Our latest blog post by Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic).
Hey presto! A new retail and student organisation area for the university, just like that! Well, not quite. As we watch the wood frames of the ANU pop-up village creep up by the hour amongst the trees, the question has to be asked about whether a plywood village rings the right chord for the construction work to come.
It does. Construction begins with fencing off. As kilometres of chain link fencing and printed fence fabric go up, access to our student organisations and the majority of our current campus retail is closed off. Without a pop-up, there will be even fewer places for students and staff to find something to eat and drink, to get their bikes fixed, to buy a pen, and to unwind. None of these things form the core business of a university, but without them, you give staff and students every reason to be somewhere else.
If your university campus is not mixed in with a town or a village, the poor provision of retail and services can generate the impression that your community is a collection of empty buildings. That’s a particular challenge for many young universities, in which ready pour brutalist concrete buildings sit loosely on acres of parkland, or which are bisected by roads. Seriously unfriendly, and hardly suggestive of a warm community. Would you want to work or to study there?
These problems are compounded if, like the university at which I work, student accommodation rings the campus. If your high density, high occupancy buildings are on the edge of campus, you give everyone the reason to drift outwards instead of inwards.
But acres of space and proximity to general retail and services are not the only challenge for campus retail and services. Leasehold spaces can be far too big for a business to be viable. Unless you subsidise or waive the rent, offerings for staff and students fall over, or atrophy in ever shorter opening hours.
This is why pop-up retail and services are so interesting.
Pop-up is a global phenomenon, and it is not particularly new if we consider activities like markets as a precedent. While the appearances of pop-ups vary, they are defined by two core qualities: they are temporary, and small. You can find an interesting account of the history of the word pop-up by the editor of the Australian National Dictionary, Amanda Laugeson, here.
Being temporary allows you to test new offerings that you suspect will work well with your community. It also allows you to keep turning offerings over to encourage staff and students to come to campus and to engage inwards rather than just outwards. This is confirmed by our construction project research over four years, in which staff and students used the word ‘vibrant’ most commonly to express their wish for retail and services.
Being small turns out to be even more important. Small means lower rent, and that means the possibility of lower prices for goods and services. Affordability is critical for students, and for staff. The new ANU pop-up will provide a home for our student associations and the same number of retail and service offerings in around one third (22 outlets 1000m2 vs the current 3400m2 of the existing central retail and services space. We’ll also welcome four food trucks to campus for the first time. The new development, which will open in January 2019, which house just under double the number retail and services outlets across 4500m2.
In microcosm, this redevelopment captures a much broader discussion on the national and global health of retail. As the 2016 AT Kearney Global Retail Development Index report highlights, online commerce grew by 37.5% between 2014 and 2015, and now accounts for $878 billion USD revenue annually. Bricks and mortar retail has to fight hard to hang on, and it can do so by eking out discretionary spending opportunities—for example, local, high-quality independent food and drink outlets and important services such as medical and wellbeing—with the cheapest rent possible. It can also adopt a ‘showroom’ methodology, as PwC notes in its 2017 Retail Industry Trends Report, carrying a limited range of branded goods that are typically subject to higher rates of return through online shopping. That’s hard to do with fixed retail spaces in malls with high fitout and fitout renewal costs.
So, yes, pop-up is magic. With that kind of recalibration of retail and services provision, the university has a real opportunity to provide the vibrant environment that students and staff want.
This blog’s shout out is for every staff member and student who wants to buy food or a cup of tea or coffee after 2pm.
