“pirating” store pleasures

In Gruen, Victor and Larry Smith. “Prologue, Part 1” Shopping Towns USA: The Planning of Shopping Centers.“the automobile was the means by which the last vestige of community coherence was destroyed.”

I question the authors suggestion that automobiles provided complete freedom of movement to the individual driver and that the ensuing population sprawl followed “no pattern whatever.”

The authors describe a linear, binary demise of growth and congestion. For instance he states, “Business grew and so did automobile traffic.,” or “planning is needed to bring order, stability, and meaning to chaotic suburbia. The author is extremely pro-shopping and its physicality as “cystallization points for suburbia’s community life.”

Part I was a much more critical perspective on mercantile development. I appreciated the systematic outline of required components; developers, location, site, zoning, tenants, financing for effective shopping center development. As they describe it, the “healthy development of our communities.”

The terminology and descriptions of trade area analyses is very insightful when investigating the trends in mall development in the Phillipines. The awareness of “pirating stores” was amusing; especially their ability to overburden orderly traffic flow and parking facilities.

In Richard W. Longstreth’s, “Is Main Street Doomed?, I am fascinated by the diagrammatic plans for shopping center layout by Albert Frey. They illustrate, almost unknowingly, the utopic obsession with efficiency and consumption.