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Restaurant survival during the COVID-19 pandemic: Examining operational, demographic and land use predictors in London, Canada
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic placed considerable stress on restaurants from restrictions placed on their operations, shifting consumer confidence, rapid expansion of remote work arrangements and aggressive uptake of third-party delivery services. Industry reports suggest that restaurants are experiencing a much higher rate of failure in comparison to other sectors of the economy. Restaurant survival was assessed in the Middlesex–London region of Ontario, Canada as of December 2020 using a novel dataset constructed from public health inspection permits, business listings and social media. Binomial logistic regression models were used to determine the association of operational, demographic and land use factors with restaurant survival during the pandemic. Operations-related factors were considerably more predictive of restaurant survival, though some demographic and land use factors suggest that urban processes continued to play a role in restaurant survival. Restaurants that offered in-house delivery and phone-based ordering methods were considerably less likely to close. Restaurants with a table-based service model, drive-through or an alcohol licence were also less likely to close. Restaurants proximal to a concentration of entertainment land uses were more likely to be closed in December 2020. Closed restaurants were not spatially clustered as compared to open restaurants. The pandemic appears to have disrupted established theoretical relationships between people, place, and restaurant success.
Technological advances and client demand may change food service ghost kitchens. Value, scalability, and technology integration challenge delivery-only restaurant operating standards. Their operational benefits are well-documented, but their commercial, sustainability, and consumer implications are unknown. In this chapter, ghost kitchens' history, working systems, and economic, environmental, and social elements are studied to fill the gap. Case studies and industry data analysis are used to explore ghost kitchen advancements, including AI-driven analytics, multi-brand approaches, and eco-friendly practices. Distribution systems, regulatory compliance, and consumer distrust are needed for ghost kitchens, which promote entrepreneurship, sustainability, and cost performance. Theory explains how virtual food brands affect consumer behaviour and competitive market dynamics, whereas practical ways execute this concept. Examination of ghost kitchens' history and benefits reveals their vital role in global food ecosystem transformation.
The retail sector is experiencing unprecedented change, from ongoing shifts in shopping behaviour to retailer rationalisation and business failure. Internationally, this is impacting the crucial economic and social role of many highly developed city centres. This paper examines how key stakeholders have responded to the challenges of adapting city centres for the future. Empirically, the paper draws on a series of repurposing schemes across five case study cities. Conceptually, theories of assemblage are used as an analytical framework to understand how heterogeneous networks combine to repurpose city centres. The paper makes a distinctive contribution by revealing symbiosis between mixed uses that challenge traditional high street norms, and suggests that harnessing common desires could underpin productive shared governance and support business communities’ efforts to bring vibrancy and enhance resilience.
British high streets have faced significant economic and cultural challenges as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is predominantly due to government enforced restrictions which required all ‘non-essential’ retail to close, resulting in a significant change in the way consumers interacted with high streets. While all premises related to the retail or hospitality sector were forced to close, leading to rising vacancy rates, some high streets were more resilient to the economic shock than others. In this paper we detect some of the unforeseen consequences of the pandemic on British high streets and create a measure of resilience. The impact of the lockdown restrictions have resulted in some high streets, notably Spring Street in Paddington, London, experiencing disproportionate decline. Others including Northolt Road in Harrow, London were able maintain their occupancy. This study provides a typology of high street resilience incorporating the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions and links the impact of government policy to the economic performance of high streets. The outcomes from this research address both local and national policy contexts as the resilience typology has the potential to assist in funding allocation for recovery and regeneration projects.
Since the 1990s the UK’s city centre high streets have been losing market share to outof-town shopping and e-retailing. The shocks of the GFC and COVID-19 have hastened this and precipitated widespread store closures. The experience economy is increasingly promoted as a means to avert the ‘death of the high street’, and this prompts our study of its evolution. An exploration of the literature reveals the experience economy to be an interconnected phenomenon focused on the creation of a memorable event that elicits a sensory response via multi-dimensional innovation and design. Using this to guide our empirical work, we undertake a comparative mixed method longitudinal case study of five UK city centres. We initially chart the changing manifestations of experience uses before analysing supporting interviews and observations that reveal three interconnected layers of the experience economy: in-store commercial experiences; leisure and entertainment-orientated adaptations to shopping centres and department stores; and the wider regeneration of the public realm. Implications for city centre management are discussed.
