Urban policies, planning and retail resilience

► Cultural and socioeconomic factors influence public policies. ► Public policies highly influence retail structure and location. ► Europe has very diverse national retail structures and spatial distribution of units. ► Globalization and neoliberal principles dominate. ► There is a strong link between city centre regeneration and retail resilience. Retail trade is a private-sector activity: its structure and location result mainly from the action of individuals and firms in a given time and space. However, planning and regulations, which translate the way collective interest relates to private interest, have a significant effect on the activity. When examining the relationship between retail and urban space in the last three decades, in what may be regarded as a process of general deregulation, it is possible to identify the continued relevance of public policies, plans and projects, although with differing intensity. This finding applies considering either those rules specifically designed for retail or those with a spatial focus on places where retail plays a significant role, as is the particular case of the “city centre”. Policy and planning are seen in this article in their relationship with retail and urban resilience, as the text deals with the way in which they influence the situation in the countries which were the object of study in the Replacis Euro-net research project: France, Portugal, Sweden and Turkey. The article intends to examine the role of the countries’ cultural framework in policy design and to demonstrate how regulations, planning systems and practices contribute significantly to understanding the differences in urban retail structure between these countries (and, in particular, in some of their cities).