Urban Big Box Stores: Is it only about walkability?
The big box stores are starting to get it. Or are they? In a post on Denver Urbanism, Target, Walmart, and Home Depot are becoming more urban-friendly. The post features pictures of these big box stores situated on street blocks, connected to the sidewalks. Target is leading the way in this big-box store meets new urbanism approach. I applaud Target and the other stores in their attempt to adapt to the urban context, but is that all there is to it?
Walkability is a great feature for an urban store and definitely a positive step for the big box stores that have been buying up huge swaths of unincorporated farmland and throwing up acres of parking lots and cheap, unaesthetic structures. It is environmentally better, better for the city’s tax base, and less demanding on the municipal infrastructure. It is even an improvement for the population-dense downtowns. While it is an improvement in these ways, it isn’t all positive.
Eric Jacobsen offers another angle on the issue in his book Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith. Jacobsen argues persuasively that the big chain stores do not contribute to the local community in the same ways a local business does. In contrast, local stores are owned and run by people who have a personal stake in the community. They will participate in local events, serve the municipality, and contribute to local causes. A local business might care more about how the building contributes to the character and identity of the neighborhood. Local businesses might help promote a community charity or offer a community drama group a space to practice. In this way, the big box stores don’t contribute to the local neighborhoods of the city in the same ways small businesses can. Sometimes when we think of cities we think of everything on a large scale (skyscrapers, big stores, and access to anything). But a wonderful feature of great cities is the local neighborly feel of communities that combine to create cities.
June 23, 2011 at 1:18 pm
check out this talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html
Also I’ll send you some ppts you may find useful.
June 23, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Kunstler has been very effective in his critiques of suburbia and bad urban planning. As he puts it with his acerbic wit:
“Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading–the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the ‘gourmet mansardic’ junk-food joints, the Orwellian office ‘parks’ featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chaingang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call ‘growth.’” (Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere, 10)