Retail is an important function at the core of urban areas, occupying a key role in determining their economic prosperity, desirability, and vibrancy. Efforts to understand the geographies of retail centers, the cores of retailing in urban areas, have a long academic tradition, often studied through either rich local case studies, or when geographically more expansive, are constrained by limited detail. New data in United States detailing the location and uses of retail creates a significant opportunity to develop a more complete and comprehensive overview of the national retail system, at a high spatial resolution. This research is rooted in a pragmatic effort to provide the first and most comprehensive model of U.S. retail center geographies, through development of an integrated, conceptual, and empirically grounded framework, using data from SafeGraph, to examine where they are located, what characteristics they have, and who uses them. The resulting geographies are of great interest, creating significant potential in the monitoring of the national retail system as it continues to evolve in response to wider structural challenges. Furthermore, by integrating these three geographies (where, what, and who), we establish a conceptual framework that yields substantive insights about the relationships between each of them, and argues that understandings of U.S. retail center geographies are more comprehensive and useful when considering the who, what, and where together.
Town centres and high streets typically form the social and commercial cores of UK cities and towns, yet, there is no uniform definition of what a town centre or high street is. In this study the spatial delineations of retail agglomerations are generated using open-source data for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The extent and boundaries of these physical retail areas are identified based on the density and connectivity patterns of individual retail units over space. A high resolution hexagonal grid is superimposed over spatial clusters of retail points and a network-based algorithm used to identify mutually exclusive tracts. Agglomerations are then pruned and fine-tuned according to a series of heuristic rules. Our retail agglomerations represent local commerce areas with shopping amenities and are assigned to a hierarchical classification ranking from the largest Regional Centres, Major Town Centres and Town Centres, down to Small Local Centres and Retail Parks. The classification into one of eleven hierarchies is based on a combination of relative rank in the local area and absolute size of retail units within the area. These retail agglomeration boundaries, hierarchical classification and lookups form an open-source spatial data product available for wide use and research implementation.
Black communities in the U.S. have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic; however, few empirical studies have been conducted to examine the conditions of Black-owned businesses in the U.S. during this challenging time. In this paper, we assess the circumstances of Black-owned restaurants during the entire year of 2020 through a longitudinal quantitative analysis of restaurant patronage. Using multiple sources of geospatial big data, the analysis reveals that most Black-owned restaurants in this study are disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic among different cities in the U.S. over time. The finding reveals the need for a more in-depth understanding of Black-owned restaurants' situations during the pandemic and further indicates the significance to carry out place-based relief strategies. Our findings also urge big tech companies to improve existing Black-owned business campaigns to enable sustainable support. As the first to systematically examine the racialization of locational information, this paper implies that GIS development should not be detached from human experience, especially that of minorities. A humanistic rewiring of GIS is envisioned to achieve a more racially equitable world.
This study aims to better understand retailers' resilience by conducting a micro-level analysis of retailers against the backdrop of the current Covid-19 crisis. Focusing on e-commerce strategies, the paper reveals that for a better understanding of retailer's resilience it proves helpful to analytically differentiate subjective and objective aspects that influence the personal 'capacities to respond', leading to more or less (pro)active reactions (absorptive, adaptive, transformative) to the crisis. This results in the differentiation of four broad response, respectively retailer types. As such, the paper contributes to existing research frameworks by providing analytical categories for defining subjective and objective aspects of resilience as well as by applying this framework to an empirical study on retailers (and urban) resilience during the Covid-19 pandemic. A mixed method approach is applied, which includes a survey as well as expert interviews with retailers located in the German city centre of Würzburg. For urban policy makers the results provide an opportunity to redefine retail policy frameworks contributing to retailers' and urban resilience alike.
Online spaces are increasingly important in the sale of food, alcohol and tobacco. This analysis focuses on two developments in online food delivery: delivery-only ‘dark kitchens’ and rapid grocery delivery services (RGDS), with the aim to understand and assess the availability of health harming and health promoting products through these services. Data was collected for one metropolitan local authority in London, UK, using publicly available online sources. Being explorative in nature, the analysis includes descriptive statistics and qualitative assessment. Three dark kitchens (renting kitchens to 116 food businesses), three grocery delivery apps, and 76 grocery businesses available through online delivery platforms were identified. Most businesses renting dark kitchen space were ‘virtual restaurants’ (52%) selling fast food (47%) or dessert (21%) through online delivery platforms. RGDS sold a variety of items, with a focus on pre-packaged foods high in fat, salt and sugar, alcoholic beverages and tobacco. These items were also most likely to be promoted through offers and promotional language. Fruits and vegetables were less commonly available and mainly on grocery delivery apps. Online delivery services increase the temporal and geographic availability and promotion of many unhealthy products. Research expanding on the geographic area of interest is needed.
