City centres are undergoing change. Traditional usage patterns are disappearing, and new hybrid formats are emerging – places where work, consumption, culture, health and social interaction intertwine. This is changing not only the requirements for retail space, but also the self-image of design: interior architecture is increasingly becoming a mediating discipline between usage, quality of stay and social relevance.

Against this backdrop, bki will be part of the ‘Retail+’ lecture programme organised by AIT-Dialog at EuroShop 2026 in Düsseldorf. On 25 February 2026, between 2:00 and 5:00 p.m., Susanne Brandherm, co-founder of brandherm + krumrey interior architecture, will join Peter Ippolito (Ippolito Fleitz Group, Stuttgart) and Saša Stanojcic (Designliga, Munich) will discuss how the field of planning and design is being redefined in the course of the transformation of retail and cities.

In her lecture, Urban Lab: Networked Use for Living Spaces, Susanne Brandherm discusses how the role of retail is evolving from a purely sales-focused space to a networked system of uses. The focus is on spaces that are not conceived in isolation, but as places of overlap. The city centre becomes a laboratory — a space for experimentation in which new typologies emerge and the traditional boundaries between uses become blurred. Using selected projects, Brandherm demonstrates how such hybrid concepts can be realised and how interior design can create synergies, improve the quality of the user experience and develop spaces with a social impact.