Plot morphology and retail patterns: a morphological assessment of peripheral retail clusters

Retail clusters represent an important spatial expression of urban vitality, yet how urban form relates to retail patterns remains underexplored, particularly at the plot scale where compositional and configurational attributes intersect. This research examines how plot-level structural and network-based contextual attributes are associated with retail density, agglomeration, and diversity in peripheral areas, and whether they correspond with retail cluster form. The Morphological Assessment Framework (MAF) weights plot at- tributes by their spatially varying associations with each retail metric, estimated through multiscale geographically weighted regression. Using municipal plot data and retail point-of-interest data, 19 peripheral clusters (5064 plots) were selected from DBSCAN-identified clusters (120, 200, and 216 m) in Ankara, Helsinki, and Vilnius. Retail diversity is positively associated with the configurational character of plots in all cities (0.13–0.60), and retail density with their compositional character, most strongly in Helsinki (0.46). The MAF indicates that these associations are configuration-led in Ankara, composition-led in Helsinki, and intermediate in Vilnius, while cluster form varies between cities rather than with plot morphology. As an analytical framework, the MAF identifies which morphological dimension is most closely associated with retail vitality in each of the three peripheral contexts, rather than assuming uniform effects.