This paper synthesizes knowledge on how the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic reshaped the relationship between cities and quality of life. The possible impacts of cities on seven domains of quality of life – travel, leisure, work, social relationships, residential well-being, emotional responses, and health – during COVID-19 are reviewed. Findings indicate that the role of transport and land use, urban nature, public space, facilities and services, housing, and information and communications technology (ICT) in quality of life in cities was transformed during COVID-19. Access to healthcare facilities and services and local amenities; opportunities for walking and cycling; COVID-19-secure public transport; access to a car; urban blue or green space and access to nearby nature; easy access to open public space; living in a dwelling of sufficient size and quality; private or communal outdoor areas; and ICT infrastructure and systems possibly helped to mitigate the negative impacts of COVID-19 on quality of life in cities. Implications for urban planning and policy arise from the COVID-19 crisis, shedding light on ways to address inequities, support vulnerable groups, and improve quality of life in cities in times of pandemics but also under normal circumstances.
This paper develops the argument that post-COVID-19 recovery strategies need to focus on building back fairer cities and communities, and that this requires a strong embedding of ‘ age-friendly’ principles to support marginalised groups of older people, especially those living in deprived urban neighbourhoods, trapped in poor quality housing. It shows that older people living in such areas are likely to experience a ‘double lockdown’ as a result of restrictions imposed by social distancing combined with the intensification of social and spatial inequalities. This argument is presented as follows: first, the paper examines the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on older people, highlighting how the pandemic is both creating new and reinforcing existing inequalities in ageing along the lines of gender, class, ethnicity, race, ability and sexuality. Second, the paper explores the role of spatial inequalities in the context of COVID-19, highlighting how the pandemic is having a disproportionate impact on deprived urban areas already affected by cuts to public services, the loss of social infrastructure and pressures on the voluntary sector. Finally, the paper examines how interrelated social inequalities at both the individual and spatial level are affecting the lives of older people living in deprived urban neighbourhoods during the pandemic. The paper concludes by developing six principles for ‘age-friendly’ community recovery planning aimed at maintaining and improving the quality of life and wellbeing of older residents in the post-pandemic city.
We use data on human mobility obtained from mobile applications to explore the activity patterns in the neighbourhoods of Greater London as they emerged from the first wave of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions during summer 2020 and analyse how the lockdown guidelines have exposed the socio-spatial fragmentation between urban communities. The location data are spatially aggregated to 1 km ² grids and cross-checked against publicly available mobility metrics (e.g. Google COVID-19 Community Report, Apple Mobility Trends Report). They are then linked to geodemographic classifications to compare the average decline of activities in the areas with different sociodemographic characteristics. We found that the activities in the deprived areas dominated by minority groups declined less compared to the Greater London average, leaving those communities more exposed to the virus. Meanwhile, the activity levels declined more in affluent areas dominated by white-collar jobs. Furthermore, due to the closure of non-essential stores, activities declined more in premium shopping destinations and less in suburban high streets.
This paper examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic, fiscal, social and political fallout on cities and metropolitan regions. We assess the effect of the pandemic on urban economic geography at the intra- and inter-regional geographic scales in the context of four main forces: the social scarring instilled by the pandemic; the lockdown as a forced experiment; the need to secure the urban built environment against future risks; and changes in the urban form and system. At the macrogeographic scale, we argue the pandemic is unlikely to significantly alter the winner-take-all economic geography and spatial inequality of the global city system. At the microgeographic scale, however, we suggest that it may bring about a series of short-term and some longer-running social changes in the structure and morphology of cities, suburbs and metropolitan regions. The durability and extent of these changes will depend on the timeline and length of the pandemic.
Despite the widespread use of statistical techniques in quantitative research, methodological flaws and inadequate statistical reporting persist. The objective of this study is to evaluate the quality of statistical reporting and procedures in all original, quantitative articles published in the Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice and Research (CJDPR) from 2010 to 2019 using a checklist created by our research team. In total, 107 articles were independently evaluated by 2 raters. The hypothesis or objective(s) was clearly stated in 97.2% of the studies. Over half (51.4%) of the articles reported the study design and 57.9% adequately described the statistical techniques used. Only 21.2% of the studies that required a prestudy sample size calculation reported one. Of the 281 statistical tests conducted, 88.3% of them were correct. P values >0.05–0.10 were reported as “statistically significant” and/or a “trend” in 11.4% of studies. While this evaluation reveals both strengths and areas for improvement in the quality of statistical reporting in CJDPR, we encourage dietitians to pursue additional statistical training and/or seek the assistance of a statistician. Future research should consider validating this new checklist and using it to evaluate the statistical quality of studies published in other nutrition journals and disciplines.
