A Study Of The Spatial Layout Of The Large Retail Stores In Dalian City

With the increasing improvement in the urbanization and people’s income in the past twenty years and the further opening up of the business after China’s entry into WTO, the commercial network constructions are developing rapidly in China. Thus, the retail industry has become one of the industries which opens up at the highest degree and develops very rapidly. In the meantime, it is also in a fierce competition all over the country. With the further improvement of China’s market economy and the increasingly intense competition in the retail sector, large retail stores, as an important part of promoting retail industry development, has played a pivotal role in the daily life of residents as well as the layout of the city. Therefore, to study the layout of large retail stores has some practical significance.Located in a key position in the Bohai circle area, with the east near the Yellow Sea and the west near Bohai, and as an opening door gate to the world, Dalian City has its unique advantage to develop its business. In2010, the total retail sales of consumer goods amounted to RMB163.98billion. At present, foreign retailers Carrefour, Wal-Mart, Metro, Parkson have stationed in Dalian, in fierce competition with some big local business groups, such as Dalian New Mart, Friendship Mart and etc. Thus, the market structure has changed enormously in Dalian and the investors have become more diversified. However, the spatial layout of Commercial Facilities mainly driven by market forces in Dalian City is not reasonable enough with a high degree of agglomeration, a high commercial center primacy ratio and serious homogeneity, which causes the vicious competition, the decline in the overall efficiency and the city "external diseconomies". Therefore, there is an urgent need to study the spatial layout of commercial facilities especially that of large retail stores, in order to strengthen the macro-control on the spatial layout of them.The emergence of GIS technology since the1960s, especially the application of GIS in the analysis of commercial space in cities, has opened up a new road with a combination of qualitative and quantitative research and has a great practical value. By a close study of the well-known literature and cases at home and abroad, combined with its own characteristics to study the retail industry in Dalian City, with 44large retail stores in Dalian City of more than5,000square meters’ business area as the study objects and the theories knowledge of integrating the GIS technology into the commercial space layout, this paper gives a study of the space layout of the large retail stores in Dalian City. It analyzes the spatial and temporal evolution of the large retail stores in Dalian City in the past20years based on characteristics of the commercial spatial layout today in Dalian City. By selecting some main factors of the commercial facilities layout, namely consumption, population distribution, traffic situation and urban space, the application of the GIS technology in the analysis and combining with factors of consumption, the Dalian urban planning and construction and policies, this paper gives a further discussion on the future development and the spatial layout of the large retail stores in Dalian City and conceives the way in the spatial layout of large retail stores in Dalian City.