New and Old #46
Friday roundup and commentary
Urban planning can facilitate friendship — and the Catholic Church can help, America, Eve Tushnet, February 17, 2022
Eve Tushnet interviewed me for this piece months ago, and I had forgotten what I had even told her. Bur I’m not recommending this because I’m in it (and only in a short part of it), but because it brings together so many of the themes I write about here. It’s about the intersection of friendship and human relationships in general with the form of the built environment. E.g.:
The urbanist writer Addison del Mastro offers a paean to “nooks and crannies”: “When I go to a town and walk around, in the classic towns where you have streets on a grid and not just linear development along the road, there’s a sense of three-dimensionality to the space—back lots, the back of a house backs onto something else. You can go behind stuff. Nobody goes behind a strip mall.
And:
Maybe we need to start by giving up some of the things we think we need. The features of cities that foster friendships most often involve the absence of many of the goods Americans value most: autonomy, control, safety, order and comfort.
All of these are goods. But they are not goods that come without tradeoffs. Pursuing these goods above the goods of community and solidarity has left us lonely and overwhelmed.
There’s a lot more in here. Read the whole, beautiful thing.
The Pandemic Shows Us the Genius of Supermarkets, The Atlantic, Bianca Bosker, July 2020
Starting with the history of the supermarket—which, like many important innovations, evolved out a series of shifts in retail and economics rather than suddenly appearing fully formed—Bosker goes on to point out just how incredible supermarkets really are. There’s also a lot of really interesting early-pandemic reporting here. It’s also kind of the story of the long-running New York-area grocery chain Fairway. As you probably can guess, this is my kind of article, and it’s a pleasure to read. So, read it!
It’s not all perfect:
Although a Nielsen survey found that 85 percent of retailers take slotting fees [fees for placement and location of products on the shelf], the practice is covered by a strict omertà. One woman, fearing retribution for testifying on the subject to a Senate committee in 1999, only did so while wearing a hood, hiding behind a screen, and having her voice scrambled.
But I’d like to point to this:
My grandmother, who had been forced to flee her home in what was then Yugoslavia during World War II, had spent nearly two decades as a stateless person and, before coming to the United States, pieced together family meals from cabbage, offal, and the produce with which farmers paid my grandfather for teaching in a rural Italian school. Fairway, to her, was a place of surreal abundance.
This is one of those things we Americans forget or sort of poke fun at, but it’s true, and not something to take for granted.
And this:
Once upon a time, supermarkets were themselves the colossi putting small grocers out of business, and nostalgia for regional supermarkets in a sense seems risible. These Goliaths now look frail, as we’ve shifted to stocking up on groceries at places far beyond the super- and even hypermarket—gas stations, a onetime online bookseller.
De-Suburbanizing Suburbia: Is It Possible?, Strong Towns, Tim Wright, July 18, 2019
This piece, with before and after images of an outlet center in Texas, is a great illustration of how small details can do a lot to make car-oriented commercial environments more welcoming to people. It’s a very similar set of points to a piece I recently did for Strong Towns, on an aging strip mall turned Vietnamese cultural and commercial center in Northern Virginia.
But it’s not just about design details, like benches, plantings, etc.—it’s also about a higher ratio of business activity to parking, and a broader range of businesses or services that can keep people lingering longer.
Suburbia isn’t going anywhere, but much of it is going to change a lot, and you could do much, much worse than this.
Courthouse Square Flemington - What's Coming, Dave Norton, February 16, 2022
A fellow who owns a store downtown in Flemington, where I grew up, put together a great synopsis here of the town’s major redevelopment project: a renovation of its historic Main Street hotel along with several new buildings forming a mixed-use development right in the middle of town.
This project has taken over a decade to materialize, and is still disliked by a lot of folks in Flemington. But as such projects go, in my opinion, it’s very good. It’s an example of an existing town intensifying an underutilized piece of prime real estate. Check this out as a general example of the sorts of opportunities a lot of towns have, if they take them. (I wrote about Flemington at more length here, and about another upcoming big project there, as well.)
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