Shopping Centre Classifications: A Dynamic Approach

With the emergence of online retail platforms, many retailers and shopping centre developers have been forced to re-evaluate their approaches in catering to their physical store offerings to consumers within the Canadian market. This shift in the retail hierarchy has demonstrated a need to enhance the generalized static retail classifications. This paper aims to evaluate the current shopping centre classification systems and proposes the development of a framework for a dynamic classification system. Several analytical methods were implemented throughout this study and saw the application of a multivariate weighted K-Means model to develop a user-controlled dynamic classification system to further enhance the dynamic nature of the newly developed system. Datasets employed within the study area of the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) were provided by The Centre for the Study of Commercial Activity and Environics Analytics.