A third revolution in retail? The Dutch approach to leisure and urban entertainment

The aim of this paper is to develop a clear framework of the relationships between real estate, leisure, urban entertainment and retail, drawing on historical and recent experience in the Netherlands. The relationships between leisure and urban entertainment are of great interest to the retail and real estate sectors – both inside and outside the Netherlands – and have the potential to generate productivity for the former and profitability for the latter. Yet opinion and thinking on the subject are highly fragmented and there are both optimism and uncertainty about its future prospects. This paper provides a description of those contending views and puts forward the proposition that leisure and urban entertainment could signal a third revolution in the retail sector.