As France’s Towns Wither, Fears of a Decline in ‘Frenchness’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
When you own a car it costs a lot of money whether you drive it or not. When you own a car you want free and convenient parking. When you own a car you want wide roads free of obstacles (that is, people). When you own a car then retailers can offload distribution costs onto you, which means buying in bulk at giant stores with giant parking lots. Widespread car ownership is fundamentally incompatible with dense, walkable towns.
But there weren't enough people like me to make the movie's release successful by conventional measures. It barely broke even. There were enough die-hard fans to drive up the price of those theoretically limited 100 tickets, but most people aren't Firefly fans at all and didn't bother to buy tickets at the normal price.
In the past, this was because of disease caused by pre-sanitation density. Today, it is due to below-replacement fertility rates caused by impossible to afford living costs.
So if you consider extinction a form of human suffering, 'traditional walkable cities' fit the bill.
Untold millions have lived in big cities since the time of Babylon and earlier.
I don't know where you get that interpretation, but most historians will say that is exactly the opposite reason why cities were developed. Historically, people moved to cities so that they would NOT die.
Living in a city amongst other people provides one with a greater defense against roving bandits and others who want to kill you and take your property/food. That is how cities came into existence. There is also the benefits of trade. With trade came specialization so that not everyone had to be a farmer to sustain themselves. One could become an artisan, a priest, or a warrior.
(I'm honestly not sure if this is a troll comment or not. I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt though.)
Alternatively one could say any cursory reading of history will reveal that cities are and always have been where humans go to prosper and innovate.
Also, and more importantly, the majority of dense, walkable cities do not have high costs of living - e.g. Berlin, Barcelona, Istanbul, or even much of Chicago. Just because the most expensive major global cities are dense and walkable that does not mean that all dense and walkable cities are expensive.
If you look at the most expensive zip codes in the US [1] you'll see that eight out of ten are in low-density suburban or semi-rural areas. Does that mean that low-density suburban areas are all super expensive?
[1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/betsyschiffman/2015/11/10/full-...
Using property prices as a proxy for demand, it seems the problem is more too many people wanting this.
Most people buy compact commuter cars, lets say. It really doesn't matter what kind of car is the most expensive car, that probably being sports cars. The price of a Ferrari being a large multiple of the price of a Honda Civic means surprisingly very little, or at least it should...
In 2015 about 300K honda civics were sold for lets say $19K each vs 7664 Ferrari sales for $400K each in the USA.
Yes I understand perfectly that the typical Ferrari sells for $400K and a Civic sells for $19K so apparently market clearing prices for Ferrari's dwarfs prices for Civics by a factor of almost exactly 21. Clearly we should socially engineer all our car laws to greatly encourage Ferrari ownership and all our social signalling memes should revolve around the superiority of Ferrari ownership.
However... 300K Honda Civics at 19K is roughly $5.7B in sales. And Ferrari sales of 7664 cars at $400K is almost exactly $3B. Clearly the marketplace has spoken and Ferraris and Civics are roughly equal in the marketplace and should be equal in the world of memes and social signalling.
But wait, there's 300K civic owners and 7664 ferrari owners. Clearly the socially engineered car laws should favor civics, not ferraris.
The world of property is somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd examples. The first example is simply irrelevant.
Cities have some expensive properties and proportionately no one lives there. I'm well aware that culturally its a huge social mistake to pretend anything or anyone matters other than the big cities, regardless how few live there. Most people want the suburb life that we must be convinced to socially engineer laws to destroy.
Most people would want the Ferrari, or a similarly expensive car in a different style (Rolls Royce, Tesla, whatever). In fact, both. But they can afford neither.
Most people would also like a home in the city centre, or one in a village in the countryside, mountains or on the coast. Or both. Who would choose suburbia? It's a compromise, and in every respect the city centre or the village is better.
We both agree there is only one politically correct opinion for the only "correct" lifestyle. Pointing out that most people don't like it, don't live it, and will not tolerate laws to annihilate their current lifestyle, is useful in that there's no real point in talking about legally working to destroy the suburbs when so many people like it there as opposed to the very small number in the city.
No matter how many people post on HN about how they love the city and the burbs must be destroyed by any means necessary legal or otherwise, meanwhile ten real estate contracts were signed by people upgrading to the burbs. Obviously whatever strategy is being used for urban boosterism is socially popular yet in a practical business sense is a complete economic failure.
