For those who are unfamiliar, or don't click through links like the above, groceries in European cities are often smaller than in the US and also dotted more frequently through the cities. They don't have big parking lots and you aren't expecting to do a week's worth of grocery shopping there at once--a few days at a time at most.
I'm not talking about farmer's markets and similar events, which occur in both places; I'm talking about the urban design as it relates to fixed grocery stores.
So why is this good design? Why should I want less choice and more trips?
1. Smaller Stores ≠ Less Choice
Well, first of all, it's not actually necessarily less choice. Go to a US grocery store and you'll see a lot of variety in some areas, but you'll also see whole walls of very similar looking or identical goods. Because Americans are used to doing big trips, we get a lot of stuff each time, typically, but we don't necessarily get different stuff, just more of what we buy--so those big shelves are often full of a lot of the same stuff in larger quantities.
When you buy more often, even in smaller quantities, things rotate in the store's stock. And that means more things can be stocked in the same space, because what's being bought isn't taking up space sitting there waiting for someone to buy 100 at once.
Small purchases, more often--like this.
This is especially true for fresh and unpreserved foods, like the cheese and bread above, but it's even true for canned and packaged goods: despite the huge shelves, we don't actually always get more variety. Now, we might for something like breakfast cereal, which they just don't eat as much as we do--but for commonly used foods, that both Americans and Europeans eat, we often don't.
There's a larger urbanist point here too: all the preparation we do in the US to allow for all that stuff to be bought all at once (huge cars, huge parking lots, huge stores) isn't necessary either: and that space and effort could be redirected in more productive ways.
As mentioned, the above point is especially important in relation to fruits, vegetables, pastries, bread, meat, fish, and other perishables. See, a lot of these things, when sold in the US, need to be treated for preservation: they will spend a lot of time on supermarket shelves, and then even more in storage at home (because we make less frequent trips), so they have to stay edible through all of that. In Europe and other places with similar habits, they will be fresher when bought (because stock rotates) and when consumed (because they are bought closer to when they are used). And as such, they can be less treated for storage, and fresher for use.
So more trips to the grocery store can actually mean better food.
Again, I would make a larger urbanist claim related to this: like grocery design, urban design should focus differently than it does in the US by focusing more on what actually makes people happy. Like our grocery stores, US cities have the wrong focus. Our groceries focus on making sure food doesn't spoil by itself without considering if "eaten before it spoils" might be more important than "takes longer to spoil." Our cities focus on making sure cars can move through without wondering if "fewer cars" or "more positive reasons to stop and do something" might be more important than "cars don't have to wait."
Fewer car trips, and more local amenities, might matter more than a faster freeway.
2. Leave Room for Improvisation
A weekly grocery trip and a multipack of ingredients implies a planned existence, or at least one that is predictable and relatively invariant. A daily trip means more room for changing plans and new ideas (successful or otherwise).
When the norm is to buy small amounts and use them up, you can more easily take a risk with a recipe, a new prepared food, or something else. If you have to buy 5 lbs (since we're American) of flour to use 2 tbsp for a recipe, you're either wasting food or really committing to making that recipe a lot.
More frequent trips come with smaller packages, and both create space for more improvisation in life, and greater flexibility in plans even when there are plans.
This too can expand to greater urbanist implications. A big point of 15 minute cities is to let you change routine if you want or need, because nothing is so far away that you have to center your whole day on planning around it. So many American cities plan their transit and urban design more generally around predictable commute patterns, rather than flexibility. There's a reason a lot of European planners speak of "regional rail" when Americans would say "commuter rail."
Not to put too fine a point on it, but a model that allows for more flexibility and improvisation promotes human flourishing more.
3. Fewer Food Deserts
And of course one side of the pond is likely to have fewer food deserts than the other, because fewer, smaller stores means they spread out across the cities more. Rather than having a single store that everyone from a given area drives to, European cities are more likely to have several smaller ones that might have overlapping walksheds but end up closer, on average, to a given spot.
That doesn't mean Europe doesn't have food deserts. It just means that they way their system is typically set up means they have fewer, especially in large cities.
What do you think? How often do you go to the grocery store, and what do you notice about how that reflects larger currents in your life?
No comments:
Post a Comment