Leisure, Property, and the Viability of Town Centres

Neil Ravenscroft, Jo Reeves and Martha Rowley
Additional contact information
Neil Ravenscroft: School of Management Studies for the Service Sector, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 5XH, Surrey, England
Jo Reeves: Department of Law, The University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 6AW, England
Martha Rowley: Performance Management Group (C2), BG International, 100 Thames Valley Park Drive, Reading RG6 1PT, England

Environment and Planning A, 2000, vol. 32, issue 8, 1359-1374

Abstract: Much has been written about the positive benefits associated with the growth in town centres of leisure enterprises, particularly those associated with the ‘evening economy’. Coinciding as it has with concerns about the future viability of many of these centres, the promotion of leisure and tourism businesses—and the concomitant conversion of property—has become a core strategy for many local authorities and town-centre managers. Informed by the work of Sharon Zukin, the authors argue that, rather than reflecting the increasing strength of urban areas, the opposite may be the case, particularly in smaller provincial towns. Using case-study data, the authors show that, rather than compete for space, most new leisure businesses employ opportunist strategies, colonising areas no longer required by other occupiers—whether retail, commercial, or industrial. As a result, they argue, the emergence of concentrations of leisure-based property occupiers in town centres signals little more than a delay in the economic restructuring of the area.

Date: 2000
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a32221 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:32:y:2000:i:8:p:1359-1374

DOI: 10.1068/a32221

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().