Location intelligence co-location archetypes

The Location Intelligence platform identifies retail and commercial gravity through three co-location archetypes: Retail Centres (PRO), Urban Fringe (VWH), and Commuter (PKS). Each archetype describes a distinct clustering pattern that reflects a different type of commercial activity and a different relationship to the surrounding urban geography.

The three-letter codes were ratified on 1 June 2026.

The three archetypes

PRO is the base map product — the foundation of the site-selection dataset. VWH and PKS are overlay archetypes that identify adjacent market structures not captured by grocery-anchored clustering.

PRO — Retail Centres

PRO clusters represent grocery-anchored commercial co-locations, assigned to one of four tiers by a predicate-gate test — each tier requires every listed condition to pass, not an additive score against a threshold.

Tier definitions

Tier 1 — Regional: Cluster contains (Warehouse AND Hypermarket) or (Lifestyle AND Hypermarket); ranks in the top 10% of its country by primary catchment population and top 20% by secondary catchment population; has at least one regionally classified hospital within the tertiary ring; and is not dominated by a stronger cluster within a 3.0 km disk radius.

Tier 2 — District: Cluster contains a Hypermarket plus Hardware or Warehouse; ranks in the top quartile of its country by primary catchment population, and in the top quartile on at least one spend axis (grocery, hardware, or wholesale); has at least one regional or district hospital within the tertiary ring.

Tier 3 — Local: Cluster contains Hardware or Warehouse; ranks in the top half of its country by primary catchment population; has at least one hospital of any classification within the tertiary ring.

Tier 4 — Fringe: All clusters that do not pass the Tier 1, 2, or 3 gates.

Anchor classes: ALPHA_HYPERMARKET (large-format grocery — Walmart, Target, Carrefour, Kaufland, Tesco, and other national chains), ALPHA_LIFESTYLE (IKEA), ALPHA_HARDWARE (Home Depot, Lowe's, Leroy Merlin, and similar), and ALPHA_WAREHOUSE (Costco, Sam's Club, and similar). Neighbourhood grocery formats (Lidl, Aldi) are deliberately excluded — their density would produce false-positive clusters below any useful threshold.

Current dataset

As of the most recent published tier count, the production dataset spans 157 Tier 1, 1,462 Tier 2, 2,081 Tier 3, and 6,513 Tier 4 clusters — 10,213 total after deduplication — across seven headline countries (United States, Mexico, Spain, Germany, Canada, France, and Great Britain) plus additional markets not yet broken out individually. Tier boundaries are periodically re-tuned as anchor-chain coverage and the underlying retail footprint change.

VWH — Urban Fringe

VWH clusters identify concentrations of hardware and industrial-supply retailers in the absence of grocery anchors. These sites occupy the urban fringe — a band of distance beyond the immediate metro core but short of standalone-market territory — and tend to cluster around highway interchanges in areas with adjacent industrial landuse.

Definition

A VWH candidate is a location where one or more hardware retailers are present, no grocery hypermarket is within the cluster span, and the site sits within the Urban Fringe metro-distance band. The typical built form is a multi-storey warehouse or light-manufacturing building, distinct from the one-storey big-box format of the retail park.

VWH locations serve trades contractors, light-manufacturing operators, and just-in-time logistics tenants — not general retail consumers.

Co-location signals

Essential:

Significant:

Disqualifying: Dense residential immediately adjacent; flood plain; heritage conservation zone; location inside a PRO cluster.

Production status

Urban Fringe classification is production-grade. Hardware stores were profiled as proxy anchors, and the trade-supply clustering was validated against held-out hardware-anchor data, with an internally set acceptance threshold for cluster quality that the production build clears.

The dataset spans thousands of clusters across the 17 display countries, concentrated most heavily in the United States with meaningful coverage across several other North American and European markets.

Clusters are distributed across the three tiers in the expected shape: a small minority reach the Full Trade Hub tier, a larger share reach the Established tier, and the majority sit in the Emerging/Thin tier. That T3-heavy distribution is expected — a full trade hub combining MRO, tool rental, builders merchant, and auto parts is a legitimately rare combination.

A quality-control flag marks clusters that sit close enough to a grocery hypermarket to be considered dual-use commercial parks — valid VWH co-locations that also include grocery retail.

PKS — Commuter

PKS clusters identify commercial concentrations near regional airports and intercity train stations that sit in a Commuter belt beyond the immediate metro core but short of standalone-market distance. The defining demand pattern is park-and-fly or park-and-train travel: residents of a Regional Market drive to a transit node, park, and travel to the Metro Market.

Definition

A PKS candidate is a regional transit node — airport or intercity train station — within the Commuter metro-distance band. Nodes closer than that band are classified as suburban rather than regional; nodes beyond it are considered standalone markets with a separate metro relationship.

The defining commercial signal at a PKS location is car rental. Auto parts, fuel stations, quick-service restaurants, and convenience stores are secondary signals.

Co-location signals

Essential:

Significant:

Disqualifying: Major hub within the immediate metro core; population below a minimum viable threshold; no direct metro service.

Production status

Commuter classification is production-grade. Park-and-ride records serve as the primary geographic anchor — actual car-to-transit transition points distributed independently of rail network geometry. Transit modes are enrichment signals; car rental and hotel presence define commercial maturity. Related transit-mode categories are grouped together before tiering, to prevent related modes from inflating an apparent multi-modal signal.

Clusters are distributed across three tiers. A Regional Hub tier combines multi-modal access with a full commercial ecosystem. A Transit Interchange tier combines transit with at least one commercial signal. A larger Transit Node tier is where transit is present but commercial opportunity remains to be proven out.

Commercial enrichment draws on major car rental and hotel chains active in each market, ingested and reflected in the production build.

Major hub filter

Airports adjacent to a major PRO retail cluster are excluded as likely major commercial hubs. Major airports generate their own retail gravity and do not exhibit the park-and-transit pattern. The filter correctly removes hubs such as LAX, JFK, LHR, and CDG.

Future enhancements

• Airport passenger volume data (CAPA or IATA) to replace the current adjacency-based hub proxy with a direct traffic-based classifier
• Parking operator directory: Q-Park, APCOA, NCP, Indigo/Vinci (EU); SP+ (US)

Map integration

VWH and PKS are available as overlay layers alongside the core Retail Centres (PRO) view, so a reviewer can see Urban Fringe and Commuter candidates together with the base retail-cluster map. PKS candidates are further distinguished as integrated — near a PRO Tier 1 or Tier 2 cluster — or standalone, consistent with the Commuter definition above.

Data Sources

Map and location data © OpenStreetMap contributors / ODbL.

See also

• Co-location Methodology — the anchor-composition scoring that drives PRO tier assignment
• Co-location Ranking System — the five-rank commercial density index that ranks PRO clusters
• Regional Markets Intelligence System — the 400-market set built on PRO cluster data
• Top 400 Regional Markets — North America — qualifying set of suburban-regional PRO markets in NA
• Top 400 Regional Markets — Europe — qualifying set of suburban-regional PRO markets in EU
• O-D Catchment Methodology — how catchment zones are measured around each cluster centroid