The City and Complexity – Life, Design and Commerce in the Built Environment • Paper / Proposal Title: Resilience of the High Street and its public space • Author(s) Name: Dorota Celinska-Janowicz • University or Company Affiliation: University of Oxford, Said Business School University of Warsaw, Centre for European Regional and Local Studies (EUROREG) • Abstract (300 words): For centuries urban retail and services have played a pivotal role in creating city centre’s vitality and viability, determining not only its economic development, but also creating spaces for social interaction, local community building, or political manifestation (Sennet, 1992). In the last few decades this role of retail and services has been heavily transformed, first by the proliferation of new large-scale shopping formats, and recently by the emergence and rapid expansion of e-commerce. The High Street (City Centre) is under pressure from two sides: in economic terms competition of e-commerce and shops in managed shopping centres affects retailers, especially of some types, causing increasing vacancy rates and shopping environment decline, while managed shopping centres additionally compete with shopping streets in terms of attractive shopping environment, designed in order to create a convenient retail public space aimed at increasing profits rather than providing valuable and inclusive communal environment. The results of this competitive impact depends on the High Street’s resilience. It can be defined as a dynamic and evolutionary process of adaptation to changes, crises or shocks without failing to perform hitherto functions in a sustainable way. For traditional urban retail and service area (High Street) particularly relevant in this respect is its public space that can be one of the key factors of competitive advantage over e-commerce and managed shopping centres. The aim of this paper is to present the role that public spaces play in creating this advantage on the example of Oxford primary shopping area. The theoretical framework of the research is the resilience concept, adapted to the spatial and retail/service context. In this perspective City Centre is understood as a complex adaptive system thus interconnected and self-organising structure, characterised by non-linear dynamics, complex feedbacks and self-reinforcing interactions, within which macroscale structures emerge spontaneously out of microscale behaviours. • Author(s) Biography (200 words each): Dorota Celinska-Janowicz, Ph.D. in earth sciences (University of Warsaw), specialty human geography. Dorota graduated geography and spatial economy at the University of Warsaw. She was awarded post-doc scholarships at the University of Vienna and the Free University of Berlin as well as the Eugeniusz Romer Prize of the Committee on Geographical Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences for the best Ph.D. theses in socio-economic geography. Since 2010 She has been working at EUROREG (Centre for European Regional and Local Studies, University of Warsaw), when she also became an Executive Editor of scientific quarterly “Regional and Local Studies”. Since September 2016 she has been a Counsellor for Students' Affairs. She has participated in several ESPON projects (in three as the project manager) and research projects funded by the Polish National Science Centre, as well as evaluation studies and projects on regional and local development commissioned by the Ministry of Regional Development, the National Centre for Research and Development, and the Warsaw City Hall. In 2019-2020 she is an academic visitor at the University of Oxford, Saïd Business School, under the Bekker Programme post-doc scholarship awarded by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange. .