urbanSTL

In cities that value their own history, heritage, and culture, local businesses are more likely to succeed. In St. Louis, where shoppers and diners are almost always equipped with cars, it is quite easy to remain fearful of the unpredictability of non-formula restaurants and retail and to go where the experience and quality (and parking ease) is known and deemed acceptable.



The whole local/independent business lobby is not some group of parochial wackos. It's often a group of people who recognize the inherent threat to urbanity that chains/non-independents pose.



That is the threat of the "knowable", the scientific space and place. This is what caused the failure of high-rise housing projects, of late garden suburbs, and of any engineered space. It is created with the thought that human behavior and use of space is ultimately controllable: deterministic design. Often, it involves an insensitivity to the user's demands of the space. For example, "open space" was seen as a must-have for urban inner city residents whose children played on streets prior to the "renewal" (demolition) of their old neighborhoods.



At that time, though, the residents of the block had a sense of ownership over the street and were more vigilant of their playing children, despite the concrete playground they were forced to use. In superblocks, the complex sense of place was extinguished with the belief that people would view the greenspace in front of their home in much the same way as they viewed their former home on their former street.



In short, the complexity of all of the elements of urban space and how people relate to it were ignored.



With the advent of suburbia came also deindustrialization and accelerated commercialization. The fast food model became a convenient solution to increasingly busy lives, which were increasingly being lived in auto-oriented formats that separated commerce from residence.



These commercial plots, due to land limitations (since they could no longer be put on every corner), had to be shoved onto major roads. The parcels grew larger and larger as traffic engineers and real estate experts discovered that all these cars passing by appreciated an abundance of parking and a one-stop shopping experience. As the parcels grew larger, smaller entrepreneurs were more and more excluded from business start ups.



An auto-oriented, suburbanized culture got very comfortable with "efficiency" and less comfortable with something that potentially risked a waste of their precious time and money. Chains and formulas satisfied both needs: they minimized costs of service and sped up delivery time to a public that no longer required intangible benefits like an pleasing aesthetic environment, presence of pedestrians, people-watching, personalized service, an intimate scale.



Civically, and physically, that urban, intimate scale was seen as claustrophobic and outmoded. Worse, a culture of insulation and privatization began to look disdainfully upon the unpredictability of urban environments, that controlled chaos that Jane Jacobs spoke of.



With a return to cities and an appreciation for meaninful environments and public spaces, it's a wonder that some cities simply don't mind offering a fully privatized (and, to over-generalize, suburban) experience.



You can arrive alone in your car, often park right in front of these establishments (or not get out of the car at all, in the case of fast food), walk in, know exactly what you want and what you're going to get, walk back to your car, all having interacted with a minimal number of people and with no surprises at all.



Yes, people do get familiar with their local establishments, but often do so only because they feel it reflects their city or neighborhood's identity and welcomes them.



The notion of the non-localized, dependent formula store or restaurant (and especially those suburban-style establishments) is antithetical to "traditional" urbanity.