Urban Retail Systems: Studying the Interactional Activities and Social Sustainability

Retails and shopping centers have become essential to today’s lifestyle. Furthermore, as modern shopping venues, retail centers' social role contributes to its popularity and profitability. The social motive of customers for shopping is beyond acquiring their crucial purchases. These advantages favor retail centers and improve the level of social sustainability and its relevant concepts. Given that relatively little study has been studied on the impact of retail centers' social role as places for interactional and recreational activities on customers' behavior in these centers and its relation to social sustainability. Two hypotheses were raised that show the effect of time travel duration and shop variety on increasing the percentage of users who spend their leisure time and recreational activities in two analogous retail centers. The result of research regarding the first hypothesis reveals that there is an interaction between time travel duration and shoppers' motivation. Furthermore, the results revealed that half of both retail center goers who spend more than 10 minutes to arrive at the retail centers prefer to do leisure activities and browsing than shopping. Therefore, the majority of individuals are from further distances, indicating longer trips can be one of the factors for willing to spend more leisure time and recreational activities. The second hypothesis reveals that shop variety can be one of the main reasons for attracting users to spend their leisure time and browse in both retail centers. There is a significant correlation between shop variety and customers’ motivation.


Introduction
Regarding the united nations' report in 2010, by 2050, more than half of the world population predicted to live in urban areas [1]. Hence making our cities more effective, equitable, and sustainable has been the focus of interdisciplinary research during the past half-century, also challenging them to be more competitive with a focus on people's welfare in a sustainable development framework is a crucial issue [2,3]. Urban sustainability has been connected with keeping balanced and adhering retail systems set up in a great diversity of facilities, shopping spaces, and places [4,5]. Since retailing has always been an urban activity par excellence, the services, and facilities that offer can be the main factors of their attraction. Nowadays, the relationship between city developments and retail has a little in common with the past. According to wide and deep changes, most cities have experienced the retail revolution, despite the differences that can be seen among the urban settings of different countries with different cultures. The effects of this revolution are everywhere [6].
Along with urban development, the social dimension is a reflection of human development [7]. This has been specified as progress toward enabling all human beings to provide their essential needs, achieve an appropriate level of comfort, welfare, and share fairly in sustainable development opportunities composed of three topics: environmental, social, and economic evolution [7,8]   In 1987 the Brundtland report advises that to have powerful and dynamic communities, citizens' most foundational needs should be satisfied and enhanced [9]. Shopping and retail activities are the necessity of economic and social activities that increase the vitality and livability of urban public life 10].
Designing retail centers can play an important role in creating the future of sustainability. it can play a role as a bridge between people. Businesses can also simplify the systematic integration of environmental, economic, and social parameters in the framework of new and more sustainable models of production, marketing, and use [11]. Regarding social sustainability, the built environment and leisure are viewed as required factors [12]. Therefore the importance of retail centers as retailing formats has become progressively remarkable. They play a notable role in customers'shopping pattern and have become more than merely a center to purchase [13]. Accordingly, for justifying deeper research on retail centers, the social factors can be one of the major criteria, for instance, leisure shopping is a browsing activity that is characterized by looking for pleasing experiences and stimulate the senses rather than a desire of purchasing [14].
There is a wide range of definitions for the word leisure, without doubt, it can be in front of work, or saying it as a synonym with entertainment which itself can be explained as effectively any satisfying experience [15]. Recently, leisure and recreational features of consumption have become more and more remarkable to consumer research [16][17][18][19][20]. Shopping is an activity that probably even be one of the preferred entertainments and a preferable activity of choice. Accordingly, it is a form of leisure activity [21,22]. Essentially, the main purpose of retail centers was once shopping, but now leisure activities are becoming integrated day by day [23], customers in contemporary societies are spending more time on recreational activities, the originators of retail centers are trying to find a way to make them a place for doing leisure activities besides its commercial role [24,25]. Consumers of any age prefer to spend more time in retail centers [26][27][28], therefore, retail centers have become community centers, and shopkeepers trying to offer more recreational attractions than before [29][30][31][32][33]. Leisure activities can be the key to the success of retail centers since they can make an interesting and exciting experience for customers [34], also the diversity of the shops and their product assortment affect consumers and encourage them to purchase more [35,29]. Recreational activities and finding a place to offer recreational services are pivotal to retail center shop keepers since they must create an interesting and entertaining atmosphere for customers that provides for their demands and extends their visiting time [36]. Consequently, retail centers for social indicators through open spaces have a prominent value, which allows purchasers to have social contact [37,38], hence the assortment of retails, the retail centers' environment, and shopping involvement have a differential influence on excitement and desire to stay in retail centers, which in turn have an impact on patronage intentions and desire for shopping [39][40].