Objectives
The effectiveness of public health interventions for mitigation of the COVID-19 pandemic depends on individual attitudes, compliance, and the level of support available to allow for compliance with these measures. The aim of this study was to describe attitudes and behaviours towards the Canadian COVID-19 public health response, and identify risk-modifying behaviours based on socio-demographic characteristics.
Methods
A cross-sectional online survey was administered in May 2020 to members of a paid panel representative of the Canadian population by age, gender, official language, and region of residence. A total of 4981 respondents provided responses for indicators of self-reported risk perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours towards COVID-19 public health measures.
Results
More than 90% of respondents reported confidence in the ability to comply with a variety of public health measures. However, only 51% reported preparedness for illness in terms of expectation to work if sick or access to paid sick days. Risk perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours varied by demographic variables. Men, younger age groups, and those in the paid workforce were less likely to consider public health measures to be effective, and had less confidence in their ability to comply. Approximately 80% of respondents reported that parents provided childcare and 52% reported that parents in the workforce provided childcare while schools were closed.
Conclusion
Policies to help address issues of public adherence include targeted messaging for men and younger age groups, social supports for those who need to self-isolate, changes in workplace policies to discourage presenteeism, and provincially co-ordinated masking and safe school policies.
The Covid-19 health crisis has led to a substantial increase in work done from home, which shifts economic activity across geographic space. We refer to this shift as a Zoomshock. The Zoomshock has implications for locally consumed services; much of the clientele of restaurants, coffee bars, pubs, hair stylists, health clubs, and the like located near workplaces is transferred to establishments located near where people live. In this paper we measure the Zoomshock at a very granular level for UK neighbourhoods. We establish three important empirical facts. First, the Zoomshock is large; many workers can work-from-home and live in a different neighbourhood than they work. Second, the Zoomshock is very heterogeneous; economic activity is decreasing in productive city centres and increasing residential suburbs. Third, the Zoomshock moves workers away from neighbourhoods with a large supply of locally consumed services to neighbourhoods where the supply of these services is relatively scarce. We discuss the implications for aggregate employment and local economic recovery following the Covid-19 health crisis.
Purpose: This paper aims to evaluate the early effects of the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and accompanying stay-at-home orders on restaurant demand in U.S. counties.
Design/methodology/approach: Two sets of daily restaurant demand data were collected for each U.S. county: foot traffic data and card transaction data. A two-way fixed-effects panel data model was used to estimate daily restaurant demand from February 1 to April 30, 2020.
Findings: Results show that a 1% increase in daily new COVID-19 cases led to a 0.0556% decrease in daily restaurant demand, while stay-at-home orders were collectively associated with a 3.30% drop in demand. The extent of these declines varied across counties; ethnicity, political ideology, eat-in habits, and restaurant type diversity were found to moderate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders.
Originality: This study represents a pioneering attempt to investigate the economic impact of COVID-19 on restaurant businesses.
Practical implications: These results characterize the regional restaurant industry's resilience to COVID-19 and identify particularly vulnerable areas that may require supplementary assistance to recover.
Restrictions on the use of public space and physical distancing have been key policy measures to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 and protect public health. At the time of writing, one half of the world’s population has been asked to stay home and avoid many public places. What will be the long term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on public space once the restrictions have been lifted? The depth and extent of transformation is unclear, especially as it relates to the future design, use and perceptions of public space. This article aims to highlight emerging questions at the interface of COVID-19 and city design. It is possible that the COVID-19 crisis may fundamentally change our relationship with public space. In the ensuing months and years, it will be critical to study and measure these changes in order to inform urban planning and design in a post-COVID world.
The aim of this paper is to identify the impact of local characteristics, such as the relative concentration of economic activities, on new business location decisions based on their sectors of economic activity. Spatial establishment-level, micro-data, pooled over time (2008–2014) was used for a typical Canadian nonmetropolitan area—the Lower St. Lawrence region—in the province of Quebec. The study was conducted on a radius of 1250 m to describe the local economic environment. Results of our employed multinomial logit model reveal that local characteristics influence the location decision of new individual establishments for most of the economic sectors. An econometric model is developed to simulate the probability that a new establishment (in a given economic sector) will be located at a given geographic location based on this location’s characteristics. Results confirm that the location decisions for new primary sector businesses are related to the presence of benefits arising from the existence of natural resources as well as those benefits associated with having large spaces (such as in the case of rural cities). New manufacturing sector businesses are mainly looking for a co-location (specialisation) pattern, with a slight preference to locate in small-sized cities. Finally, the location decisions of service sectors firms are strongly dependent on intermediate demand and on the distance to major markets.
