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In the 1960s, the Gaullist state, faced with many spatial imbalances arising from the recent development of hypermarkets in the suburbs, became a full participant of urban retail planning, breaking with his mere observer status. The state undertook to regulate this expansion by creating ad hoc committees that took different forms in forty years and followed one another without much effect. Since the 1990s, municipalities are at the helm, reinforced by intercommunality, and are almost the only partners with major distributors in this new urban governance. Yet it would be necessary that the French local authorities endow real urban foresight tools.

This article analyses the new “local” strategy of the large retail industry in France to identify potential evolutions in the relationships between the large retail industry and the town. It shows “local” commerce of the large retail industry is the result of the peculiar background on the international, national and even local scales. If, at first glance, this “local” commerce could appear opposed to the hypermarket model, it is in fact a new recipe based on the traditional ingredients which made the success of the large retail industry. This explains why eventually the relationships between large retail and the town have not really evolved on the local scale. However, on the smaller scales, local commerce has initiated new trends which increase the socio-cultural differentiation inside towns and between towns.

This article examines the evolving relationship that the city and maintain trade. The impact of trade on the structure and spatial dynamics is central to the purpose.

Towns during the Roman period have often been conceived as parasitic to the rural areas which constituted the pillars of Roman time’s economy. However, a short survey of urban planning in the Swiss Plateau, cradle of the Helvetii’s territory, reveals that numerous commercial and artisanal spaces existed within the town itself. Most of these, although one should not underestimate public marketplaces, were confined in private houses, giving onto the colonnade and the street. The study of a particular type of dwelling, the long house, gives clues so as to recreate the evolution
of both domestic and commercial spaces, as well as their impact on town planning in general.

Starting in the 1980s, the commercial transformations accompany the metropolisation and urban redeployment across the great Istanbul. We are witnessing an intensification of large shopping centers throughout the entire agglomeration. Those are increasingly growing and diverse in their offer as in their clientele. At a neighborhood level, throughout the example of Kurtulus, appear forms of cohabition, resistance and negotiation between franchised businesses and independent retailers. New consumption patterns are adopted within space-time where the boundaries between public and private are more porosed and blurred.

The aim of this paper is to présent the results of an investigation managed in Sidi Mabrouk, a western outlying area inside the algerian city of Constantina. In a garden city built during the 1930’s, some countryside investors connected to the trade globalisation mainstreams buy real estate properties since the middle of the 1990s’. Those transactions turn this quiet residencial area into a commercial centre, attractive for young, affordable and trendy customers. Rapidly expanding in social and economic terms, those “nouveaux riches” who had made a lot of money in a short time become very activ agents of an urban renewal and a modernization in this Constantina’s suburb.

If retail is considered as an economical function, it is also a key driver of urban production and a palliative cure against decline and crisis forms used by french planning policy actors in the city. The aim of this article, through the commercial positioning in urban and renewal planning operations, its issues, forms and gaits, is to understand the city impact of regeneration policies context in successful or unsuccessful economical and urban resilience processes.

Château-Rouge, in Paris 18th district, is a popular African commercial centrality. On a daily basis, this area is characterised by food businesses (which sell various cheap tropical products).
It also gathers populations coming from different areas (Paris, Île-de-France, country side and broad) most of them stemming from Sub-Saharan Africa and the West Indies.
However, this area is not only playing a supplier role. In a context of diversification of the tropical products commercial offer and of an increased interconnection between the location and the consumers, the area also takes on new important social functions whilst keeping its identity as an “African neighbourhood”.

This article examines the evolution of the spatial setting-up of the Euro-African secondhand cars exportation business in Brussels.
This transnational business activity is operated by people with immigrant background and exclusively oriented toward other groups of migrants. The chosen gateway is that of conflicts linked to the urban planning of this neighbourhood. After a first period of relative indifference, urban planers’ reaction moved to a frontal approach seeking the departure of secondhand cars. Tensions around this neighbourhood are even stronger today as a process of gentrification is causing the appearance of a new population profile in this city’s area.

Since 2009, informal street markets of objects retrieved from the city’s garbage have increased and reached downtown Paris, creating a public problem. In this article, I analyze how this trade among poor people and pariahs, expending in the public space, generated conflicts and solidarity. The experience of city-dwellers who face these markets can be both affective and normative. I’ll analyze the indignation of local residents, and recount how protests moved and developed from the street into political arenas.