While collective identity markers are constantly evolving in today's city, the hyper-consumption society has allowed retail, even though greatly transformed, to remain a community hub for socialization. Society's commodification takes shape precisely within the public realm and the urban scene: sprawling analogous drivable retail-only suburbs and turning city centers into bland, soulless and undefined places displaying homogeneous frontages characterized by the same retail storefronts worldwide. More than ever, urban policies on retail oriented servicescapes seem crucial to urban and regional planning from a sustainable perspective. Switzerland's territorial governance fosters public-private partnerships that encourage a frame of retail development towards the inner city, densifying existing centralities and assuring a lively retail offer. Retail is instrumentalized by planning policies to foster urbanity in complex spatial projects. Thorough the study case of Lausanne, a mid-sized city in western-Switzerland, our research focuses on how the urban planning model and its policies set into place spatial strategies to enhance urban quality and to reorganize retail centralities without succumbing to the prevailing commodification of the public realm.