Briefing Notes

The NRPF has established an extensive knowledge base on retail planning, updated annually since 1998. The compilers of the Retail Planning Knowledge Base realise that it can appear daunting at first glance: as it has expanded, it has also become more difficult to find the items sought, owing to the scale of the resource. So to facilitate access, Anne Findlay and Leigh Sparks of the Institute for Retail Studies in the University of Stirling are preparing topic studies, in the form of Retail Planning Briefing Notes.

Each Briefing Note comprises comprises a short listing of abstracted references, a list of useful web sites, a list of researchers to contact and a key findings section. The key findings section will provide a context for the references giving some insights into the papers which have contributed to different parts of a specific debate and which are based on original research.
Briefing Notes published so far examine the following topics:
  1. Farmers’ markets
  2. Food deserts
  3. Clone Towns
  4. Neighbourhood Retailing
  5. Competition in Food Retailing
  6. Scottish Retail Planning Policy
  7. The Need Test
  8. The Sequential Approach
  9. Evidence Base
  10. BIDs
  11. Urban Regeneration
  12. Eco-towns
  13. Retail Vacancy
  14. Diversity
  15. Linked Trips
  16. Town Centre and High Street Reviews
Under Served Markets are covered in the same style by the Research Appendix to the Business in the Community USM Guide.

More background on the Briefing Notes series is provided by an article in the International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management which looks at them in the context of the changing policy agenda.


Search Tips

All files are Adobe Acrobat files. These should be downloaded. The text can then be searched by clicking on ‘Edit’ on the Adobe Acrobat toolbar followed by ‘Search’ on the pop-up menu. Terms of interest can then be entered and a list of all occasions when the term appears will be shown