They are very different things.
Some don't and won't. But others do. I live in a small apartment in the centre of Manhattan. I measure my commute in minutes, and that only because I choose to detour to the many coffee, tea, bagel, juice and breakfast-ramen-in-a-cup shops nearby. My laundry gets picked and dropped off for free, maintenance is someone else's worry and I have an abundance of city services available to me (for which I pay out the nose for through taxes). Going home to my parents' suburbia is relaxing but not how I'd like to live.
These perks I enjoy--diverse people, foods and cultural experiences nearby--are a function of density. Give us city folk more space and you reduce the number of customers within walking distance of each store, reducing their carrying capacities, thereby changing the fundamental dynamic that gives cosmopolitan life its colour.
This isn't for everyone. But lots of people willingly--aspirationally, even--move to cities. Note that chateau life is costly--many Americans don't see why their taxes should subsidise it. (Particularly when it appears to be low-income Americans paying for richer Americans' suburbs [1].) Democratic debate is how we'll find a balance.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
In reality, the laws that do exist tend to be aimed at trying to force people to live in suburbia and _not_ a dense city. Lots of municipalities ban density - either out-right or through absurd minimum parking requirements and other design specifications that severely limit what people can build on their land. Plus decades of transportation planning, and current funding decisions, have been aimed at undermining urban neighborhoods in favor of suburban sprawl.
In general, people who advocate for legal reform to facilitate more urban living are saying there should be _less_ regulation and government intervention into how people live and what they do with their land.
Of course some people want to live in suburbia. That's great. No one is trying to stop them. The tens of millions of people who want to live in dense walkable neighborhoods are sick of people trying to stop them.
Sure, having the only big house with a big yard in a city center would be awesome, but there's a surface area issue where it isn't physically possible to have as many homes in the city centre. So it isn't merely a compromise around cost, it's that there couldn't possibly be enough homes (of the type people enjoy living in in the suburbs) in the city center.
City center living is just as much a compromise: a nice private yard would be great, but I'm giving it up for a more walkable neighborhood. More storage space would be great, but I'm giving it up for a shorter commute. Etc. And if I lived in a city with better traffic, I wouldn't prioritize the commute time as much, so I'd be much more likely to intentionally choose suburbs.
Suburb vs village is a separate question where I would choose suburb 9 times out of 10. You're likely to be in easy distance of far more cultural, entertainment, and dining options.
Some people with cars are complaining, but it is overall viewed as a good decision, as cars take up lot of space for walkable/bikable areas, parcs, etc... and they pollute really badly
I do want a dense city with no car and more transport/the ability to walk to most places
This is what I seem to be seeing anywhere - urbanization as all or nothing, either megapolis or countryside, since the smaller towns seemingly can't sustain many things, everything (except real estate) is more expensive and with less options available; and it's even more so with education and jobs, with many professions simply not having any companies needing them in smaller towns.
However, I would argue that the number is not necessarily very high : for example Niort (110k inhabitants) is also pushing pretty heavily to get rid of cars in the city center [1], making tranports free [2], and having experiments to push people to get rid of their cars [3]. All those have a pretty positive feedback from the local population
Albi might be to small for it, but not necessarily by much, and I think it is also important to have support from the municipality
Sorry about the links in French, but it's pretty hard to find infos on Niort in English :)
[1] : https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/cadre-de-vie/quartiers/centre-... [2] : https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/fr/actualites/dernieres-infos/... [3] : https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/fr/actualites/dernieres-infos/...
Possibly this is the first time any part of my behaviour has been described as "ethnic".
Well, that's like, your opinion, man.
Millions living in NY and other "dense" cities would like to disagree.
According to older statistics I was able to find, it's 58% living in cities of over 200k people in the USA, but that's way more inclusive of a measurement than what would reflect cities that are dense to the point where, for instance, walking becomes more desirable than car ownership.
For instance, the Phoenix metro area has over 5 million people, but it has no really "dense" areas in the walkable sense. It's sprawling desert that was able to be built up recently and spaciously.
