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 fromsupermarkets 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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