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Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-usj-10.1177_00420980221143043 for The experience economy in UK city centres: A multidimensional and interconnected response to the ‘death of the high street’? by James T White, Allison Orr, Cath Jackson, James Hickie and Robert Richardson in Urban Studies

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-usj-10.1177_00420980221143043 for The experience economy in UK city centres: A multidimensional and interconnected response to the ‘death of the high street’? by James T White, Allison Orr, Cath Jackson, James Hickie and Robert Richardson in Urban Studies

The UK retailing industry is experiencing unprecedented structural change on the High Street, evidenced through increasing occupier business failures, property vacancies and market uncertainty and instability. The global pandemic during the early 2020s has only served to accelerate changes to established consumer behaviour. In response, this End of Project Report, Retail Change and Transition in UK City Centres, presents the findings of a mixed method study called Real Estate, Place Adaptation and Innovation within an integrated Retailing system or ‘REPAIR’ which investigated the changes experienced across the retail cores of five UK cities – Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hull, Liverpool and Nottingham – between 2000 and 2021.\ud \ud This large-scale study drew on the ‘adaptive cycle’ retail model, whereby the word ‘transition’ explains the current situation in city centres better than the popular quip ‘death of the High Street’. The report describes the ‘adaptive cycle’ model and outlines the research approach, before introducing the case study city centres and the study’s four separate work packages, which examine different aspects of the property market and built environment. 25 recommendations are then presented as part of the study’s wider findings and conclusions.

Supplemental Material for Ownership diversity and fragmentation: A barrier to urban centre resilience by Allison M Orr, Joanna L Stewart, Cath Jackson, and James T White in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

This paper explores the governance of urban design on Toronto's waterfront. It examines the formation, mandate and powers of the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC) – now branded Waterfront Toronto – and critically evaluates the urban design policies, tools and mechanisms that have been put in place to support waterfront redevelopment and pursue a goal of ‘design excellence’ since 1999. The paper traces the key decisions that led to the creation of the TWRC by the federal, provincial and municipal governments and details the ambitious planning and design vision that emerged for the waterfront, but also argues that the TWRC was awarded a limited institutional mandate to fulfil its aims and objectives. The latter sections of the paper describe how a series of design-sensitive tools and mechanisms were introduced alongside the statutory planning framework for the waterfront to counter the governance and financial challenges faced by the Corporation. The paper contends that the Corporation is currently overseeing a broadly positive redevelopment programme that has been able to deliver a high quality public realm on the waterfront and facilitate design-led real estate development. An innovative public engagement strategy has been coupled with neighbourhood ‘precinct’ planning and design peer review to achieve these outcomes. It is argued that these positive shifts have begun to counter the long history of faltering post-industrial development and ‘jurisdictional gridlock’ that has plagued Toronto's waterfront since the 1960s.

This paper examines ‘Vancouverism’ and its recent reproduction at CityPlace on Toronto’s Railway Lands. The developers, Concord Pacific, were centrally involved in producing ‘Vancouverism’ in the 1990s and 2000s. This study examines the design quality of CityPlace and explores the differences between the planning cultures in Vancouver and Toronto. In evaluating the design outcomes, it highlights a mismatch between the public sector’s expectations, the developer’s ambitions and the initial design quality. The paper demonstrates that, despite an increasingly sophisticated system of control, the city of Toronto’s ability to shape outcomes remains limited and, overall, the quality of development falls short of that achieved in Vancouver.

We analyzed the response of NaI(Tl) to low energy nuclear recoils in the experiment that is reported on here. Such detectors have been used recently to search for evidence of dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Understanding the response of these detectors to low energy nuclear recoils is crucial in these searches. We have measured nuclear recoils and associated quenching factors (QF) for sodium recoils in the energy range of 8 keV - 48 keV. The results are characterized by a decrease in QF as the recoil energy decreases. The measured values are significantly lower than those reported by DAMA, but are similar to results from recent measurements. We present the details of our experiment, including the neutron beam calibration, shielding optimization, and the experimental design and setup. The DAMA/LIBRA combined modulation signal is used with the new QF values to illustrate the changes to the dark matter interpretation resulting from this improved characterization of these NaI(Tl) detectors., Comment: 9 pages, 14 figures

Design competitions are often used to select design teams for high profile development projects, yet have received scant attention in the literature. Seeking to redress this imbalance, this paper presents a competition model that was employed on Toronto’s waterfront in 2006 for a large public realm project and describes how it was structured around an iterative public consultation process. Although subject to a number of implementation delays, the competition sponsors built a constituency of support for the redevelopment project by engaging lay people in the decision-making process. The paper argues that the competition struck a balance between lay input and professional knowledge and contends that future research efforts should continue to explore means by which public participation can be integrated into design competitions.