The role of retail centers
Shopping activity has been seen as a rapid global transformation in a half-century space, especially the development of different types of commercial related sectors, following an attitudinal change to consumption itself from the necessity to leisure [41]. The retail centers which first become known in the United States have become the principal part of the contemporary lifestyle. It has been developing since the early 1920s by introducing changing patterns of shopping as well as social and recreational activities, malls are becoming places where shop keepers can touch their users in a fascinating ambiance [42]. They have been defined as a group of retails and other commercial units that are evolved, organized, owned, and run as a single possession [43]. Consequently, nowadays we have been faced with changing the consumption pattern because of globalization, the international incorporation of markets for goods and services distinguishes the modern world economy, this process is known as globalization is providing more and more countries with opportunities to benefit higher standards of living, but at the same time is making pressure on societies to adapt to their traditional practices [44].
Globalization makes the behavior of consumption progressively similar from one country to another. Critics of globalization often discuss that the strong pressure of market integration is forcing the world towards increasing homogeneity. These changes have also vastly affected retail centers and forced establishment and architects to build different types of retail centers for answering the various types of costumers' needs [45]. The retail Center can be comprehended from the evolutional perspective of consumption revealed as 'space of consumption' which all these spaces have similar basal characteristics and also use similar methods to entice users [46], accordingly, to attract more customers and lengthen their stay in the retail centers, investors added various leisure venues and facilities to Shopping centers [20,5], although it's not a new tendency and started many years ago but recently has accelerated [47].
Considering studies in this field, we can see six periods of evolution in the conception of customers' recreational activities in retail centers, 1930 the passive browsing and effect of capitalism on consumption pattern, 1950 the targeted Browsing and clarifying Spectrum of users, 1970-80, establishing retail with multi-purposes, 1990, adding leisure activities and popularized them, 2000, focusing on customers' behavior to make the retails centers more cognitive, and at present focusing on recreational activities, browsing, and targeted trip [48,49,34]. Shopping centers exist in three types according to their size, number, and type of users they serve. Neighborhood centers that have one or two anchor supermarkets which serve a radius of 2 miles, community centers, which are bigger than neighborhood ones, and propose comprehensive products, normally they feature two sizeable anchor shops that serve a radius of 20 miles and the third one is named superregional malls, which serve a multistate area [50,51].

Leisure time and opportunity in Retail Centers
Leisure has vast definitions, contrasting leisure with work or mentioning it as synonymous with recreation, which itself can virtually be seen as any satisfying experience [14], leisure times can be a time of relaxation, comfort, calmness, and free time that anyone uses differently. The following table briefly refers to the provision of leisure from different viewpoints. In the 1950s when the malls were born, we rarely could see the entertainment and recreational activities in retail centers or malls, between 1895-1920 the recreational activities such as movie theater, amusement parks, were built in the downtown of the US. Nowadays retail centers are not only being used merely for shopping, but their new role is also motivating users towards entertainment and Non-recreation-Based -A consistently planned that includes some retail units and typically focuses on a narrow but deep selection of goods within a particular retail class.

5,000+ NA
spending leisure time [52], also there are four main relationships between shopping and leisure, shopping as purchasing, shopping for leisure, shopping and leisure, and shopping as leisure that are loosely related, both with the definitions of leisure intrinsic in the approaches, as well as with various properties of shopping facilities, such as their size and complexity(figure2) [53].

