Part 2: Pop-Up Shops and Stakeholders
Chapter 6: The Role of Pop-Up Shops in Community Development
Chapter Overview
This chapter looks at the potential role of pop-up shops within the area of community development. Communities can be defined in many ways, from geographic boundaries (e.g., neighbourhoods), shared identities (e.g., shared cultural heritage or beliefs) and increasingly, as virtual communities (e.g., social media platforms such as Facebook). A community is defined by both its members (or stakeholders) and their relationship to one another.
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of the chapter, readers will be able to:
- Define community development.
- Understand the role of pop-up shops in contributing to community development.
- Identify different types of retail vacancy and the strategies used to handle retail vacancy.
Setting the Context
VIDEO
The following video helps to set some context about the considerations of landlords and BIAs (or community groups) who have been presented with the idea of offering short-term and/or reduced-rent lease agreements for pop-up shops as part of a strategy to revitalize a location with long-term vacancies.
1. Community Development and Streetfront Revitalization
The term community development can be used to describe a range of community-based interventions and their outcomes. It is typically seen as a grassroots (or ground-up) process through which communities seek to improve their collective well-being and quality of life. This can involve working together to improve health, reduce poverty, strengthen the local economy or address any range of social, economic, cultural or environment goals.
Community development is a collaborative process whereby the community takes responsibility for tackling issues of common interest. Development does not necessarily mean that growth needs to take place, rather development is used to refer to making changes within the community for the betterment of the community as a whole. Community development can therefore be seen as a vehicle for change. It needs to be planned and organized both by and for the community. Community development is often associated with concepts such as economic development, urban renewal and revitalization.
Community Development: the planned evolution of all aspects of community well-being (economic, social, environmental and cultural). It is a process whereby community members come together to take collective action and generate solutions to common problems. The scope of community development can vary from small initiatives within a small group, to large initiatives that involve the whole community. Regardless of the scope of the activity, effective community development should be:
- a long-term endeavour,
- well planned,
- inclusive and equitable,
- holistic and integrated into the bigger picture,
- initiated and supported by community members,
- of benefit to the community
- grounded in experience that leads to best practice.1
As many pop-up