Shopping centre clusters: Competition or synergies? The case of the region of murcia (Spain)

Abstract Since their emergence in the mid 1950s, the role of shopping centres has evolved and they have now become key articulating elements of urban and metropolitan peripheral areas. In Spain, the opening of new out-of-town shopping centres intensified after the year 2000, thanks to an increased area dedicated to new leisure-related uses and activities. This process has been particularly prevalent in the regions in the south-east of Spain such as Alicante-Elche, Murcia and Valencia which are supported by high capacity regional and national road networks. In the case of Murcia, of its ten shopping centres, three of them, Thader, IKEA and Nueva Condomina, are very close to one another, and two of them - Thader and IKEA - are just 650 m apart. The objective of this study is to analyse whether this proximity between shopping centres generates synergies among them based on agglomeration economies or, on the contrary, whether it gives rise to competition between the different centres. For the purpose of this study, these highly specialised shopping centres have been considered and a field study has been conducted based on the administration of surveys among the customers of these shopping centres. The results show that the synergies with those shopping centres which have a diverse retail mix seem to be linked to those users who have a longer journey time and visit these shopping centres more frequently. On the other hand, in the case of non-regular or sporadic customers of these large, highly specialised shopping centres, we can observe direct competition with the rest of the shopping centres, revealing an absence of agglomeration economies.