Retail centers and their social role
For the first time in the United States, chain stores increased in the late 1920s, in the 1930s, this type of market flourished and turned into supermarkets with discounts [54,28]. In 1956, with the founding of the first retail center in Southland by Victor Groningen, his utopian assets, this retail center became a gathering place for civic and social meeting place [55]. This trend continued in the following years, and many retail centers became indoors, in the 1970s, the attitude of retail centers sought to add side-effects such as food stores, cinema, and theater [56]. Almost everywhere in the United States, a large number of teenagers set their appointments in the suburban vicinity of the retail center. In research in 1985, 63 % of the retail centers' users came there once or twice a week, and most of them spent one to five hours in these spaces. They rarely just went shopping alone and usually went out in these spaces with their friends. Only half of the people said that they do shopping as their goal of coming to retail centers. [57].
Nowadays retail centers have a gradually influential position in our society, now we can leave our children to play in malls' playgrounds while we are doing shopping or other activities since most retail centers offer more recreational activities. Hence, retail centers that initially held a more commercial role are now considered places of recreation [58]. The sphere of retail centers affects shopping habits there are various factors which could define the utility of retail such as, travel distance [59,60], travel time [61], accessibility [62], scale [63], variety of shops [64], and the number of stores [65]. Retail centers can explore place attachment [66], there is a relationship between social and physical indicators which form a place with visitors' behavior [67], and those indicators can generate the place's characteristic [68]. Spacious shopping places have increasingly become a place where we don't only do shopping but also, we can spend our free time. The shopping atmosphere, with the colorful alley, which allows us to freely walk around them, even in bad weather conditions, also more and more activities like shopping, dining, entertainment, cultural events are gradually moving from city centers to one large place plus doing windowshopping and hang around the retails. Nowadays, retail centers are used in different ways by different groups of people (Table 3) [58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69].  The most noticeable one. The galleries are mainly shops offering Famous products, made by popular brands. Catering In retail centers, the place can mostly find Fast food restaurants which reveal the nature of a typical consumer those places Social Large retails have increasingly become a place where we can not only do shopping or eat but also spend our free time.

Recreational
In most modern retail centers, there are large chain gyms open, Beauty services, where in addition to the previously mentioned social roles of malls, you can also walk with shopping and dining opportunities, work on your appearance. The many galleries multiplex cinemas, entertainment centers, clubs, and even pubs are located in most modern retail centers.
In this regard, this study examines social events and how these spaces are transformed into public spaces in one retail center in Tehran and one retail center in Madrid as case studies. In Iran traditionally markets have always been the venue for social events [70]. With the arrival of modernism in Iran, major changes were made to the pattern of designing shopping spaces. The establishment of Ferdowsi's stores in 1957 and Cyrus's shops in 1970 and the expansion of them in the city created a new style of shopping in Tehran, which influenced this emerging atmosphere of Tehran's lifestyle [71]. With the outbreak of the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, the process of extending retail centers was stopped, and after that, they were sold or renamed. In the 1990s, new chain stores such as Shahrvand and Refah were established in Tehran [71]. In the design of retail centers and chain stores of the 90s, there was no place for life. These types of markets were mostly passageways. the leisure activities were not the main issue of these spaces. In the early 21st century, major urban projects were conducted in Tehran. In that period, the municipality encouraged the contractors to build high rise buildings, towers, and retail centers. Many retail centers were built in Tehran during this decade such as Golestan Shahrak-e Gharb, Ghaem Tajrish, and these spaces turned into a youth meeting point. Starting construction in the last decade, from 2010, and adding more services such as food court, cinema, playground, a new type of commercial-recreation spaces pattern in Tehran formed [72].
In Spain centers and supermarkets have experienced an important development since their appearance in Spain in the 70s. In the 80s the first retail centers of Spain were inaugurated with lots of facilities, shops, offers, parking spaces. A case in point, the La Vaguada, and Parque Sur were the retail centers were established in the 80s in Madrid. In the 90s the trend of retail centers was devoting more space to leisure. Finally, since 2000, we have seen the retail shops saturated with cinemas and comprised of sports. The most representative example is Xanadu, which opened in 2003 in Madrid [73]. In summary, Spain has three periods of retail shop transformation, up until the 80s hypermarkets periods, from the 80s until the 90s advent of retail centers and from the year 2000 diversity of shopping centers is heightened. Recently, retail centers in Madrid have not only been considered a retail center but have also become a leisure and entertainment center. These spaces are not just meeting point for youth but can be used as a recreational destination, in which they can spend their full day buying, going to the cinema, having fun, and eating. [74] Many articles have been studied on the role of retail centers on economic and environmental sustainability, but rarely some researches have been worked on the effect of retail centers on social sustainability and the impact of retail centers 'social role on consumers' behavior and their shopping pattern when attending these malls in the direction of social sustainability. Accordingly, the lack of study on this new role of the retail center and its impact on the customers' recreational activities in terms of social sustainability has seen as a gap that needs to be worked on it, on the other hand, similar studies that have been conducted in this field mostly studied the retail centers located in the same city or country, but in this study, it has been attempted to examine the retail centers that are located in different countries with a dissimilar consumption culture. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of retail centers 'new role as places for interactional and recreational activities on customers' presence reason in these centers and its relation to social sustainability. This study focuses on the perceived shopping centers from the customers' point of view via studying independent indicators that are time duration and motivation and dependent is one which is shop variety to determine the role of these centers as a place that provides recreational activities along with shopping. Hence it was hypothesized that: Hypothesis 1: The ones who take them more times to get retail centers to have more desire to do recreational activities Hypothesis 2: Shop variety can be one of the main factors for attracting users to spend their leisure time and doing recreational activities there.

