It’s not enough for planners to control where people live. Now they want to control where people shop. British planner Mary Portas has unveiled a 28-point plan for saving High Street (the Britishism for what Americans would call downtown). The most important part of the plan would prevent anyone from building a suburban shopping center without approval from the national government.
Instead of new suburban shops, Portas wants to require that everything from supermarkets to car boot sales (similar to what Americans would call flea markets) be located in town centres, er, centers.
Without these changes, warns Portas, High Street is dead. She estimates that High Street’s share of retail sales in Britain have fallen from about 50 percent to 40 percent and will continue to decline. Well, so what? People used to shop at little stores where everything was behind the counter and you had to ask the clerk for anything you wanted. Then came self service, then came longer business hours, then came park-and-shops, then came superstores, then came all sorts of other retail innovations. Many of those innovations don’t fit in High Streets where rents are high, streets are congested, and parking is limited. The latest retail innovation, on-line sales, isn’t location-dependent at all, much less does it require a downtown shop.
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Naturally, Portas has a few critics who say she has failed to understand the latest trends. The appeal of her proposal is that a few downtown property owners will gain huge benefits while many other diffuse property owners and large numbers of consumers will each lose a little. That means the beneficiaries will work hard to promote Portas’ plan while the losers won’t be bothered to fight it.
Unfortunately, too many professional planners support pro-downtown plans because they have an obsolete view of cities. As Joel Garreau points out in Edge City, what we think of as downtown didn’t exist before about 1820 and was rarely built without subsidies after 1930. Yet this view of cities has conditioned the way many people think about urban areas.
American planners have long promoted downtowns using subsidies and other forms of favoritism. Other than urban-growth boundaries, the kinds of restrictions that Portas proposes have not yet reached this side of the Atlantic, but it is only a matter of time before they do.
So the concept was largely obsolete over 7 decades ago; Downtown is largely reserved for more expensive stores like Gucci, Armani, Tiffany’s even Macy’s and various restaurants. I’m sorry the only British euphemism I know is that fag means cigarette.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjaDG2G-_go
The focus should be preserving the character of high street while allowing whatever appropriate uses (no strip clubs or porn shops) that want to move in. Trying to force retail on main street is a tactic the is fading in the planning world. A lively and functional main street is not necessarily dependent on retail.
The same kind of thinking also tells us that congestion is a GOOD thing.
See John Norquist’s promotion of urban congestion (especially in the context of “High Streets”) on the Atlantic Cities site here.
CP,
I’ve been thinking about the “congestion is good” argument for some time now,and think that semantics is playing too big of a part. People like Norquist should stop using the word “good” and use words like “inevitable.” In certain contexts, often where places are economically vibrant or desirable, congestion is inevitable. Hence the Yogi Berra quote “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” In these places, there is no amount of transit or highway expansion that will have substantive reduction in congestion (there’s mountains of data to support this). I think this is what Norquist is trying to get at with the good congestion v bad congestion argument. Is some contexts congestion is inevitable, in others work needs to be done to reduce it because nobody really thinks it’s ever “good.”
No porn shops, no strip clubs………despite the planning profession dominance, Portland has more strip clubs than any city per capita surpassing even Las Vegas. Times Square used to have dozens of adult theaters and porn shops. As far backs as the 20’s and 30’s they had “peep shows”. From the 1960s to the early 1990s, the seediness of the area, especially due its go-go bars, sex shops, and adult theaters. Many historians however say that Time’s Square was at it’s most exciting at that point in time. Anthony Bourdain once remarked how he used to visit Time’s Square in the 70’s and now in the 21st century he actually misses the sleaze and depravity that made the place infamous. Now the gentrification of the area has (by critics) targeted lower income neighbors especially in Hell’s Kitchen. As a proponent to legalizing gambling and prostitution and other “vices”, I’m not saying I can offer solutions. If businesses can revive the classical downtown without subsidies let them try. It may only make sense in big cities; It’s like everywhere in the city has some form of retail. Small cities like Baltimore or Boston as opposed to NYC or Chicago have distributive retail all over the city both big box and small box. Why do they have Apple stores when they sell iPods at Walmart, Toys’R’Us and Target, Best Buy.
Remember when Borders and Barnes and Noble were the evil companies because people shopped there instead of the “fantastic” downtown independent book stores? Now the mega-book stores are going down too. It is called “progress” even if it is opposed by the self-titled “progressives.”
In reality those downtown independent book stores were more like this http://youtu.be/Ohk-Ey01c9k .
Instead of the “good old days” when over educated book store employees gave you their recommendations, now people get suggestions from Amazon’s computer and then read thousands of independent reviews from all sorts of people.
You can hold back the tide if you try hard enough, but why?
I agree that whatever wants to move into the space should be allowed, and the form of the buildings have regulation on them. The uses will figger themselves out.