In the USA, there's likely a couple dozen million people max living in the too-dense-for-cars cities, and there's hundreds of millions in the population at large. We have the most mobile population on the planet, thus we can "vote" where to live far easier, and the vast majority lives outside those areas. Sure, most are still urban and suburban, but certainly not living in NYC/SF style density.
Well, sort of. Don't most people move to whereever their next job is? I would love to live somewhere like Montana or Idaho where population density is low, but I don't know how I'd pay the bills when I got there.
You're forgetting that it's illegal to build dense walkable cities in much of the country. And, like others have pointed out, few people are actually free to move to exactly the kind of place where they would ideally like to live.
Past and current behavior is not always a good indicator of underlying desires.
Cities have advantages and disadvantages, just like everything else and just like not everything is great in the countryside so not everything is great in the city.
- too little green
- dogshit all over the place
- traffic
- price of accomodation
- impossible to get in or out of the city at certain times of the day
- measurably increasing street violence / drug trade while I lived there (28 years give or take)
- not knowing your neighbors even after years of living next to each other
My 'sweet spot' is just outside a major city. That way I get all the advantages without the disadvantages.
35 minutes :)
Then maybe, they should not have done that. Manhattan Kansas gutted itself the same way.
One is certainly the presence of malls and big box stores nearby. I live within walking distance of several groceries and bakeries but I mainly shop at Costco, because of the insane convenience of getting 90% of what I need at one place, with parking, that also happens to be very inexpensive.
Another is tourism. In tourist towns (Albi is one, apparently), there's a tipping-point where shops can make more money selling bottled water and tchotchkes to tourists than they could selling staples to locals, and once you pass that point things go downhill fast.
Lastly, jobs. If Albi is like many small cities in the US, the jobs are simply elsewhere.
Which in turn is built around the cultural identity of the 20 somethings who move into this area to try to make their way in the world.
Gluten-free is definitely a fad, but it sure helps the people who are actually gluten intolerant,
For example, the textile industry was quickly wiped out in just a handful of years, recently (about 10 years ago).
Industry represents only 10% of French GDP. For neighbouring countries, it is 12% in Spain, 14% in Italy (that's the average in EU) and... 20% in Germany!
That's the country of Alcatel, the company that decided to become "a company with no factory" 15 years ago. It's like an exceptional moment worth a celebration when you discover a "Made in France" behind a product.
It's like the "curse of oil". If you have too much of a natural resource, your economy is very unlikely to create a healthy mix of industries. The high-margin resource crowds out investment in other activities.
The town has rules in place limiting the ability of franchises to expand and so we never got a Starbucks on either of those roads though there is one on Highway 27 near a McDonalds and Burger King, rather close to the village. One thing that did change though was the money. There seems to be a lot more of it there now than when I was a kid and as a result there are about half a dozen Ralph Lauren stores between Southampton, Bridgehampton, and East Hampton. There used to be just one. The influx of the larger brands has made Main Street and Jobs lane feel somewhat soulless. The situation in East Hampton is even worse.
I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say here. Commerce happens and it has pros and cons. One of the cons is that it jacks up rents and makes it hard for local businesses to stay put. Only the well monied corporations can afford a storefront on Main Street these days and it kind of sucks. I'd be willing to bet that of the local businesses that still exist there all of them own the buildings that they are located in.
We somehow need to develop a language where we can talk about priorities that also include the unquantifiable, the fuzzy, and the hard-to-articulate. If all that enters the political calculus is purchasing power for consumers (and people only being consumers), and companies only being about making money without also being about building and maintaining communities and cultures, then society turns into a paperclip-maximizing GDP-chasing hideous machine where we end up losing things that we valued yet did not realize we valued.
I live two hours north of Albi; local towns have free parking over lunch, so restaurants throng nearly every day of the week. Town center parking is free all day on Saturday, which attracts thousands of people, both locals and visitors, to the thriving market.
The result is that not only are there no empty shops in town at all, and café culture is alive and well, but twice a week the towns are packed with several hundred market stalls. It's really very remarkable.
Of course, tourism makes a lot of this viable; our town of 8,000 people has over a million visitors each year. But France more generally is a world champion at this, with 10% more visitors than the USA, 30% more than Spain and the better part of three times as many as the UK.
In other words, the same car-centered development afflictions as elsewhere, and the same "strong towns" reforms needed.