Despite its nearly half-century decline in Western countries, manufacturing remains a vital part of local and regional economies. This importance is reflected in the economic development policies of cities, which are struggling to understand the current state of manufacturing and what they should do to either reinforce or replace it. Within the scholarship and practice, however, there is limited understanding of the policies that are adopted and whether they have potential to have a meaningful impact for the cities that adopt them. To address this gap, this research considers the way that manufacturing is contextualized and responded to within the local economic development planning documents of 47 (of 51) cities in Ontario, Canada. Through a comprehensive content analysis, it examines whether there are variations in the way cities approach manufacturing. Based on chi-square analysis, the findings show that there is considerable homogeneity in the way that cities of all sizes are approaching manufacturing, suggesting they are not adequately considering the local context in their policy, and rather focus on more general and previously adopted approaches. However, there is an emerging spatiality to the policy that was identified, which presents cities with a pathway forward to address manufacturing within their local economic development.
To better understand the location patterns of different types of restaurants across the United States, we investigate the relationship between neighborhood sociodemographic characteristics and restaurant location using a unique data set from 2013 covering 30,772 U.S. zip codes. The estimation results from negative binomial regression models confirm the significant impacts of various sociodemographic factors (e.g., population density, median age, median household income, average household size, educational attainment, gender distribution, housing tenure, neighborhood urbanization) on restaurant location. We also project future restaurant growth potential based on model estimates and projected changes in sociodemographic characteristics by 2020. The results are analyzed, and several metropolitan areas in Texas and Florida are identified as having high potential for growth. Lastly, implications are provided for restaurant real estate practitioners.
Commercial strips are common within metropolitan regions throughout the world and particularly within Canada and the United States. Planners have identified these linear clusters of commercial land use as a form of auto-oriented sprawl on the one hand, and as fertile ground for local independent businesses on the other. Despite the rapid churn of businesses in a number of gentrifying central cities, few studies have examined the distribution or cumulative impacts of commercial remodeling or its relationship to larger scale urban transformations. In this research, authors demonstrate methods used to identify spatial patterns in central city remodeling activity. Getis Ord Gi*, also known as hot spot analysis, is used to identify clusters of reinvestment activity associated with locally-owned restaurant and retail businesses. Associations with differences in urban form are observed, including clustering of independently owned restaurant and retail businesses along areas of commercial strips with smaller lots. Theories on the location of clusters in older buildings are also tested, with mixed results. In addition, authors use a Redevelopment Impact Index to capture the degree of external modification to commercial buildings and the nature of changes in building usage. Point density analysis is used to identify areas where commercial remodels are likely to add up to entertainment and leisure zones. The results of statistical tests show some association between proximity to the restaurant and retail clusters and new, mixed use development. Thus, authors illustrate methods of examining emerging landscapes of local restaurant and retail business and their relationship to larger scales of redevelopment. This methodology has applications in the study of incubation and retention of local businesses, land use planning and redevelopment along commercial strips, and gentrification studies.
This paper presents e-resilience as a framework for assessing the extent to which retail centres have spatially differentiated vulnerability to the impacts of online consumption. This extends the conceptual model of resilience as applied to retail, and is operationalised through a novel methodology that develops two indices that balance both supply and demand influences. We describe the creation of a composite e-resilience indicator, and then calculate it for retail centres across England. Our findings suggest a geographic polarising effect, with least vulnerable centres identified as large and more attractive or as smaller local destinations with a focus on convenience shopping. Mid-sized centres were typically shown to be the most exposed, and are argued as having a less clearly defined function in contemporary retail. Such findings have wide policy relevance to stakeholders of retail interested in the future configuration of sustainable and resilient provision.
Although diversification strategies in the US restaurant industry are actively implemented with strategic importance, research on the effects of diversification on firm value has been rare. This study investigates the individual effect of geographical diversification and brand diversification on firm value in the US restaurant industry context. Furthermore, to investigate the effects of diversification more comprehensively, this study examines whether or not brand diversification moderates the relationship between geographical diversification and the value of US restaurant firms. The study finds an insignificant effect of geographical diversification on firm performance, a negative effect of brand diversification on performance and a negative moderating effect of brand diversification on the geographical diversification–firm performance relationship.
Among one of the more significant societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions on people's movement accelerated, and in some cases outright caused, restaurant closures. By considering people's potential for both driving and walking to restaurants, this study aims to examine how restaurant closures are associated with neighborhood characteristics during the pandemic. To do so, we investigated changes in spatial accessibility to restaurants , identified hot spots of communities with large accessibility reductions, and explored relationships between the reductions and neighborhood characteristics in Leon County, Florida. Analysis showed that the area experiencing the largest reductions in spatial access to restaurants varied by transportation modes and the overall geographic patterns in accessibility reductions significantly differed. Communities with significant reductions in car-based accessibility were areas with a small percentage of the older and non-White populations and a longer distance to the central area. On the other hand, only being a shorter distance to the central area was more related to hot spots of changes in walking accessibility. Findings show geographic patterns of restaurant closures, which interacted with people's modes of transportation. As such, the closures most substantially affected people in more suburban areas who might rely on driving during the pandemic.
