Gambling: A Story of Remarkable Stability in Fast-Changing High Streets.

High streets, the main commercial streets in towns and cities, have undergone significant transformations due to the evolving urban retail landscape. Despite these changes, this study demonstrates that the presence of gambling venues in Great Britain remained remarkably stable between 2014 and 2023....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Annals of the American Association of Geographers Vol. 115; no. 7; pp. 1577 - 1596
Main Authors: Li, Luning, Tranos, Emmanouil
Format: Article
Published: Taylor & Francis Ltd 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: 2025
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      pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd
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        187565184
        10.1080/24694452.2025.2496698
      ppf: 1577
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      tig:
        atl: Gambling: A Story of Remarkable Stability in Fast-Changing High Streets.
      aug:
        au:
          Li, Luning
          Tranos, Emmanouil
        affil:
          School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, UK
          Division of Urban Studies and Social Policy, University of Glasgow, UK
          Urban Big Data Centre, University of Glasgow, UK
      su:
        Cities & towns
        Random forest algorithms
        Autoregressive models
        Gambling
        Panel analysis
      sug:
        subj:
          Cities & towns
          Other Gambling Industries
          Random forest algorithms
          Autoregressive models
          Gambling
          Panel analysis
      ab: High streets, the main commercial streets in towns and cities, have undergone significant transformations due to the evolving urban retail landscape. Despite these changes, this study demonstrates that the presence of gambling venues in Great Britain remained remarkably stable between 2014 and 2023. Using points of interest data, we constructed a panel data set of gambling shops on high streets. Employing simple autoregressive models estimated with random forests, we predicted annual gambling frequencies during 2015 to 2023 using 2014 frequencies as the sole predictor. Our results show a predictive accuracy of 91.8 percent by 2019, which remained robust at 86.2 percent in 2023, even after the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This highlights the notable stability in the frequency of gambling shops on high streets. Additionally, we developed a two-tiered analytical framework that confirmed this stability across different types of local authorities and high streets. Given the geographically bounded negative externalities of gambling, these findings provide a comprehensive understanding of the evolving spatial footprint of gambling shops. They also offer broader insights into how retail environment characteristics influence the resilience of leisure businesses in diverse urban contexts, contributing to ongoing discussions on high street revitalization.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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