors in terms of sustainability and low energy use.
Download the Whitepaper via the form on the right to access the complete content and discover the 8 of the best mixed-use schemes in development today –>