COVID-19 has had unprecedented impacts on urban life on a global scale, representing the worst pandemic in living memory. In this introduction to the first of two parts of a Special Issue on urban public health emergencies, we suggest that the COVID-19 outbreak, and associated attempts to manage the pandemic, reproduced and ultimately exacerbated the social and spatial divides that striate the contemporary city. Here, we draw on evidence from the papers in Part 1 of the Special Issue to summarise the uneven urban geographies of COVID-19 evident at the inter- and intra-urban level, emphasising the particular vulnerabilities and risks borne by racialised workers who found it difficult to practise social distancing in either their home or working life. Considering the interplay of environmental, social and biological factors that conspired to create hotspots of COVID-19 infection, and the way these are connected to the racialised capitalism that underpins contemporary urban development, this introduction suggests that reflection on public health emergencies in the city is not just essential from a policy perspective but helps enrich theoretical debates on the nature of contemporary urbanisation in its ‘planetary’ guise.
In this paper, we use intersectionality-based policy analysis (IBPA) to examine how COVID-19 income support policies enacted in Ontario, Canada, affected people living with poverty. We find that the privileging of formal labor market attachment in eligibility requirements systemically excluded constituencies most likely to be living with poverty. More broadly, these exclusions represent a retrenchment of neoliberal logics in social policy, and the rejection of universal social welfare programs. In conclusion, we suggest that the experiences of people living with poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic further highlight the need for comprehensive social welfare programs, including a universal basic income.
This paper analyzes restaurant closure patterns during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using establishment-level data from Yelp and SafeGraph, I describe restaurant and location characteristics related to the closure decisions. Lower-rated restaurants and restaurants located closer to the city center were more likely to close in 2020.
Will COVID-19 end the urban renaissance that many cities have experienced since the 1980s? This essay selectively reviews the copious literature that now exists on the long-term impact of natural disasters. At this point, the long-run resilience of cities to many forms of physical destruction, including bombing, earthquakes and fires, has been well-documented. The destruction of human capital may leave a longer imprint, but cities have persisted through many plagues over the past millennia. By contrast, economic and political shocks, including deindustrialisation or the loss of capital city status, can enormously harm an urban area. These facts suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic will only significantly alter urban fortunes if it is accompanied by a major economic shift, such as widespread adoption of remote work, or political shifts that could lead businesses and the wealthy to leave urban areas. The combination of an increased ability to relocate with increased local redistribution or deterioration of local amenity levels, or both, could recreate some of the key attributes of the urban crisis of the 1970s.
Covid-19 interventions are greatly affecting patterns of human mobility. Changes in mobility during Covid-19 have differed across socio-economic gradients during the first wave. We use fine-scale network mobility data in Ontario, Canada to study the association between three different mobility measures and four socio-economic indicators throughout the first and second wave of Covid-19 (January to December 2020). We find strong associations between mobility and the socio-economic indicators and that relationships between mobility and other socio-economic indicators vary over time. We further demonstrate that understanding how mobility has changed in response to Covid-19 varies considerably depending on how mobility is measured. Our findings have important implications for understanding how mobility data should be used to study interventions across space and time. Our results support that Covid-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions have resulted in geographically disparate responses to mobility and quantifying mobility changes at fine geographical scales is crucial to understanding the impacts of Covid-19.
Restaurants are basic urban amenities. With the dynamic evolution of cities, restaurants rise and fall: new restaurants may open (birth), and existing restaurants may close (death). Analyzing the rise and fall of restaurants may assist urban dynamics exploration and urban policy assessment. Location is crucial for restaurant success. Roles of locational factors in restaurants' rise and fall were empirically explored in this case study of Beijing based on point of interest (POI) data, a more available and universal data source than conventional statistics used by previous studies. We characterized restaurant birth and death through matching POI data across years, examined their spatial patterns, and regressed restaurant distribution, birth, and death against various locational factors with count regression models. The rise and fall of restaurants revealed the impact of policies relieving Beijing of functions non-essential to its role as China's capital. Regressions suggested four roles of locational factors: 1) Promoting factors, including accessibility, commercial land use, and building capacity; 2) Hindering factors, namely, existing restaurant density; 3) Stabilizing factors, i.e. house price; and 4) Irrelevant factors, including population and residential and institutional land use. Our findings may provide practical advice for restaurant operators and urban policy makers.
