07/08/2010 9:00 am - 07/09/2010 5:00 pm
Tuition $950.00
AIA/CES units: 14 AIA/CES HSW units: Yes AIA/CES SD units: No
AICP units: 14
ASLA units: 14 ASLA HSW units: No

New features include:

A consideration of recession lessons and opportunities

An overview of university and medical center opportunities

Tips on buying low and selling high

A look at hot tenants for 2010

This program will demonstrate how proven principles of retail development can be combined with the best practices of New Urbanism, Smart Growth, and architectural design to create successful and competitive mixed-use urban commercial centers. Ideal for developers, planners, retailers, architects, and public officials, the program will focus on several topics, among them the required market demographics for various retailers, restaurants, and shopping center typologies including convenience centers, neighborhood centers, power centers, regional malls, and lifestyle centers. The impact of consumer psychographics and techniques for creating place-based brands will also be presented.

Instructors will focus on the actual nuts and bolts of how to program, plan, and design sustainable retail in historic downtowns, underperforming shopping centers, and new ground-up developments. The course will cover market research, branding, national retailer criteria, and site-selection principles. Participants will learn about streetscape, store planning, signage, tenant mix, merchandising plans, leasing, anchors' roles and successful new urban planning techniques, design criteria, parking, building, site planning, and developer requirements. The course will also review the synergy among residential, office, civic, and governmental land uses and retailer performance.

A special section will focus on gaining retail market share and attracting leading retailers into historic downtowns and older shopping centers. In this two-day program, the instructors will demonstrate how site planning, site selection, detailed storefront design, merchandising, and branding principles can make a commercial center and retailer more competitive. The program will also review lessons learned from dozens of leading town centers and suburban retrofits.

The instructors will illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of many leading town centers built during the past 20 years. Discussions of trends and techniques for vertical integration of nonretail uses as well as retail storefront design trends and techniques will be featured, and the instructors will share inside secrets for shopping center planning and design and applications for cities and new towns. Also taken into consideration will be the integration of big-box discount retailers in the city and new town centers.

The program will examine historic Charleston, SC; Lake Forest, IL; Rosemary Beach and Seaside, FL; The Kentlands (Gaithersburg, MD); the Glen Town Center (Glenview, IL); East Fraserlands (Vancouver, BC); Birkdale Village (Huntersville, NC), Naples, FL; Easton, PA; and other proven developments. A guest developer will present a case study of a proven new urban town center. Participants are welcome to bring projects to be discussed.

Learning Objectives:

Explore planning and design techniques for revitalizing historic town centers and building new mixed-use town (lifestyle) centers.

Review the rise and fall of American cities as regional shopping destinations.

Apply nuts and bolts techniques for increasing retail sales through streetscape, parking, signage, and pedestrian movements.

Examine a successful New Urbanist model for integrating retail into existing historic downtowns, new developments, and suburban retrofits.

Academic Leaders

Robert J. Gibbs is considered one of the foremost urban retail planners in America. For more than two decades, his expertise has been sought by some of the most respected mayors, renowned architects, and successful real estate developers in the country. He is also a recognized leader in the New Urbanism, having pioneered the implementation of its environmentally sustainable principles of Traditional Town Planning and Smart Growth as an antidote to the wasteful sprawl of suburbia. For the past 25 years, Mr. Gibbs has been active in developing innovative yet practical methods for applying modern trends in commercial development to more than 300 town centers and historic cities here and abroad. Gibbs has consulted for the cities of Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, OR; Alexandria, VA, Cambridge, MA; Charleston, SC; and Naples and West Palm Beach, FL; and for the states of Florida and Oregon. His consulting for New Urbanist developments has included the towns of The Kentlands (Gaithersburg, MD); the Glen (Glenview, IL); and Rosemary Beach and Seaside, FL. Gibbs's corporate clientele has included Fortune 500 companies, such as Electronic Data Systems, General Motors, and the Walt Disney Company, real estate industry leaders such as Taubman Centers, Inc., and Simon Property Group, and architectural innovators such as Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company.

Terry Shook, FAIA, is a principal of Shook Kelly, with offices in Charlotte, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Shook Kelley's retail consultancy includes psychographic consumer analysis, strategic planning, and prototype development for many of the world's foremost retail brands, and well as retail centric mixed use environments in existing urban as well as greenfield locations. He has more than 25 years' experience in planning and branding traditional town centers, shopping centers, and retailers. Shook Kelly designed Birkdale Village (Huntersville, NC), which has received awards from the NAHB, ULI, and ICSC and is considered one of the most successful New Urban lifestyle centers in the United States.

Numerous Guest Speakers including developers and retail architects.