Density And Specialization
Businesses, products, and services come after people
One of the curious things about visiting Hawaii, a few years ago, was trying the hyper-specialized Japanese restaurants. There are places that do only udon, only sushi, only izakaya-style cooked food, only tonkatsu. They’re not just specialized in terms of menu items; they’re specialized in terms of how deeply they delve into the thing they focus on.
In most Japanese restaurants, with a big sushi/sashimi/ramen/udon/teriyaki/tonkatsu menu, the tonkatsu, for example, is a decent but perfunctory chicken or pork cutlet. At the tonkatsu place we tried in Hawaii, you made your own sauce to start the meal, with sesame seeds and a mortar and pestle, and there were all kinds of tonkatsu’d items, from very high quality pork to oysters!
This is possible because Hawaii has a large Japanese population, enough people to branch out from the standard “Japanese cuisine” menu to all of these specialties. That’s it. It’s people.
I remember a conversation on Twitter—I don’t recall the details—but someone observed that in much of exurban America, there are a lot of cuisines you literally can’t enjoy at any price. It isn’t a question of paying money for prepared food. It’s a question of whether the people who really know how to make that food are there.
This is kind of obvious, but really, really important. These things—businesses, amenities, cultural interest—don’t just materialize. They’re not disconnected from the number and diversity (age, race/ethnicity, profession, class, etc.) of people who live in the community in question. They’re not there “for us,” they’re there when the community overall can support them.
This is the same reason you can’t just say when a retail vacancy opens up “Oh they should put a bookstore in there!” or “We could really use a small hardware shop in town.” This doesn’t necessarily mean simply increasing population density inexorably leads to great things. It might not. But it’s one of the necessary preconditions.
Conversely to the specialized business point, one way you can tell a place is sort of under-peopled is when the businesses are all kind of generic, or trying to do multiple things at once. My hometown is kind of like this: lots of restaurants and stores have more than one “concept,” which often means they’re doing a lot on paper but not really executing anything really well.
When you find a business somewhere—an amazing bakery or deli or pastry shop or sandwich shop or bookstore or some narrow thing you didn’t even know quite existed—yes, you need the passion of a business owner, but you also need the people to support those things. There is no way to make them happen without people.
This is one of the key things you realize as an urbanist, and it isn’t really something we think about typically. There aren’t crowding and traffic jams and “too many people” over there, but quaint Main Streets and nice shopping centers and great restaurants and parks over here. The culture and business of a place and the people who live there are different dimensions of the same thing.
There are people who are willing to trade cultural interest and amenities for space and peace and quiet. But there are a lot of folks who I think never really connect these things. We experience businesses as landmarks, as pieces of the environment, not as fleeting, contingent things. We look suspiciously at the “they” putting up the big new apartment building, but appeal to a “they” to put in the store or restaurant we think the community needs.
The best and most interesting places in America were mostly not “designed,” or were designed initially and then grew into themselves, layers upon layers of time and people free to do their thing, making a patch of land into so much more.
Related Reading:
That Damned Elusive Parking Spot
Culture, Nostalgia, Cuisines as Living Things
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Tangentially related, but a point of pride as a former New Haven resident is that pizzerias are an originally American thing. The food may be Italian, but the type of restaurant is ours!
I've always enjoyed reading your columns in various places, even though most of the subjects aren't in my 'wheelhouse'. The articles open up my thinking in ways that very few writers do.
Come to think of it, this fits the specific subject of today's column. Even though the product isn't part of my usual consumption pattern, there's something about it that pulls me in as a paying customer.