Owen McShane: Planners mired in an irrelevant past

Owen McShane

Where regulators have tried to protect mainstreet shopping, they have, as I pointed out in an earlier Perspectives article, devastated the retailing sector.

The regulators are well-intentioned - they do not set out to reduce employment in retailing, raise rents and prices, and choke off innovation and change.

So why do they get it so wrong? We expect our planners to look to the future. Why do they attempt to lock us into the retailing patterns of the past?

The problem lies with their belief in a false theory. You will have problems with your navigation if you believe the earth is flat.

The reports and planning documents that regulators use to justify their protection of mainstreet retailing centres and their opposition to "big box retail" and shopping malls claim consistently that protecting "the traditional retail centres" will maintain, or even restore, "vibrant local communities".

This is a seductive claim. Sadly it is wrong. Places do not create communities. Communities create places.

This has always been true, but for most of human history it was easy to believe places created communities because community activities and the places were coincident.

If you lived in a village, everyone in the village shopped, worshipped and went to school in the village, and people with common interests would meet over a glass of wine or cup of coffee in the town square, or at the newspaper stand. Most people hardly ever left the village.

Today, these patterns have changed, but these changes seem to have passed the regulators by.

Obviously we are now much more mobile. The car has set us free to choose the places where we can best satisfy our diverse needs.

Also, many of us chat with our community of shared interests over the internet, using email to communicate directly with one another, or through newsgroups. We no longer need to walk or drive to the town square to chat with our friends and colleagues. We meet in the non-place of cyberspace.

Many of us, especially in the country, do much of our shopping by internet, especially for books, wine and specialty goods.

Today's communities are communities of shared interests, and these communities develop their own places to meet and share their thoughts.

Retailing centres exist mainly to provide a service. We visit the shops to buy what we want, then go on our way to meet with friends and colleagues somewhere else.

A retailing centre may provide a focus for a community of shared interests, but not normally. If they do, it is because the community of interest has created the centre - not the other way round.

For example, the wonderful market at Matakana has not created a vibrant community, whatever that may be. A group of people with a strong shared interest in growing and selling fresh fruit and vegetables created the farmers' market. The people created the place.

When I want to chat to other growers, that's where I go. When I want to buy the week's groceries, I go to the supermarket.

When I buy my meat at the Mangawhai butcher, the butcher and I chat about recipes and cuts because we share a common interest. But I seldom know anyone else who walks into the shop.

The golf club is the central place for golf enthusiasts. The RSA is the central place for many others.

Some of us around Kaiwaka form a community of interest centred on Lisa Cameron, our personal trainer. We happen to meet at the local gym. But the gym did not create our community of "exercise and nutrition". Lisa did that.

Think about your own life and your own communities of shared interests. Then ask how many focus on any single place.

The development of impersonal shopping centres has been a natural consequence of this dissociation of communities from a single place. We are not short of places to meet and chat.

The internet means that most of us are chatting more than ever before. I belong to a group that communicates daily from places distributed all over the world. Some of us are getting together at a conference next month in Minneapolis.

On my way home I will stop off at Berkeley, where I will spend much of a day wandering round the campus - a place which means more to me than any retailing street.

So are we stuck with small retail centres at one end, and huge impersonal malls at the other?

Not at all. The market continues to respond to changing needs. As an ageing generation has more time on its hands, and as a wealthier population seeks more variety in both products and places, innovators are responding to their needs.

New centres, such as Santana Row in San Francisco Bay, recognise the need for more than bargain prices to attract affluent customers with time to spare. These centres complement the retail outlets with movie complexes, health clubs, children's playing areas, farmers' markets, restaurants and cafes.

These diverse places are set within a high-quality landscape that combines efficiency with comfort and human scale.

The owners need to attract these communities of interest to enjoy their diverse spaces in the right places. So they employ architects who know how to create intimate and comfortable places where one can relax, chat and watch the world go by.

Finally, regulators have to understand that places that appeal to people are created by those architects who know how to design spaces and places of human scale - the size of a room or an alcove. This requires an understanding and appreciation of those architectural elements that have proven their appeal over thousands of years.

In the 1960s, Christopher Alexander, of UC Berkeley, described these elements in his seminal books The Pattern Language and A Timeless Way of Building. His analysis explains why, when a house designed by one of New Zealand's Group Architects comes on the market in Auckland, people line up to look inside.

These houses contain corners, alcoves and window seats that coax you to sit down and read a book, or listen to music, or enjoy a quiet chat. They appeal to what makes us human.

We cannot write these outcomes into books of rules. And we will not meet the needs of today by regulating to maintain an irrelevant past.

* Owen McShane is director of the Centre for Resource Management Studies.