Why Europe’s First Capital of Small Retail treats shops as public infrastructure

Barcelona was just named Europe's first Capital of Small Retail, crowning years of deliberate policy work.

The city's small retail sector accounts for 13.2% of GDP and supports more than 152,000 jobs, with over 90% of ground-floor commercial premises occupied. But what earned Barcelona the designation isn't the size of its retail ecosystem so much as the depth of its strategy. The city runs over 40 interlocking initiatives spanning sustainability, digitalization, mobility and entrepreneurship.

Among the most distinctive is Amunt Persianes ("Raise the Shutters"), through which the city council has invested EUR 17 million in purchasing empty ground-floor premises and offering them to local entrepreneurs at 30-50% below market rent. Rather than waiting for market forces to fill vacant storefronts, Barcelona is treating street-level retail space as public infrastructure. Italy's Silandro and Portugal's Caldas da Rainha also earned the EU-backed title, in the small and mid-sized city categories, respectively.

TREND BITE
The European Capitals of Small Retail initiative formalizes a new urban strategy: treating small retail as a public good. For decades, small shops have been framed as casualties of progress: charming but doomed by e-commerce and big-box efficiency. Barcelona's approach flips that script, treating independent retail as essential civic infrastructure — a generator of jobs, social cohesion and neighborhood identity that justifies active municipal investment.

The playbook is practical: combine data-driven policymaking with direct intervention, embed sustainability into existing retail networks rather than bolting it on, and build public-private coalitions broad enough to survive political cycles. For businesses watching the slow hollowing-out of commercial streets in their own cities, the takeaway is that revitalization doesn't require a savior brand or a market upswing; it requires treating every shuttered storefront as a design problem with a policy solution.