Developments in retail architecture in the second half of the twentieth century considerably altered our inner cities. Walter Brune, one of Germany’s great architects and business personalities, had a strong influence on this architecture during his sixty-year career and he was also a strong critic of its negative impact. He advocates the preservation of lively inner city zones not least because of the negative effects of oversized, non-integrated shopping centers. His long-term activities as department store architect for the Karstadt group began in the 1950s. His Rhine-Ruhr Center in Mülheim, built in 1970, was one of the first shopping centers to be erected in Germany. Based on the experience that he had gathered over the decades in developing, building and running retail real estate, he was able to test his idea for an inner city-compatible shopping center with the Kö-Galerie, built from 1983 to 1986 in Düsseldorf—a “Stadtgalerie” that aimed to preserve a lively inner-city. His most important retail buildings are presented in this volume.