‘Urban regeneration’ urged by keynote speaker Ibrahim Ibrahim

Keynote speaker Ibrahim Ibrahim will focus on the needs of consumers and urge towns and cities, as well as the retail trade, to give greater weight to story-telling, services, emotional experiences and convenience in the future. His agency, Portland, is one of the leading international branding and retail design agencies. It is centrally concerned with brand design, encouraging brand loyalty and specific consumer behaviours in both digital and real worlds. Urban change is one of Portland’s specialisms.

1. What do you mean by the ‘liberation’ of shops when you say: “The internet will not kill shops, it will liberate them!”?

As transaction and fulfillment move away from physical shops, they will become creative platforms for customer recruitment and retention. That will liberate the shops to become wonderful social experiences for interest and brand communities, combining shopping, hospitality, entertainment, co-working and learning. The consumer experiences in these shops will be ephemeral and will thrive on the power of surprise. The new shops will create ‘happiness’ (on the principle of serendipity).

2. What would you recommend cities to do, in order to keep up with the requirements of (future) customers?

It is all about variety and surprise in the retail environment: this emerges through the matching of products and services on the one hand and interests on the other. To involve creative start-ups, a variety of spaces with different rent levels must be offered. Additionally, we need to create some affordable accommodation again in town centres. And traffic calming measures can help encourage cross-connection of offers on both sides of the high street.

3. How can shopping centres survive?

The concepts that have the best prospects of success are those which offer retail and F&B services in combination with community ones.

By offering well-known brands alongside new labels, we can achieve synergy effects that attract customers. Interesting multi-cultural offers, which appeal to local ethnic population groups, as well as to customers who value authenticity and local specialties, make for vitality and variety in the shopping centre.

4. What are the central concepts for urban architecture in this context?

To drive the design of urban architecture forwards, we need to understand the cultural context of the people who live there. And then we need to take account of the wishes and needs of the people who use this space to shop or work.

Urban architecture must be open to the requirements of various different user groups (students, families, senior citizens, etc.). It should blur the distinctions between the physical and the digital, be part of the urban grain, responding to the trends that will drive future user behaviour, and it should be culturally relevant.