About Peter H Bos and cities
I’m Peter Harry Bos, the author of these blogs. I’ve always been interested in cities and how they change. Being a draughtsman, not a city planner, I’m interested in the layout of towns, the history of their planning/guiding rules, and their outcomes. In the 2000s Hamilton had a few workshops in which consultant urban planners told stories about how to revitalise parts of cities. In 2009 I first visited Europe and the cities in which my wife’s and my families had lived: Schiedam and Groningen. Here we found cities that were very different, even when they were neighbouring cities.
After the Christchurch earthquakes a lot of rebuild ideas and reports were presented, which increased my interest in how outcomes were to be measured. My wife and I have been lucky enough to have visited Europe several more times, and have spent time in cities rebuilt after the war: cities where the average building age is younger than Hamilton’s average. Many of these cities’ centres have fully occupied street-front real estate and high foot traffic, along with people watching people and people meeting face to face. At the same time, there are a few cities showing retail blight and clearly losing foot traffic. There are many reasons for loss of foot traffic, but the most visible is the lack of entry-level businesses.
Entry-level, non-franchised businesses are not unfair competition to existing business. The lifespan of fashion and business is not endless. It is important that the entry costs for new, small, non-franchised businesses are low enough that failure is not catastrophic for the investor.
People’s desire to hang out near retail centres is not reducing: we can see this at the Hamilton East, Te Awa, and Chartwell shopping centre and neighbourhood shops. In Europe you can find every type of retail centre imaginable, and a lot of competition between cities and neighbourhoods to attract people. Foot traffic in retail centres ranges from places that are packed with foot traffic to areas that feel abandoned.
It is futile to suppress competition. What comes with competition is change of use, which includes ground floor residential and offices. In my travels I found neighbouring cities with very different levels of foot traffic, and it seems that the more ‘single-function’ the city is, the more it is at risk of being blighted.
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