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Owners of shopping centres in Western Europe are seeking to re-position their properties as the 'Third Place' between the home and the workplace where people no longer visit purely to shop but instead to shop when they are out. Shopping centres are providing 'accessible social surroundings' for people to interact and socialise, Jones Lang LaSalle has said in its latest scan of retail trends.

James Dolphin, head of European retail agency at JLL, said European consumers can choose where to shop, relax and interact. 'With these choices comes the need for developers to offer an environment that encourages consumers to shop and more importantly a place which is more appealing than competing shopping experiences, including the internet. Creating and evolving a unique identity is central to this strategy and will ensure that one size will never fit all, even if the tenant line-ups look increasingly similar,' he said.

The report entitled European Shopping Centres: One Size Fits All? examines the shopping centre development boom in Europe and asks if there is a move towards a generation of cloned European shopping centres. The key findings were that hypermarkets anchored 75% of all major new schemes in 2007-2008. Fashion anchors becoming more popular as shopping centre owners look to maximise their rental income and footfall.

The same fashion anchors are increasingly found across Europe, with H&M for example, taking major units in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and the UK last year. JLL cautioned that retail provision is becoming formulaic, reflecting the growing internationalisation of the retail sector and a desire to replicate a 'winning' formula. Fashion retailers took about half of the units in each of the shopping centres opened last year with cross border retailers dominating.

The leisure mix in shopping centres across Europe is becoming 'increasingly familiar', the property adviser said. The small number of exceptions include an aquarium in Forum Istanbul in Turkey and plans to mix a Grand Prix motor racing circuit with retail in Pescara, Italy.

Cinemas remain the most popular leisure anchor in European shopping centres, being added to 85% of new schemes. But JLL said cinema operators are looking at ways to re-fresh their offer to the public by for example the introduction of 3D digital screens and VIP suites.

Neville Moss, director of European retail research at Jones Lang LaSalle said not all aspects of shopping centre development in Europe are quite so formulaic. 'There is a big locational difference between east and west Europe, driven by the difficulty in accessing town centre sites in eastern Europe and a move towards town centre regeneration projects and 'town centre first' planning policies in western Europe. Over 60% of major new schemes in western Europe were located in town centres, compared with just 28% in the East.'