And I would suggest trying to understand the argument in the Atlantic piece. He isolated his premise – Congestion, in the urban context, is often a symptom of success. for ease of reading comprehension, and then made it easy to understand with a clearly placed follow-up After all, congestion is a bit like cholesterol – if you don’t have any, you die. And like cholesterol, there’s a good kind and a bad kind.. I don’t know how he could have made his argument easier to understand.
DS
LR,
You bring up an interesting point. This spring I went to a bachelor party in Portland and went to two strip clubs (Not my choice. Not a big fan). What I found most interesting was that they were not delegated to one section of town like most other cities and from the outside you might not even know that were adult entertainment establishments. I wondered how many people have accidentally gone into a strip joint in Portland thinking it was just another downtown bar only to be surprised upon entrance. When it comes to establishments like these, Portland is like no other city I’ve seen.
The little upstate New York farm village I grew up in (and have returned to) has mostly lost its tiny downtown. There’s still a bank, the Post Office and a couple gin mills. But the dozen or so clothing stores, TV stores, hardware stores, bowling alley, American Legion Hall, meat markets and gas station of my youth are gone. It’s depressing — sort of. It just doesn’t look nice. It doesn’t feel right.
Yet the population remains constant, the residential neighborhoods are perhaps a bit more well-kept than they were in the seventies and, try as I may, I can’t think of a single thing that would bring it back to what it was. Everyone gets in the car now and drives to Jamestown or Dunkirk to shop at Walmart or Bon-Ton and Amazon.com delivers to your front door whenever you want something you just can’t wait for.
I guess things just change. I actually like downtowns. I don’t like efforts to legislate them, though. I really hate those.
I recently moved from the States to Leeds, one of the larger cities in England. It also has one of the largest City Centre shopping districts. 30 years ago as the industrial revolution dried up in the north, most of the cities were left derelict and falling down. Most of the jobs had left, and the cities had to re-invent themselves. Leeds in an effort to remain vibrant, pushed to keep shopping in the city center. While they did allow grocery stores, off-licences and corner stores in the outer districts, all the retail is still centralized. In the course of a Saturday over 100,000 people now come into the city and walk between the stores. Whats more, due to the parking that exists for all the workers coming in during the week, Saturday parking rates are incredibly cheap. Furthermore, most people come by bus, train, or walk, as it’s a lot cheaper, and the systems are well setup. The stores you find in the city centre are also not just the higher end ones or the strip clubs. There is a wide variety from Primark (think walmart clothing) and TJMaxx all the way up to high end department stores.
Sheffield, 40 miles south, tried to create jobs by building a new shopping mall just off the M1 the major North-South motorway on the East Coast. Today the city centre is falling down, and there are still businesses that stand empty. 15 years ago the city actually qualified for EU redevelopment funds, which were set up to help the poorest cities in Eastern Europe along. Furthermore, with so many of the cities residents unemployed, and the fairly good public transport, most people didn’t own a car. This meant that in order to buy anything, they needed to get on a bus and travel 20 miles out, a place that had limited bus service at the time. Ultimately, the city was talked into building a tram line that ran through most of the residential areas and terminated at the shopping mall. It still loses money on the venture, but at least everyone is able to get to work and buy clothes when they need to.
While I understand that in the States that trying to save downtowns is a lost cause, centuries of land planning and different transport networks over here make it a much better prospect. Bus routes all run into the city centre already since thats where most of the jobs and schools are. These are also bus routes that make money due to the large number of riders. When i lived in the states I was all for the free market and allowing things to grow up wherever. However, over here space is at a much higher premium, and the transportation networks have a lot more options than driving. Should everything be herded into the city, not at all, but they should be allowed to consider the option. A recent survey found that most Brits were willing to pay more for their taxes in order to create the outdoor walking areas that city planning creates. All I’m saying is that the two countries should not be judged in the same light. If the country so chooses to live that way, let them. The states on the other hand should be free to chose.
Thank you, BSW, for that information about Leeds. I agree with you that each area is different. England is much older, and recent development has not been as fast, as many US cities.
In a lot of big urban areas in the US, the urban area downtown is not very attractive to shopping, and they are essentially vacant at night and on weekends. But the inner suburbs often have smaller downtown shopping areas that are thriving.
I think the downtown small business shopping experience has a lot of vibrancy and attractiveness, even alongside the big box shopping experience. But in the US, whether because of laws or geography or other reason, the attractive shopping experience develops in older areas, but newer than the central downtown district.
BSW said: “If the country so chooses to live that way, let them.”
But what if a freedom loving antiplanner want’s to move to your country and when they get there some communist planner has successfully implemented growth mgmt. They can’t all live in Houston.
bennett, since when has O’Toole been freedom loving?
He tells other people how to live their lives every day!
“He tells other people how to live their lives every day!” – The highwayman
But he does not advocate forcing them to live a certain way, only for others to not for people to live a certain way.
free·dom? ?[free-duhm] Show IPA
noun
1.
the state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint: He won his freedom after a retrial.
2.
exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc.
3.
the power to determine action without restraint.
4.
political or national independence.
5.
personal liberty, as opposed to bondage or slavery: a slave who bought his freedom.