A step towards Digital High Streets
Isobel Vernon-Avery
During Stage One of the Towns Fund, our Digital and Innovation topic experts have had several conversations with towns across England. A question that emerged during these conversations was how digital can support town centre and High Street recovery and re-imagination. In the previous blog, The Future of Digital High Streets, Arup’s digital blueprint was presented as a framework through which to plan, implement and co-create digital High Streets and town centre services.
As Towns embark on Stage Two, there are several projects focusing on High Street connectivity infrastructure, connected services, data collection and analysis, and digital retail. This blog discusses High Street and town centre trends and shares examples of deployed digital High Street interventions. Through these, the Digital High Street emerges as a vibrant space offering new activities, new services, new insights and new infrastructure, shaped closely around the needs of residents and local businesses.
“High Streets are vital public places [that] boost wellbeing and benefit many different communities”
The decline of the High Street in past decades has been well documented. I imagine all who read this, will have at some point seen rows of boarded-up shops and witnessed High Street struggles. In the past year, as our response to the pandemic has reshaped the patterns of our lives and accelerated the rise of online retail, High Streets have faced further challenges. For many, online shopping and services are now daily practice and as a result, the role of the High Street has to change. As pandemic restrictions start to lift, there is an opportunity and a necessity for the High Street to be re-imagined.
Digital will be fundamental to this re-imagination. Digital and data enable far greater understanding of what people really want from their town centres, allowing these to be responsive, and citizen driven. And as technology develops, the High Street space will also be re-crafted. For example, shared or autonomous vehicles could reduce car numbers by 25%. Space previously designated for parking might become free for other uses such as play areas, pop-up gardens and urban farms. The physical and digital re-imagination of the High Street can be integrated with wider visions for enhanced local engagement, innovation, or collaboration, to name but a few.
As the digital High Street emerges, it is important this is based on an understanding of what the High Street is needed for and for whom it is created. Building on themes that have emerged in the past year, such as localism, community, trust and innovation, the Digital High Street could become a place that is co-created continuously. A focus on approaches that enable flexibility, learning and change could support High Street resilience as they adapt to changing circumstances.
Examples of different digital High Street interventions are provided below. If you would like to discuss the contents of this blog, you can request a one to one session with our Innovation & Digital experts through our Expert Drop-in Hour service.
Case Examples
There are many ways that digital High Street is being developed. Building on the Digital Blueprint, the following examples show deployed digital High Street interventions in towns and cities.
Promoting innovation and engagement
The High Street can be a place where people test, trial, and innovate together.
Market Street Prototyping Festival in San Francisco, USA, connected designers, artists and makers with neighbourhoods and encouraged them to develop and test ideas to re-imagine pavement space. The vision of this event was to co-create public spaces with the public and to foster a sense of civic ownership.
Reveal was an active reality project in Kings Lynn, UK, that utilised AR and lighting projections to create a series of interactive experiences across the town. Markers were placed around the town, people scanned these with their phones, and this provided them with parts of a code to deliver part of a story. Linked to this were several education programmes that worked with local schools to develop coding skills. These activities were hosted in a vacant shop space along the High Street.
New end user services
Digitally enabled end-user services can support different High Street activities. Click and collect collaborations between online and High Street stores can drive High Street footfall. Use of vacant retail units or rent adjustments could support a wider range of activities on the High Street.
NearSt supports smaller retailers by linking their products to local customers. A customer might search on google for a product, and NearSt will show where this is locally. It then pops up with Google maps to direct that customer to the store. Shopappy.com is an online local community marketplace. Shops can share their goods and services. It connects local people to local businesses online, allowing people to save their shopping lists online before heading out.
Hackney, UK, has developed an engagement strategy to understand how young people use the physical and digital public realms. The council is also developing a better market layout and installing contactless card payment machines for market traders. This is complimented with training to ensure traders have the skills needed to digitally future proof their operations, with free Wi-Fi at key locations across the town centre.
NavSta is a mobile wayfinding system that helps people with situational impairments. It aims to remove anxiety of travelling to new places by providing a richer description of place, such as detailed images of pathways in train stations.
Targeted promotions and information
Phones, sensors, and card readers are all devices that provide a bridge between the physical and digital. They can provide access points to the internet so that digital exclusion on the High Street is limited. Devices can also act as data collection points.
Proximity triggers detect customers as they approach targeted promotions, advertisements, or totems. In Manchester, beacons attached to buildings send news updates directly to mobile phones as part of a Google-funded trial.
A digital town crier was installed as a pop-up in Porth Teigr. The town crier would ‘speak’ when people got to a certain distance from it to share deals in local shops.
Using data to improve the High Street
Councils could collect anonymised data through public Wi-Fi networks. Working with communities, data trusts and management for the High Street can be developed. Data can be used to address challenges in a focused manner.
Movement Strategies provided data-based insights for Bath's Business Improvement District. Spend data and movement insights are analysed through a dashboard portal. It will help retailers measure business performance and inform decision making.
Open Data Bristol is a data-sharing platform that offers data management, data sharing across public and private sectors, and the opportunity to innovate and foster community engagement. The prototype dashboard provides a shared action plan across multiple sectors.
Stratford High Street has explored measures and resources required to transform the vehicle-dominated thoroughfare into a healthy environment that supports the community. Data has been integral to delivering a living lab and supporting flexible, incremental design.
The High Street providing digital assets and infrastructure
Wi-Fi as an amenity for all enables everyone to interact with the digital High Street and access new connected services. The digital High Street will need to ensure it is accessible to all. Ducting and fibre is the foundation for the digital High Street. It provides the infrastructure that enables digital technologies and connected services to function. Other assets such as lights create the physical environment of the High Street.
This year, Westminster has deployed superfast public Wi-Fi on six market streets to help local traders and visitors connect online and in real life.
Wetherby have a free public Wi-Fi offer on their High Street. The High Street has benefitted from this as it enabled greater click and collect options from small independent shops during the pandemic. This trend is likely to continue.
Smart benches have provided High Streets such as Lewisham with places where people can connect the internet, charge devices and access information. In a collaboration with Cancer Research, branding was placed on the bench in addition to the facility of making a contactless donation payment to the charity.
To create a connection between the passageway of Garden at 120 and the roof garden, a 180 square metre LED roof installation was developed. Cameras were installed on the roof garden to stream the garden canopy.