Data collection
The recent research in terms of the purpose is functional research and comparative study, a comparative method is a foundational tool of analysis [75]. A mixed-methods approach has been used for the study, to fully explore the customers and retail centers relationship and ensure that the most main factors were mentioned and Properly conceptualized for data collection. For the qualitative factors, a series of semi-structured interviews were run to identify the components in the relationship between customers and the retail center's social role [76]. A questionnaire was then created and pre-tested on the interview subjects. We used a sample of Tehran and Madrid retail centers as the research setting.

Independent and dependent variables
In this study, we used two independent variables, first, the travel times that takes customers for attending the retail centers, and second, the motivation of customers for their attendance in these retail center. The retail centers' shop variety is mentioned as a dependent variable, since it can be almost one of the main factors for attracting customers, shop variety acts as an influential factor on dependents factors of this study [77].

Data analysis
In The scales measuring the relation between the recreation role of retail centers and customers' behavior have been examined the questionnaire consists of two parts. Examining the motivation of customers and the time taken by customers to reach these shopping centers, for analyzing the relationship between customers' motivation and their time travel duration, the bivariate correlation was applied [78], a significance level of p≤0.05 was used to show the existence of a relationship between customers motivation and shop variety. Results with p≤0.05 were presumed to reflect variables that were significantly related to one another. Surveying the relationship between One-way ANOVA tests was used to measure the consistency of customers 'motivation across shop variety. The eta-squared was used to measure the effect size of any statistical differences [79].

Study Site
Two almost similar case studies in terms of characteristic and functional since both are community malls [44,45], and have been built in the current context, also were established in middleclass districts that are far from the city center were selected as evaluation models, the Koroush retail center which located in Tehran (Figure 3) and the Las Rosas retail center, located in Madrid ( Figure  4).    Koroush Retail center is a complex of commercial, cultural, and entertainment, including a cinema, campus, kindergarten, cafe, VIP restaurant, and a supermarket. According to previous findings, the major item sold currently is clothing. In addition to high priced brands, Kourosh commercial center offers apparel for middle incomes as well. Apart from the shops, shoppers can enjoy spending time in the food courts, restaurants, coffee shops, game lands, and cinema complexes available on the top floors of the mall. Additionally, the parking lot is quite spacious, with several floors underground. Measurements in Tehran were conducted on the 12th of April 2019 during peak hours of Friday that is the weekend of Iranian, from 20:00 to 22:00. According to the Cochran formula, in total 150 questionnaires were collected from Koroush retail center.

Madrid: Las Rosas Commercial center
Madrid, Spain's central capital has a population of 3.17 million and more than 100 retail centers. One of these centers, Las Rosas, is located in the San Blas-Canillejas district on Avenida de Guadalajara with a population of 158.9, It was built in June 1998 with an area of 110.000 sqm2, It has two access entrances, the main entrance at Avenida de Guadalajara, and the second one by the street of Aquitaine [80]. The center consists of two commercial levels with 61 stores, a cinema, restaurants, and markets. The first floor is primarily occupied by Carrefour and Mercado Clasico, while the second floor is made up of restaurants and the cinema. Las Rosas was established in one of the oldest districts in Madrid and is made up of low-or middle-income residents. The retail center itself was built along with the neighborhood and most of its customers are residents. By using The Cochran formula, 150 questionnaires were obtained from Las Rosas retail center on the 2nd of March 2019. The responders have answered the question during the peak time of Las Rosas shopping center from 18:00 to 20:00.

