The pandemic did not create the pressures facing retail. It sped them up. Online shopping was already growing, but Covid-19 forced a sharper reckoning with what shopping malls are for, how town centres work, and whether large retail buildings still have a future.
In the UK, that shift exposed a wider urban paradox. Major retailers such as Debenhams and Topshop collapsed as online habits reshaped the high street. At the same time, the language of regeneration became tangled with gentrification: soaring house prices, displacement and the loss of established communities. In that context, the question is not simply how to revive retail, but how to adapt ageing urban assets in ways that are commercially viable, socially useful and environmentally responsible.
That is where sustainable planning and design matter most. The long-promised smart city has often been reduced to technology for its own sake. A more useful starting point is sustainability and resilience: understanding how a place works, what it needs, and how it can change without being stripped of its value. At The Oval Partnership, that thinking underpins Digital Placemaking (DPM), a tool developed to analyse how places perform and how they might evolve.
“We take an evidence-based approach to designing the city,” says Philip Clarke, Project Director at The Oval Partnership.
Beyond retail metrics
Digital Placemaking feeds directly into the practice’s design process. It helps architects and planners analyse movement patterns, test adaptability and assess how design and built form support or hinder use over time. For Chris Law, Founding Director of The Oval Partnership, its value lies not only in what it reveals about space, but in what it makes possible for existing assets. His interest in data analytics grew out of the practice’s long-standing relationship with a UK-based research team that carried out in-depth studies of mixed-use developments around the world, helping shape an approach grounded in evidence rather than instinct alone.
“Digital Placemaking helps create value in the asset enhancement process,” he says.
That matters commercially. Understanding the hidden potential of an existing retail centre can help rescue it from slow decline without the cost and waste of demolition and rebuild. Yet the case for this approach is not only financial – it also speaks to sustainability. Many ageing shopping malls have lost relevance, but not usefulness. Their structures, locations and public presence still hold value if they are studied properly and adapted with care. This is not a matter of extending a building’s life with cosmetic upgrades. The aim is to make precise, evidence-based changes shaped by the social, spatial and cultural conditions of the building and its surroundings. Rather than bulldozing obsolete malls, The Oval Partnership studies their locality, performance and relationship to public life before deciding what should change and what should remain.
A more human reading of the city
Clarke, who leads The Oval Partnership’s urban analytics offer, argues that Digital Placemaking allows for a more measured approach to renovation or adaptive reuse. It is not a sales tool designed to monetise every corner of a mall. At its best, it helps create places people actually want to spend time in.
“The idea of separate units in a city for work, retail and leisure is outmoded. In the most successful cities, these worlds overlap and connect.”
That shift matters because the standard retail model is under strain. The old pattern of enclosed shopping space and predictable consumer movement no longer matches how many people live. Younger urban residents in particular tend to expect more flexible, mixed and experience-led environments.
“What we are seeing, particularly in traditional retail, is that the standard operating model is no longer fit for purpose,” Clarke says. “Millennials and Gen Z form an increasingly large part of the city’s active population and they want experiential, joined-up, connected lives.”
Retail centres cannot respond to that change through branding alone. If they are to remain useful, they need to work more like parts of the city: porous, adaptable and socially active.
From replacement to renewal
This broader change can be seen beyond retail. As businesses continue to adjust to post-pandemic conditions, the physical fabric of cities is being asked to do the same. A telling signal came in 2021, when the Pritzker Architecture Prize was awarded to Lacaton & Vassal. The decision marked a radical departure from the prize’s usual association with new architectural icons. Instead, it recognised a body of work centred on extending the life of existing buildings through careful, people-centred transformation, what the jury called “restorative architecture”.
That logic is familiar to many of The Oval Partnership’s clients. Across much of the sector, asset enhancement has become a practical alternative to demolition-led redevelopment. Stripping a building back to its shell, or clearing a site entirely, is increasingly treated as a last resort. The more useful question is whether an existing building can be studied, adapted and repositioned so that it contributes more meaningfully to the public realm.
Digital Placemaking supports that shift by helping developers and designers understand how a place is used now, where it is failing, and what kinds of change are likely to strengthen it over time.
Parc 66, Jinan: adaptation in practice
A clear example is Parc 66 in Jinan, China, one of the city’s leading retail destinations. Rather than pursuing wholesale demolition or cosmetic refit, the project used Digital Placemaking principles to rethink how people move through, experience and emotionally connect with the mall.
