The Competitiveness And Layout Of Commercial Pedestrian Streets’ Business Forms Based On IEW And Topsis Methods

Commercial pedestrian streets are the places where citizens often go shopping, enjoy leisure and take entertainment, as well as the tourists usually enjoy sightseeing, shopping and etc. The structure adjustment, layout’s rationality and competitiveness improvement of their business forms have much to do with the planning, construction, investment and promotion of the streets as well as the development of the tourism industry chain. Previously these streets developed extremely fast in urban China. This study selects three famous commercial pedestrian streets in Hangzhou and Chengdu as comparative cases, Hefang Street and Southern Song Imperial Street in Hangzhou, and Kuanzhai Valley in Chengdu, all of which are designed and built in different eras. With an empirical method and TOPSIS by Information Entropy Weight (IEW), the research establishes an evaluation index system based on some fundamental theories of retailings and urban tourism (such as Retailing Lifecycle Theory, Weibull Fuction Model, Huff Model and RBD Theory), to calculate the competitiveness of each business form and analyze its layout on these streets. Moreover, some suggestions for the management of commercial pedestrian streets’ business forms are provided base on the research findings.The research has drawn the conclusions that:(1) There are four most competitive business forms in all these three streets, and they are clothing, catering crafts and groceries. Regarding Hefang Street, domestic crafts without brands, domestic-brand clothing and groceries are the top three business forms in competitiveness, while domestic-brand catering, oversea-brand catering and domestic-brand clothing rank top three in Southern Song Imperial Street. As for Kuanzhai Valley, bars, catering and Cafes become the most competitive business forms.(2) It is the crafts that display the most prominent difference in competitiveness rankings between these three streets:In Hefang Street, no matter domestic or oversea brands, crafts are highly competitive, however, they are less competitive in Hangzhou Southern Song Imperial Street and Kuanzhai Valley. On contrast, catering and clothing illustrate the least difference in competitiveness rankings, and they always strong performance on the list.(3) General stores rank at the bottom of the competitiveness in all these three streets.(4) Additionally, the coordination and consistency between the business forms’layouts and their competitiveness have been discovered as well, and the relationship between the competitiveness and the agglomeration as well as the discrete of business forms has also been discussed.