Results
The outcomes of this study derived from the evaluation and analysis of 150 questionnaire data distributed across Koroush retail center and 150 questionnaires were collected from Las Rosas, through using SPSS software. In this research, to investigate the social role of retail centers as places for interactional activities on urban social sustainability, three variables were considered, two independents and one dependent, travel duration to retail centers, the motivation of customers to attend retail centers as independent variables and a variety of retail centers' shops as a dependent variable. Information regarding the travel duration variable was collected by questionnaire to examine the time that shoppers spent traveling to the retail centers studied. This variable provided information about the retail center's attraction. This variable was considered as a factor that demonstrated shoppers' attitudes towards attending the retail center. However, one exception is shoppers with a short travel duration, which generally applies to residents who live in the vicinity of the retail centers. However, travel duration was important because customers who traveled longer distances spent more time in the retail centers than the neighborhood residents. The second variable, customers' motivation to attend retail centers, was divided into three main categories: shopping, leisure, and browsing. The questions in this section were asked by a researcher inside the retail centers to clarify the reason behind shoppers' presence. By analyzing this indicator, the main stimulus of customer presence was revealed.

Measurement Model
The shop variety as a dependent variable collected by field study has been categorized into 5 categories, restaurants and leisure activities [56], fashion and accessories, technology, supermarkets, and beauty services that will show us the main tendency of each retail center attracting their customers. Regarding the analysis of internal consistency and reliability for the first Hypothesis measuring the proportion of the total variance in a dependent variable that is associated with the membership of different groups defined by an independent variable by Eta Squared tables (5,6) [81].
For the Second hypothesis existing correlations between shop variety and doing recreational activities, were explored by analyzing the Pearson correlation coefficient Table (7).

Tehran: Koroush commercial center
The extent of the attraction towards the Koroush retail center was analyzed according to the customers' travel time, which was obtained from the questionnaire and analyzed by Eta Squared. Duration of fewer than 10 minutes was associated with residents who lived in the retail center's vicinity and were not considered useful for the attraction variable. However, a travel time of more than 10 minutes was considered an effective factor in the retail center's attractiveness. The results of this research indicated that individuals with a travel time of between 0 and 10 minutes and between 11 minutes and 1 hour have the highest frequency of attendance at Koroush Commercial center, with 26% and 74%, respectively. Additionally, it is of interest that the highest percentage of shoppers present at the Koroush center was located outside of the vicinity. This center was of special interest in this study due to its commercial-recreational features. According to Figure (5,6), approximately 70% of people visited this venue for more than 20 minutes, with 37% desire of doing recreational activities and only 18% of them desire to go shopping.
The statistical results shown in Table (5) indicate significant effects (i.e., p values are below .05) for Motivation and time travel duration. Note also that the Time travel duration x Motivation interaction accounts for 13.9% (i.e., η2 value is more than 0.09) which shows a strong interaction effect between time travel duration and motivation.
The Kourosh Retail Center is a local retail center that was established to meet the needs of the 5th district of Tehran. Nevertheless, these data demonstrate that in addition to meeting the essential needs of the residents, this center is considered a hub of leisure activities as well. Figure (7) indicates that 46.7% of the respondents come to this center for leisure activities and only 36.7% came for shopping. Meanwhile, the percentage of individuals who browsed the stores and did not spend money (16.7%) is of interest. Due to figure (8) that demonstrates the high variety of shops in this retail center the correlation of these two aspects, shop variety and desire of spending recreational activities, Table (7) shows that they have a significant correlation together.

Madrid: Las Rosas Retail center
The study was conducted four different times using a questionnaire that was completed by 150 respondents. The time corresponding to 0 -10 minutes applies to residents who use the retail center to supply daily necessities, and therefore was not considered an effective factor. However, the period from 10 -60 minutes is considered a significant factor. Although this retail center is a neighborhood retail center, the results showed that individuals who spent 0 -10 minutes to use this space comprised 41.33% of the total, while those who spent 10 -60 minutes comprised 58.66% ( figure 5). On the other hand, the visitors who attended the retail center's aims were divided into three categories: shopping, leisure, and browsing. According to the data obtained in this study, recreation activities in a period of 11:00-1:00 Hrs. were the most frequent (42.0%), followed by Browsing (10.0%), and Shopping (7.0%) figure (6). As regards the obtained data, the statistical results have been shown that (Table 6) there is a significant correlation between motivation and time travel duration. Note also that the Time travel duration and motivation interaction account for 22.1% that shows the interaction effect between these two aspects. Concerning the second hypothesis, the acquired data figure (7)(8) analyzed by Pearson correlation coefficient (Table 7), the results show that there is a significant correlation between Shop variety and users 'motivation, which means the more shop variety increasing the desire for doing more recreational activities.

