Rhythm of urban retail landscapes: Shopping hours and the urban chronotopes

Abstract

Daily rhythmical patterns in the city are investigated in depth in this paper. The city is conceptualised here as a cyclical process and described by a sequence of relatively stable spatial-temporal stages. The concept of a chronotope is incorporated in the analysis of retail opening hours in the middle-sized city of Brno (Czech Republic), in order to identify distinct fusions of specific times and specific retail places and to examine their position within the daily rhythms of the city. There are distinct time-space retail configurations (chronotopes), which play crucial roles in the social negotiation and imagination of basic temporal categories, such as early morning, late morning, lunchtime, afternoon, evening, as being taken-for-granted in the urban context. More generally, the paper offers an example of the ways in which the specific daily rhythms of the city are produced and structured.