Retail-less cities: rethinking the city through planetary urbanization, logistics,and urban planning

Abstract

This article critically examines the transformations of retailwithin the context of planetary urbanization and contemporary capitalist restructuring. Drawing on the concept of retail-less cities, it argues that traditional retail has lost its structuring role in the city, displaced by new logistical logics. The paper identifies five key dimensions that explain this process: the logistics revolution, the rising cost of urban land, changes in consumption habits, increasing inequalities, and the fragmentation of urban planning. Through an urban political economy approach, it demonstrates how these dynamics generate uneven urban landscapes and erode the local commercial fabric. The article concludes by advocating for multiscalar urban planning, the recovery of retail as a form of social infrastructure, and the development of new analytical categories to better understand —and ultimately challenge— the exclusionary logics of the dominant commercial model.