Using footfall analysis, behavioural mapping and local cultural research, underperforming areas were reworked to improve visibility, circulation and dwell time. Escalator layouts were reconsidered, atria expanded and navigation improved to create more intuitive pedestrian flows. At the same time, the redesign drew on Jinan’s identity as the “City of Springs”, translating aspects of local geology, water systems and cultural memory into the spatial experience of the mall.
After an asset enhancement initiative was completed in January 2025, Parc 66 began to register the benefits of improved circulation, a broader brand mix, and the arrival of first-in-town and exclusive concepts. The impact was evident almost immediately. In May 2025, the mall recorded its strongest May trading performance since opening, achieving record monthly revenue and a high single-digit year-on-year increase.
The gains were sustained across the year. In the first half of 2025, revenue and tenant sales both rose by 1 per cent, while occupancy increased by two points to 94 per cent at the end of June. By the close of the year, revenue had grown by 2 per cent and tenant sales by 6 per cent, with occupancy reaching 97 per cent. Improved traffic flow and a stronger premium brand mix also contributed to a 15 per cent increase in footfall.
These results strengthen the case for Digital Placemaking as more than a design method. At Parc 66, it functioned as a commercial, cultural and sustainability strategy. The mall remained open during renovation, which reduced disruption and allowed for incremental adaptation informed by live performance data. More importantly, the project showed that successful retail environments are no longer defined by transactional efficiency alone, but by their ability to create distinctive, place-specific experiences that people choose to return to.
In that sense, the project reflects a wider shift in urban retail: away from static shopping infrastructure and towards more adaptive, data-informed environments where architecture, culture, technology and community continuously interact. Digital Placemaking is not simply about making malls smarter – it is about making them more responsive and more human.
Designing for use over time
A similar approach shaped The Oval Partnership’s work at Taikoo Li Sanlitun in Beijing, where an Open City concept was used to position a central district as a platform for social interaction as much as retail consumption. Success here is measured by how well the district supports public life and allows for change over time.
The physical environment is deliberately human-scaled, with daylight, framed views and flexible spaces that can support different uses across seasons and times of day. One area might host al fresco dining at one point and performance the next. Over time, Digital Placemaking analytics have tracked shifts in use, offering evidence for how the neighbourhood can continue to evolve in ways that secure the longevity of its buildings and unlock their potential.
This highlights an important point: Digital Placemaking does not stop once a project reopens. It moves into what The Oval Partnership describes as a placekeeping phase: regular post-occupancy review to test whether use patterns and placemaking narratives co-created with clients still make sense, and to refine them where needed.
Breaking the monoculture of the mall
Even so, no tool could have predicted the scale of disruption caused by the pandemic. In China, as elsewhere, it left behind retail fatigue, especially across the mid-market, where many malls have become underused and unloved. In response, developers have often tried to reposition these schemes to attract visitors back. In the past, that might have meant a cosmetic refresh or a pop-up artisan market. Today, those moves are rarely enough.
“What is needed is to break up the ‘monoculture’ of the mall to make way for different kinds of environments that appeal to both broad and niche shoppers,” Clarke says. “We must create and curate valuable and attractive tenant locations in and around adaptable, credible public spaces for gatherings and events.”
That ambition extends beyond physical planning. Clarke also points to augmented reality as one way retailers can rebuild social experiences that weakened during the pandemic, especially where shared interaction has shifted online. “By creating shared interactive experiences across different media, we can support new forms of playful urban interaction that people are looking for,” he continues, arguing that grassroots participatory practice can help generate ideas and foster a stronger sense of stakeholder ownership.
The principle is broader than the technology. Retail environments need reasons for people to participate, not just purchase.
A different future for town centres
In the UK, the pandemic intensified patterns that were already eroding the high street. Over-reliance on traditional retail had been undermining town centres for years; Covid-19 accelerated the decline.
As Clarke has observed in both Europe and Asia, what used to be “an industry led by experience and instinct” is giving way to “a much more evidence-based and location-specific analysis providing an informed view of a place to chart its fortune in a changing market”.
That shift is necessary because inherited assumptions about property, place and consumption no longer hold. If city centres are to be revitalised, they need a different story: one shaped less by retail monoculture and more by community, culture and connectivity. The future of the mall may depend on whether it can become less like a machine for transactions and more like part of urban life.
