r/Glasgow Tools

You're right to raise online shopping. As bad as out of town shopping malls have been for town centres, online shopping is probably a much bigger problem.

There's no way that on street retail can compete with what online retail offers, in terms of hardware, appliances, big purchases, clothes, electronics. A lot of stuff, but not everything.

Fresh food, mini supermarkets, bars, restaurants, hospitality, etc, all these have a future on inner city streets, especially if there are more people living above the units.

That's basically how it is in most continental European cities which retained a nice balance between inner town retail and malls. Their streets have adapted to be filled with retail/hospitality units catering specifically to the local residents. We can have this too.

You can see evidence of this btw in how local neighborhood shopping streets have performed extremely well through Covid, as people have shopped for small, immediate purchases, and dined out, closer to home. A similar formula is needed for non-core streets across Glasgow city centre.

> In addition I don’t think removing the car parks to somewhere outside the centre will improve footfall, rather people will just not bother going into the city to begin with.

Yep with you there. Unless anything's done to make it more difficult to access out of town malls, they'll continue to drain town centres of footfall.

Good news is though that the Scottish Government's latest National Planning Framework (NPF4) has a declared aim to hit parking at out of town shopping malls with several sticks (minimum parking costs, limits on space provided to car parking full stop, etc).

Might sound scary to a lot of people now, but if these things happen together, it could really go a long way to repairing out towns and cities.