And that was butchered like nowhere else. The city entrances are a nightmare of uglyness. All cities, all towns, even big villages suffer from the same plague. Roads bordered by commercial areas filled with the cheapest shoebox building possible, dirty parking-lots, anarchic advertisements.
http://i.f1g.fr/media/ext/orig/www.lefigaro.fr/medias/2014/0...
http://images.telerama.fr/medias/2010/02/media_52457/comment...
And you can use Streetview around any town-centre and get the same kind of horror along the main roads for kilometres.
That was the first effect: aesthetics; it spread since the 80's. And now the second effect, the functional one, has been kicking in in the last 10 years: now not only villages are deprived from the shops there used to be, but every city except the largest metropolises suffer the same fate.
It is France who invented, developed and exported the concept of 'hypermarkets'. In the 80's, we had one near Toulouse (city which had not yet grown like the city it is now), in what used to be countryside, that was the largest in Europe, and I believe in the world. People would drive there on Saturday from 100, 150 km away.
I think of Singapore Airport.
No community, no common culture, no (historical) shared experiences…just a brief fleeting visit in the present moment, on your way to somewhere else.
Which is maybe a reflection of the experience of modern life.
In disagreement with grand OPs daydream of a multicultural future utopia, the multicultural area of the future probably looks a lot more like multicultural areas of the present and recent past, the burbs of Paris burning, genocide in Africa and the middle east, raping and violence by refugees in Europe. The multicultural world of the future will look a lot like Syria, lets say, but angrier more violent and less functional, and it'll be everywhere not just "over there". Except for the rich people in their gated communities profiting off all of it.
There is no one single 'white culture', you need to at the very least specify 'white American culture', or Scottish/Australian/Russian, etc.
But even if we accepted that false generalisation, I'm rather curious as to how you see us fetishising its suicide. Care to elaborate?
Bankers, lawyers etc., sure, downtown, but everything else can be way out in the townships.
Aside from Paris and London, most European cities don't have sprawling burbs, rather, you go through tons of little villages in the periphery.
With high speed trains making 'town XYZ to Paris' in 1 hr, it shouldn't be so bad to put companies within a couple of hours driving distance from main centres.
This is also an issue of migration: most newcomers move to cities.
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g2359785-d3930...
If there are any French-speakers around here, I would love to see any links to prior articles about this (either about the blog or this other fellow's opposition).
An article from Le Monde about Albi, and the blogger: http://transports.blog.lemonde.fr/2016/05/19/albi-sa-cathedr...
A few other news articles: http://www.leparisien.fr/midi-pyrenees/un-albigeois-repertor...
http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2016/03/10/2301060-cree-page...
It sucks, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's different.
Unless smaller towns specialize or remote work plus high rent pressure in centers drives people back out I dont see how that trend will reverse.
Compared to eastern Europe and Spain France has relatively low pressure with the demographic change in rural areas: http://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/europakarte/#11/43.9278/2.14...
What you see there is in fact the influence of Toulouse's growth. Inhabitants are flowing from Paris and the Northern parts of country, and they are ready to settle very far away from Toulouse. People not only settle 10 or 20 kilometres away, but also up to 80 and 100 km away. And then they drive that distance to work.
There are several problems with that. The first is that there is a continuous urban spread around Toulouse, more or less US-style; and then, farther away, there are small urban spread around small towns and villages. People did not move there to live in a city or village apartment, they want a house/villa, with a garden and a swimming pool.
The second is that the "god" figures that you can see on map do not reflect the reality on the field. The consequence of what I said in the previous paragraph is that these places are turned into bedroom communities, into dormitory village. There is no more life after these people have settled than there was before. These people activities are turned towards the metropolis, there is no gain in vitality for the village.
Another factor, in more remote places where the influence of Toulouse is small or nil, is that people who fled the countryside in the 50's and 60's are back there for their retirement. So that makes good figures: stabilisation or small growth. But as you can imagine, that doesn't translate into more activity and life. As years pass, the biggest employer of the municipality becomes the elderly home. You can't base a local economy on this. And that is not sustainable either, early baby boomers won't last forever.