Discussion
Regarding the results, shows that the Koroush retail center is located in Tehran, and Las Rosas retail center is located in Madrid, along with their commercial role their social role is contemplative. Due to the study, three factors were examined, time travel duration, the costumers' motivation to attend in these centers, and shop variety. The obtained research data demonstrate that most consumer's tendency to visit retail centers for leisure and entertainment activities is the main purpose and followed by engaging shopping. Results show that Koroush Retail Center in Iran and Las Rosas retail centers in Spain have a similar function on clients' willingness to do entertainment activities such as doing sport, going to cinema or restaurants, by 46.7% and 43.3% respectively. Also, the results indicate that the desire of residents for browsing without a prerequisite purchase intention for each retail centers is 16.7% and 18.0%respectivley, in total 63.4% of costumers' motivation in Koroush Retail Center and 61.3% in Las Rosas have devoted to activities other than just purchasing products. (Figure7), In the meantime, two factors of Time travel duration and shop variety can be the main influential factors affecting customers' increasing propensity to spend their leisure time in these centers.
Various studies have been conducted on influencing factors that impact using retail centers, but the studies that directly mentioned the effects of shop variety on customers 'motivation for recreational activities are limited. The researches that have been studied by Fennell (1978) [82], Darden, and Ashton (1974) [83], suggested that the more complex or differentiated products in outlet retail centers lend customers more to user exploration and information seeking. The other research examined three retail centers in the United States in 1994 [29] In this study examined the relationship between age and income with the shop's variety, and finally, determined which types of shops are most attractive for which age groups and income levels. Simon Bell (1999) [84] studied psychological factors that can affect customers 'Image and attraction, via his study the shop variety besides other aspects such as price fairness, visual amenity, convenience, and customer services strongly were associated with customers' selection of retail centers. In 2018 Calvo Porral and Lévy Mangín [85] studied pull factors for attracting more customers in Spain, they mentioned that shop variety is one of them and can affect attracting customers.
Despite the studies that have been done, they just revealed that shop variety is an effective factor in increasing the customers 'desire to purchase or go to retail centers and didn't deal with the particular effect of shop variety on increasing customers 'desire for recreational activities. Furthermore, regarding the first hypothesis, the results show that almost 51%-time travel duration of Koroush' purchasers to get this center is more than 10 min (Figure 7), compared to Las Rosas Retail Center this percentage is 52% (Figure 6). In fact, regarding shop variety in both retail enters show that the main emphasis in both of these retail centers is on entertainment activities and because of variable involvement in the merchandise presented for sale it makes customers find these places pleasurable for browsing or window shopping (Figure 8), which indicated that both of these factors are somehow related to costumers' motivation, therefore when the time travel duration is long and also the level of shop variety is high, equally, the percentage of recreational activities will increase. In this case, few studies examined time travel duration role as an impressive factor in retail centers, Louail et al [86] suggested that preserving main fundamental properties as time travel duration at the same time can be increasing equity of spatial in cities. The study which has been investigated by Beiró et al [87] in Chile showed that the customers prefer to select the retail centers which take them less time and can get there easily. The results of Handy et al.'s research in the US [88] revealed that the shopping centergoers prefer to go to centers which take them more time because they prefer to drive than a walk in this case the local shopping don't have any specific role for reducing the automobile, in this research the factor of time only was studied to show the effect of retail centers located on the type of transportation. The research which studied by Brunner and Mason [61] in Ohio demonstrated that the driving time travel duration besides population density, purchasing power, and other factors can be influential can be one of the most important aspects to reach a retail center is extremely influential in deciding user retail center preferences.
In general, based on research done in this regard, it has shown that nowadays, shopping in retail Centers is widely considered a recreational activity and can be seen as a main factor competitive instrument in the retail industry. Moss in his book argued that going to the retail centers carries out more purposes than pure consumption and many people prefer to go to the retail centers rather than go anywhere else [89], Nisco and Napolitano they found a positive connection between Entertainment orientation and performance outcomes of a retail center empirically [90]. The research in the city of Guangzhou showed that the consumption activities of most of the consumers are mainly for recreational activities, besides, their space consumption and cultural experience in retail centers have more nonmaterial factors [91]. The other research which is studied in India shows that nowadays in India for buyers, shopping is not like a chore but it has become a leisure activity, due to this changing the retail centers try offering more leisure activities to pursue more customers [92].
Despite all research done, they don't specifically mention the features that can improve this role of retail centers as a place for spending leisure time which can work as a successful one due to attracting more customers. Therefore this study tried to survey the features which can have an effect on the number of visitors and also persuade them to stay more in retail centers, hence due to results of this study which provide for the research hypothesis, more precisely, the study gives a demonstration of the importance of retail centers' role as a place where provide Recreational activities apart from shopping activities and also disclose that retail center attractions mostly drive retail center arousal. In other words, the power of retail center to attract users may be explained by several indicators, the main factors which affect shopping arousal among shoppers concern Recreational facilities [93] all retail centers are to some level leisure centers which may be the destination of leisure trips, this issue was inspected via time duration and shopping motivation as an independent factor and shop variety as a dependent one.
In the second hypothesis, it is was seen that shop variety is also one of the important issues to attract users, as mentioned in the latter part in both retail centers the highest percentage belongs to retails which offer the fashion, accessories and recreational services which attract shoppers for browsing and spending their leisure time in these spaces. Eventually consequence of these two hypothesizes are evidence of the retail variety may be the main factor for reveal the motivation of users and also the trip time duration can emphasize this motivation for spending more time on recreational activities which means that the more travel time that individuals spend, increase the percentage of leisure activities. Concerning the first hypothesis in association with most customers' motivation which is spending leisure time in these retail centers, the time it takes the 46.7% of Koroush shopping centers-goers and 43.3% of Las Rosas Retail Center-goers to get the retail center demonstrated that the majority of individuals are from further distances and takes them more time to get retail centers, that shows that the longer trip can be one of the factors for willing to spend more leisure time and recreational activities.

