Thread by @ChittiMarco

1/ A while ago I promised to write a thread about why zoning is not the only (maybe not even the main) obstacle between us and the 15-minutes city, starting from my grandmother "latteria".

Today I deliver : a thread about commerce, logistic and city planning.

2/ Let's first start with Granma's Latteria, that she opened in 1959. It was a small neighborhood shop, technically a "milk shop", but more of a small grocery + cheese shop + bar in a secondary residential street within a small cluster (tobacco, butcher and vegetable shop)

3/ It was a typical family business, run primarily by nonna Giovanna with occasional help from grandpa during weekends and by my father and my aunt after school, especially for home deliveries by foot or bike

Quite the typical portrait of a neighborhood shop in the postwar years

4/ But starting from the 1970-80s a different type of commercial structure became common: larger retailers and franchise opening supermarkets of 1000-2000 sqm in dense residential neighborhoods.
Like that Coop, we used to go when we were kids (with roof parking, lol)

5/ It is nothing like zoning-imposed commercial strip box with large parking common in US at the time. Instead, the growing importance of large retailers (mostly cooperatives like Coop or Conad in Italy) pushed the planners to accomodate this new typology within the built city.

6/Another major transformation happened from the late 1980s: the arrival of French retailers on the Italian market, with ten years of experience in developing "hyper-markets" at home, pushed local retailers to join the rush to build giant "ipermercati", larger than 10,000 sqm

7/ Unlike in the US but like in France, those car-oriented ipermercati were essentially anchored to a large grocery retailer (10 to 15 k sqm), surrounded by a growingly franchise-dominated ancillary mall in a sea of parking at a major highway exit.

8/ Ironically, the first one to open in Bologna, "Shopville Gran Reno", was inaugurated in 1993 by the main investor of the venture, a guy called Silvio Berlusconi, who announced in that occasion his will to enter the political arena.
A cursed place.

9/ In the following few years, 5 more opened around the ring expressway, all needing a negotiated amendment to the Plan to be accommodated. Political pressure and the promise of more taxes lured many cities, especially small peri-urban municipalities, to accomodate those giants.

10/ It happened very quickly, in the matter of a decade. And as many people asked for policies to put a brake in those development that were quickly emptying out inner city shops, it was too little, too late (a very similar trajectory happened in France).

11/ Grandma retired in 1995, when her business was already suffering from this unbearable competition and her historical clientele was moving or passing away. She sold the business to a new owner, that retained the bar business only, but she too closed for good a few years later

12/ Since, all the small retailers in the same cluster closed one after the other. All but the tobacco shop, a regulated and protected activity. As you can see in the picture, two shops has been converted in ground floor apartments, considered more rentable.

13/ his case is hardly an exception: since the advent of large retailers, thousands of small neighborhood shops closed, many vacant spaces, even in the city center or new infill development, has been converted to homes, parking, offices,thanks to a quite loose land use regulation

14/ Planning policies to "reinvent" the local shop have had mixed results. The tentative to bring the hyper-market+mall format within walkable dense neighborhoods has been largely a failure, as for this reuse of an old factory for commercial use in the mid 2000s: bankrupted.

15/ A more positive trajectory has been observed for groceries, as many large retailers have since the mid-2000s started to come back to the city, opening small and medium size groceries in walkable neighborhoods as marges of growth for hyper-markets were getting thin.

16/ The latest trend in retail is today the medium size grocery in the margin between the car and the walking city, often serving a mixed clientele of walkers, bikers and drivers. Still, suburban mostly car-oriented boxes are popping up for non-food franchises.

17/ Finally, other very suburban and completely car oriented retail formats, like "shopping outlets", have popped up in the last twenty years in the middle of nowhere at motorways' exits, exploiting loopholes in the planning laws aimed at curbing further suburbanization of retail

18/ All this happened within a context of quite loose land use regulations, that allow most small neighborhood shops to be easily opened everywhere by-right and slightly larger ones (up to 1,000-2,000 sqm) to be opened with a quite fast ad hoc procedure.

19/ In Italy, that deep transformation of retail from a family business in walkable neighborhood to a largely car-oriented activity has not been engineered by planners, but largely driven by market forces sometimes opposed, sometimes accompanied by planning regulations.

20/ Even parking minimums came in the game quite late, as an inadequate and naïve reaction to the negative effects of early car-oriented retail built within the walkable dense fabric, in a cultural context where the car is still often considered the default transportation mode.

21/ Behind the shift away from neighborhood shops there are economies of scale, consumers preferences, logistic contraints and other logics that strictly Euclidean land use alone cannot produce nor impede, as a whole lifestyle has been built around the Sunday shopping by car

22/Does that mean that planning has no faults? Of course not. Planners worked actively to accomodate cars in our cities. And US Euclidean land use zoning is dumb because of its rigidness and its incapacity to allow the city to adapt to changing social and economic conditions

23/But there is much more than zoning alone to "blame" for the likes of Grandma's shop sitting sadly empty for the last twenty years

A whole Copernican shift in how we produce, we transport, we sell, and we consume good has been at play.And planning tools alone cannot change it