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Achieving spatial justice in retail areas
Something that has interested me for a while is the idea of how we can take concepts of justice, and apply them in non-residential developments. (See my article on this: https://bit.ly/3hY6LSH). Recently, I discovered that the City of Johannesburg has started to explore this concept through their land use scheme, specifically S36(6):
(6.) Retail shopping centres in excess of 5 000m² floor area shall provide public transport facilities and associated informal trading facilities and ablutions, the extent of which shall be to the satisfaction of the Council.
I am not aware of any developments that have implemented this yet (if you know of any, please comment here!), but this requirement has significant potential to ensure, firstly, that retail areas remain accessible to public transport users (both shoppers, but also staff working at the centres.) The requirements for informal trading facilities also ensure that the retail shopping centres, which have high rental rates, make space for microenterprises, which allows for poorer entrepreneurs to gain access to middle-class shoppers. There are successful examples of this, for example, see the Dreyer Street Market in Cavendish Shopping Centre: https://bit.ly/2TobEKy and https://bit.ly/3p22DCK
Possibly the one weakness of how this condition is written is that it links informal trade facilities with public transport facilities, which in some cases has merit, in others the trade facilities may be better placed elsewhere, for example, within the centre itself.