Conclusions
The research on investigating the social role of shopping centers on customer behavior regarding social sustainability was studied using field study and questionnaire, the results analyzed by using IBM SPSS Statistics 22, for proofing first hypothesis Eta2 as a Statistical technique has been used to report the interaction between Motivation as a dependent factor and time travel duration as an independent factor. The second hypothesis has been reported by Pearson correlation to reveal that if the shop variety and motivation have a significant correlation or not, the results lead to the following conclusions. Regarding three indicators in this research, time duration and motivation as an independent one and Shop variety as a dependent one, bespeak that increasing the shop variety and also the time that the users take to get the retail centers can influence the type of customers' motivation, and they probably could achieve to their main goal for attracting more customers not only for purchasing but also for eating, browsing, and recreational activities. Also, the users who select these places consciously, and prefer to spend more time and do more recreational activities in these new modern units in comparison to public spaces, being in public spaces for users would be such necessary activities, not optional ones.
The results of the research that have been conducted in both case studies show even though retail centers were constructed to supply residents' needs, their social role is quite high due to the variety of facilities available, and the majority of customers attended the centers for reasons other than purchasing, the existence of recreational, service and welfare facilities can be the driving factors for attracting people. While retail centers were initially established as a modern and new phenomenon in cities, their patterns have changed across the world in the same way. Based on these findings, it appears that the primary motivation of retail centers in developed countries such as Spain is related to social activities, however, in developing countries, such as Iran, centers are increasing their social role to attract more visitors. Regarding the significance of this study and the rapid changes that have taken place in developing countries, further research is required since changes in developing countries are more influenced by imitation of patterns, rather than following a particular process and temporary policies.
According to this study, the retail centers play a relatively strong social role besides their commercial role, and today, due to the widespread formation of retail centers in cities, strengthening the social role of these centers should be considered more than before. It was found that the diversity of retail centers can be one of the factors for promoting the social role of retail centers and also can affect the customers' travel time duration in the shopping center and since this research has been done on two retail centers that are located in two completely different countries in terms of culture and consumption pattern, but the results are almost similar for both of them, which shows the importance of promoting the social role of retail centers.