Disciplinary Hybrids: Retail Landscapes of the Post-Human City

What does the rise of automated retail mean for our future? Architect Clare Lyster, who is Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, looks at its various emerging forms: cashierless grocery stores, low‐cost solar‐powered mobile retail units, self‐driving food delivery vehicles, walls of QR codes in public places … Rather than signalling a dystopian future of diminishing human interaction, she sees them as being in the lineage of work by visionary architects and urbanists from the 1960s such as Yona Friedman and Cedric Price, with the potential to increase urban equitability and empower remote communities.