Big supermarkets may be dying but they leave a plague on the landscape.

Sir Simon Jenkins has written another interesting, though controversial, article in The Guardian on planning. This time on the death of the supermarket, how the High Street may evolve in the face of on-line shopping and what role the planners should play.

Here are the highlights:

“Big supermarkets are dying. ….. Some may become warehouses for online distribution centres. Most will languish as cheap stores and homelessness shelters, like the high streets they ruined. Some will be replaced by bleak, ill-sited housing estates, part of the scarred, blotched landscape that is the coalition’s most visible legacy to the British environment.”

“Planning was certainly too rigid, but non-planning is far worse. The leads and lags of a free market in land impose huge “external costs” on the community. It was clearly wrong to allow an oversupply of out-of-town sites for competitive retailing, with no thought given to the impact on city centres or on local communities in general. The anti-green waste of energy, building material and infrastructure was never considered. The gods of the market triumphed.”

“There is no mystery here. If you want to kill a town centre, offer out-of-town sites to Tesco and Sainsbury’s – and build roads to help them. Thatcher, Blair and Cameron did just this. Shoppers had “market choice” for a year or two, then saw their towns “hollow out” and collapse. ……..This is not a free market, it is a stupid market.”

“Land is Britain’s most precious resource. The point of planning is to economise its usefulness. At present, smart planning ought to be thinking ahead of the boom in online shopping. What mistakes might there be in pandering to its gargantuan appetites? What are the implications of every street jammed with home delivery lorries? What of every suburb blighted with distribution centres, supplied by giant hangars littering every motorway?”
“Markets go in cycles.

The job of planning is to even them out, not to exaggerate boom and bust. The out-of-town supermarket era has been brief, barely a quarter century old, but it has done as much damage to the countryside as it has to Britain’s urban cohesion. Its inflexible floor plates and characterless exteriors make even the ghosts of the industrial revolution look picturesque. They will blight the landscape for decades.”

“I am sure many big supermarkets will survive. The convenience ones in town are booming. The Institute of Grocery Distribution predicts they will grow by a third in the next five years. The law of futurology applies to them as to all once-doomed relics of the past, such as books, newspapers, the church, live theatre and jazz. Booms burn out, but every fashion finds its level and something of it survives.”

“I believe town and village centres will find a new role in the post-digital economy of “live experience”. Convenience itself has a value. High streets supply such personal services as coffee bars, beauty salons, tattoo parlours and gyms. After them will come market stalls, foodie counters, pop-up shops and junk vendors, the live activities of the new “smart city”.”

“The high street has no right to eternity but it can supply the framework in which a “small society” flourishes, far below the metropolitan scanner of the coalition’s big society. The high street should embody the ideal of a regulated free market. They tried to kill it, but what a mess we have made of bringing it back.”

Full article here:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/20/big-supermarkets-dying-plague-landscape-retail