Shopping Streets or Malls: Changes in Retail Form in Melbourne and Brisbane

Retail facilities are a critical element of urban form often given insufficient scrutiny. While retail form has implications for matters such as consumer accessibility, quality of service and transport, there have been comparatively few investigations into the nature of retail form in Australia. The spread of the enclosed shopping mall is an international phenomenon of the last 50 years that has been embraced or resisted to various degrees in different cities across the world. Utilising data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics retail census and the Property Council of Australia, this article investigates the extent to which retailing in Brisbane and Melbourne is now dominated by corporately controlled shopping malls. The research builds a profile of each city's retail form, comprehensively at the time of the last retail census in 1992, and of the corporately controlled centres more recently in 2008. Results show that while Melbourne has retained a greater number of traditional shopping centres, the floorspace in corporate centres has substantially increased. Brisbane has a greater proportion of its retailing floorspace within malls. In both cities there is a significant concentration of the management of corporate centres in the hands of a few large corporations.