Architecture plays a major role in building for consumer purposes, but many architects regard shops, stores and other structures of this type as tainted by commercialism and see in them a tendency to populist design. To view commercial aspects as a tiresome appendage, however, would be an elitist misapprehension. A typology of shop architecture is closely bound up with the historical development of trade. Successful trade required a central location and thus played a significant role in the process of urbanization. Cities frequently developed at the intersection of trade routes and at river bridging points, for example. The marketplace itself, the central trading venue, thus became the nucleus of civic growth, around which other important urban functions were grouped.