As COVID-19 escalated globally in 2020, mandated suspension of dine-in services was instilled to control virus transmission. Restaurants lost billions of dollars, millions experienced severe employment changes, and numerous small restaurants closed. For those remaining in business, converting to online food ordering was essential. Unique to the food ordering setting, this study extended the Stimulus-Organism-Response model to predict the purchase intentions of participants in an online food ordering context. Using structural equation modeling, this study discovered the indirect effects of the menu’s visual appeal and informativeness, and the perception of COVID-19 risks on consumer purchase intentions. This causal relationship was significantly mediated by consumers’ desire for food and their perceived convenience of online food ordering. Through providing theoretical and managerial implications for how to identify appropriate products, utilize content marketing effectively, and attract new customers, this study could assist restaurants in adapting to remaining competitive, even post COVID-19.
The public realm is a well-recognized contributor to positive health and wellbeing. Public parks and recreational spaces are now some of the main outlets for people to get outdoors, however COVID-19 has created challenges in these spaces. We classify local government responses around maintaining physical distancing in the public realm using a preliminary conceptual map of theories and actions to identify variations in these approaches around the globe. This pilot classification approach provides a useful lens to examine pandemic responses, with future work building upon this map to potentially inform how cities may react to other complex planetary health issues.
en COVID‐19 has imposed a series of unique challenges on the food retail and food service sectors in Canada. Almost overnight, the roughly 30% of the food dollar that Canadians have been spending on food away from home has shifted to retail.
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Résumé
fr COVID‐19 a imposé une série de défis uniques aux secteurs de la vente au détail et des services alimentaires au Canada. Presque du jour au lendemain, les quelque 30% de l'argent consacré à l'achat de nourriture hors foyer par les Canadiens ont été transférés aux achats en épiceries.
This paper provides an early assessment of the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for food supply chains and supply chain resilience. The effects of demand-side shocks on food supply chains are discussed, including consumer panic buying behaviors with respect to key items, and the sudden change in consumption patterns away from the food service sector to meals prepared and consumed at home. Potential supply-side disruptions to food supply chains are assessed, including labor shortages, disruptions to transportation networks, and “thickening” of the Canada–U.S. border with respect to the movement of goods. Finally, the paper considers whether the COVID-19 pandemic will have longer-lasting effects on the nature of food supply chains, including the growth of the online grocery delivery sector, and the extent to which consumers will prioritize “local” food supply chains.
There is significant evidence that restrictions on residential land use reduce housing supply, increase house prices, and limit inflows of low‐income households. Local decision‐makers often argue that their efforts are merely attempts to preserve local amenities. We provide evidence that there is some truth to this claim: that residents of cities with more restrictions on land use appear to have access to higher‐quality and more‐diverse restaurants. In the process we develop measures of restaurant quality based on organically generated data that, while strongly correlated with expert assessments, are more easily calculated at high frequencies and levels of geographic granularity.
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This study tested whether geographic clustering differs by restaurant segment due to the differences in consumers’ hedonic and utilitarian values by using Ripley's K function and a Tobit model. This study found that higher priced restaurant segments have stronger clusters than lower priced restaurants, which implies that restaurants that focus on hedonic values tend to cluster more than utilitarian focused restaurants. However, the results differ depending on whether or not restaurants are located within a central business district (CBD). For example, quick service restaurants have stronger clusters than casual restaurants outside CBDs. Practical applications may apply to new restaurants that are attempting to open. Up-scale restaurants have the advantage of reducing research costs by locating near similar restaurants. Moreover, casual restaurants do benefit by clustering near existing ones under the condition that demand is not severely hurt by competition, while quick service restaurants benefit by diffusing from each other.
Recent studies show that, within countries, manufacturing labor productivity growth has outstripped aggregate labor productivity growth, putting significant downwards pressure on national manufacturing employment shares. We compile the first (nearly) global database of national manufacturing employment and output levels over time, and use it to document two facts seemingly at odds with these results: (1) the manufacturing sector’s share of global employment did not fall between 1970 and 2010; and (2) manufacturing and aggregate labor productivity at the global level grew at similar rates. We show that these trends occurred because rapid within-country manufacturing productivity growth was counterbalanced by a shift of manufacturing jobs towards lower productivity economies.
A guide to using S environments to perform statistical analyses providing both an introduction to the use of S and a course in modern statistical methods. The emphasis is on presenting practical problems and full analyses of real data sets.
