What You Can Get Away With

Nick Barlow's weblog

Archive for category Planning and Development

The Ghost of Shopping Past

Dec 12

Posted by Nick in Planning and Development, US | 1 Comment

Here’s an interesting collection of photos of empty American shops and shopping malls, including the abandoned mall near Chicago where one of the chases in The Blues Brothers was filmed. Interestingly, it had been recently abandoned when the filming took place, and remains unused and undemolished today. (original link via Anton Vowl on Twitter)

For more on the subject, see the Dead Malls website – another of those collections of urban arcana that would probably never have existed without the web – and I’m sure that a couple of the malls they list around Toledo, Ohio are ones I would have visited when I was living there back in the early 90s.

However, seeing the scale and sheer number of dead or dying malls in the US does prompt a theory – that I’m sure will be shot down in comments – about the differences between the US and Britain (and probably much of Europe too). While there are some common features in both retail economies around the abandonment of town and city centres in favour of ‘big box’ retailing on the outskirts – though the US is much further down that path, with downtown shopping districts becoming increasingly rare – the availability of space within the US has enabled a second wave of abandonment to occur, which has led to the dead malls. Because there was the space to build a number of malls, strip malls and all the other types of extra-urban development you see in the US, competition ensured that some of these developments failed to attract sufficient businesses and/or customers to be viable. In Britain there’d be pressure to regenerate a failed area like that because there would be fewer, if any, alternative locations, but in the US, there’s almost always another patch of land in a seemingly better economic position that you can go and develop instead, leaving the old one to rot.

Tags: ,

Not quite free parking

Aug 21

Posted by Nick in Council, Planning and Development, Transport | 1 Comment

I do love how the AA and the RAC Foundation can get headlines merely for stating the obvious on behalf of their nebulous memberships. Today, for instance, we learn that the AA are against cars being clamped by private companies, which the RAC Foundation also told us they were against about a month ago. Interestingly, the pictures BBC News use for both of those stories appear to be of the same car, just from a slightly different angle, which is somewhat apt.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a problem with some of the private parking companies, though one of the reasons they’ve had so many complaints around here is because of the number of new roads and new estates that have been built over the last few years. As there’s a delay in getting these roads adopted (often because the last thing developers pay for is the work to get the roads to an adoptable standard), drivers realise there’s nothing to stop them parking there for free – especially when somewhere’s convenient for the town centre or train station – and the developer or management company has to call in a private parking firm to police the area. Going back to my earlier post on parking issues, this is how parking issues develop as a symptom of other issues with planning and development.

Of course, with the splurge in house-building tailing off and the backlog of roads finally being adopted, it’ll be interesting to see what happens to the private parking market as their field of operations becomes smaller. Why do I expect that it will only take a few years before the AA and RAC Foundation are calling for more parking enforcement by Councils?

Tags: , , ,

You can’t park here

Aug 9

Posted by Nick in Council, Planning and Development | 4 Comments

Being a Councillor in a town with a lot of old streets and a lot of new developments mean parking issues tend to come up quite frequently. So, I found this article on the wider costs of providing parking spaces quite interesting, especially in the light on some of the experiences we’ve had.

Of course, much of the article is from an American perspective, and their experience of the issue is much different to ours as a lot of their infrastructure – indeed, a lot of their cities – was mapped out after the rise of the car, which can result in a style of urban geography that’s quite alien to European eyes. That sensation of working out how to get from A to B across what looks like an ocean of concrete before realising that you’re intended to drive across is one not normally replicated on this side of the Atlantic.

However, while the article does point out some of the disadvantages caused by creating parking spaces, it’s a bit light on the problems that can be created by insufficient parking. The example of Vauban in Germany does show that it’s possible to design the car out of a residential urban environment, but that was with special attention paid to what replaced the car, especially for commuting. The problem we’ve faced with new developments has been one of designing them with limited parking spaces, but then not ensuring that the replacement transport systems are in place. This, of course, means that people still have the same number of cars but don’t have the places to park them and so we end up with streets covered in parked cars – though one could argue (not very successfully, I would imagine) that’s just keeping the heritage appearance, as it’s the same situation with old streets which were built without parking spaces in mind.

I’m sure I could come up with some wonderfully glib solution to the problem as a conclusion, but this is an issue that cuts across a number of areas – beyond planning and transport issues, there’s some very thorny economics about the costs and benefits of car travel – and what can seem like a simple solution only throws up more problems. So, if there’s anyone out there in my rather small peanut gallery with a solution, feel free to share.

Tags: , ,

Easy AdSense by Unreal