A final point about what makes such maps look better than reality. My place used to be 4000 inhabitants in 1850. It is now "stable" under 800 inhabitants. Neighbouring communities underwent even more serious losses. But the major 'emigration' waves happened long ago (in the 50's and the 60's for the last one), so it doesn't show on such maps. Afterwards, the flows and the leaks have been moderate, compared to past bleedings.
Those who wish for a return to a bakery and a cafe on each corner are prioritizing some fond memory of a bygone era over economic efficiency. Consumers speak with their wallets, and apparently their voices have been heard. Yes, everybody enjoys that romantic idyll, but nobody wants to pay for it.
Isolation because of language is something fairly unique to Francophone areas, you see the same in Belgium.
Quebec is near the bottom of the pack when it comes to per capita GDP, close to the Maritime provinces and that's including all the government entities present there.
If Quebec would let go of the 'French first' mentality it would likely recover at some point in the next two decades but creating this barrier to commerce has not served it well.
This is in the end not about having the sign in both French and English, the government can do with its signs whatever they want with their signs. They are telling people what to do with signs that are not theirs.
There is no 'protection' to be had from signs, nor is it a sign of disrespect to have a sign in English only.
There are plenty of 'English only' signs where I live and it's neither French speaking nor English speaking and nobody actually cares because they don't see it as a sign of disrespect or feel that they need to be protected.
If the Quebec government would combat corruption and actual crime as zealously as they go overboard on how-high-the-lettering-on-your-English-sign-is then Quebec would be in better shape already.
As for the last part of your comment: it isn't a big deal, that's the whole point, so don't make the language of a sign into a big deal. In fact, don't make language into a big deal. There is no need to protect it, it will change over time and fighting that will hurt you more than that it will help because of the inevitable isolation it will cause.
One hint: nobody spoke 'Occitan', that's a modern artificial construction, based on a unification spread after the languages were already dying (such artificial unifications can work, like in the case of Basque, but this one never took off). The languages were different from an area to another even though they shared a large common root, and even different from a valley from another at my place, where communication is difficult for geographical reasons. So just imagine the differences across the supposed 'Occitan' area that occupies half of France, on areas that were not under the same rule and had no peculiar communication! I remember the reaction of my old uncle from the center of France, the day some of those activists told him he was an Occitan speaker: "what the heck is that? We never spoke it. So now we are supposed we were speaking Occitan? Like the people from the South? First news!" What's funny is that most Occitan activists I met are not true speakers: they learned it as a foreign language, if I may say so, and it shows! they have a terrible French accent when they speak, and they use typical French turns of phrase (as when I speak and write English :-) ).
Not sure what this has to do with increasing state violence against immigrants and minorities, which seems to be the entire agenda of this far-right wave we're seeing.
I think you're projecting rather than commenting on the actual article.
The campaign is like few before it in France, because of the looming question of whether the far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, will do the once-unthinkable, and win. She has already pushed the discourse rightward and made a visceral promise to voters: to protect not just France, but Frenchness. Whether the menace is defined as Islam, immigration or globalization, her vow to voters is the same: I am the woman to preserve the French way of life.
"The visible decline of so many historic city centers is intertwined with these anxieties. Losing the ancient French provincial capital is another blow to Frenchness — tangible evidence of a disappearing way of life that resonates in France in the same way that the hollowing out of main streets did in the United States decades ago."
And from there the article goes on to talk about loss of businesses in city centers, vacancy rates, and malls. The point is protecting France, not against immigrants, but against the change of lifestyle.
So, my "zero" claim was wrong. I still assert that the gist of the article is very much not about immigration, Marine Le Pen, police violence, minorities, or incarcerations.
This article appears here because of a larger political context, which is explicitly mentioned in the article. My comment is relevant for this reason. I'm sorry you disagree. It would be great if you could respond to what I said instead of picking a nit about what percentage of the article would have to be related to my comment for it to be relevant to you.
The context of that paragraph was that the author had visited the city before, in the context of a political campaign, and this time wasn't. Rather, this time the author was there to look into the change in culture caused by the decline in city centers in provincial cities. And that is the last mention of national politics in the article. There's a bit of discussion of city-level politics in the creation of shopping malls outside of the city center, but nothing more about national politics.
So I've read the article carefully enough to be confident in my assertion - that you are projecting your perspective onto the article. You're taking what is only peripherally mentioned, and trying to make it a central issue.