Urban neighbourhoods are defined as much by their commercial character as their residential; retail services not only provide material needs for those living nearby, but less-tangible social and cultural capital as well. It is reasonable to expect, then, that excessive churn in these businesses can threaten the stability of a neighbourhood. Using a longitudinal data set on mixed-use neighbourhoods in New York City, we test whether or not neighbourhoods of varying circumstances and characteristics experience different degrees and types of retail turnover. Results suggest that there are meaningful differences in retail turnover across neighbourhoods. Retail turnover is directly associated with the type of business activity, commercial infrastructure and the neighbourhood’s consumer profile. However, when all three sets of factors are considered simultaneously in a regression analysis, consumer-related characteristics explain turnover more than those related to the local commercial environment. Specifically, businesses that provide necessity and more frequently consumed goods/services are more stable and chain establishments are more likely to venture into markets with some housing price discounts, growth potential and possibly less organised opposition. Neighbourhoods with less (and more heterogeneous) general retail (as opposed to food service) concentration, as well as bigger businesses, are more stable. More importantly, bigger households and higher shares of white residents are most strongly associated with less retail churn, and population growth is the strongest predictor of more turnover.
Martin R., Sunley P., Gardiner B. and Tyler P. How regions react to recessions: resilience and the role of economic structure, Regional Studies. This paper examines how employment in the major UK regions has reacted to the four major recessions of the last 40 years, namely 1974–76, 1979–83, 1990–93 and 2008–10. The notions of resistance and recoverability are used to examine these reactions. The analysis reveals both continuities and significant changes in the regional impact of recession from one economic cycle to the next. Further, while economic structure is found to have exerted some influence on the resistance and recoverability of certain regions, in general ‘region-specific’ or ‘competitiveness’ effects appear to have played an equally, if not more, significant role.
The economies of modern cities are dependent on an advanced retail system; so too are the people who inhabit them. The origin and evolution of retailing in London, Canada, was studied using a historical geographic information system (GIS) to document the relationship between a city and its retail sector. Visualization and spatial-statistical techniques afforded by the historical GIS were implemented to study change over time. The locations of retailers and the types of the goods they sold were examined for four periods in the city’s early history: 1844, 1863, 1881, and 1916. The distances traveled to shop were also calculated for a variety of goods. The results indicate that the retail system was ingrained in the development of the city, showing marked locational patterns and a high degree of rationality in the shopkeepers' business strategies. Mapping the retail landscape in each era using historical GIS allowed for the examination of the relationship between retail and residential development in the growing city. While the downtown area remained the primary retail district for the city, considerable retail expansion also occurred at the urban periphery during this early stage of the city's development.
The past two decades in Canada have witnessed significant economic restructuring and public policy innovation. While most research concentrates on federal recovery plans and provincial adjustment strategies, this article makes the case for studying actors and places on the restructuring front lines. Offering an ideational analysis of change dynamics in London, Ontario, a mid-sized manufacturing city, the article reveals a pattern of incremental policy adjustment even as bold ideas contesting the status quo were brought forward. Arguing that particular institutional-political settings operative at different governance scales shape the policy influence of ideas, the article situates the London experience in broader theoretical debates about institutional innovation. At the national level, ideas often supply "weapons of mass persuasion" for political parties seeking electoral breakthroughs. At the local level, ideas serve a different purpose-providing focal points for problem-solving networks that over time and across issues may bring about significant change.
Scholars interested in applying the two dominant theories of American urban political economy to the politics of Canadian cities are likely to be disappointed. As this study of the politics of downtown redevelopment in London, Ontario, illustrates, the theories offered by Paul Peterson and Clarence Stone have limited applicability to Canadian urban politics. The decisions made by London city council concerning the location of theatres in the city, the creation of an economic development corporation, and the construction of an arena illuminate Peterson's general misunderstanding of the source of local political conflict. The fact that the politics of downtown redevelopment in London did not give rise to a variant of Stone's urban regimes should remind scholars of the substantive differences between the politics of Canadian and American urban governments, and the challenges they raise for cross-national theoretical development. © 2003 by the Institute of Urban Studies All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
Many descriptions of the structure of retailing at both the regional and urban scale refer to concepts which have originally been formulated in connection with settlement and general land-use studies. This is epitomized in the extension of central place theory, and particularly the notion of the hierarchy, to distinguish structural size-orders in the relative importance of shopping centres. In addition, there is a strong similarity in the nature of those classifications which have been made about types of settlements, general land-use forms, and different retail configurations. While distinct similarities may be found in the methods of these studies, however, in certain important respects parallel lines of enquiry that might have been expected have not been undertaken. There has been little attempt, for example, to relate the locational characteristics of shopping centres to theoretical postulates about urban land-use patterns. This paper reviews the extent to which analogies have been drawn, and may subsequently be developed, between various conceptual models of general human occupance and tertiary activity.