Villageonomics, or why many of our towns look increasingly like concrete blocks

I grew up in a tiny village in Germany at the Rhine and I remember clearly that, although the place had only about 3,500 citizens, we had three bakeries, a butcher, two supermarkets, a toy shop, a carpentry, and a tobacco house. Last time I visited, all of those rustic perculiarities seemed to have disappeared, or rather, they've been moved into shopping mall-like zones outside of town. This development piqued my curiosity, so I decided to explore the field and found a pattern: villageonomics.

Source: author

As I dug deeper into the material of villageonomics, I stumbled across two very different states that German towns are in: one I'd like to call the host-styled, and the other a client-styled (see picture 2; my  background as an IT nerd helped me with the names). The host village represents the one of my childhood memories. Its citizens are provided with a various amount of products and services, have a bunch of small and medium-sized companies, and all of this blends into each other in a somewhat chaotic but bustling system. The client version also offers similar products and services to its people, yet these are gathered in neatly designed, designated zones. Shopping is done in mall-like areas, education and living remains in residence belts, and work usually is about a 30 minutes drive away.

I'm not arguing (yet) which type of these admittedly pretty basic models is better; but they should suffice for analysing the development my home town has made over the past 25 years. Once a (sort of) vivacious host town, it developed into a client version. And here's how it happened: a town and actually any kind of larger dwelling of people consist of interest groups. Residents want a safe environment for them and their children, businesses want to make profitable growth, and politicians usually try to reconcile those ideas. Now in my old, host-version village the political establishment was challenged by the residents desire for safety: families wanted a sound way to school for their children and requested a bypass diminishing the amount of traffic. The leaders got pressure from the businesses, too. Those entrepreneurs wanted actually more traffic (more potential customers), and didn't like the residents bitching about the noise they made while working (remember the carpentry).

Source: author

It took the political leaders time but after giving it some thought, they decided to setup a new business-zone near the entrance to the highway. This move was probably deemed as a win-win situation: less traffic within the village and business could be as loud as they want in the outskirt. If they only would've realized to whom they'd opened the door. The designated business zones quickly attracted specialized chains. Not a problem per se, but these franchising businesses are not designed to serve the citizens of the town. They are of course serving them too but primarily their DNA zeros them in on quick and dirty growth. The businesses from my old host-version town, on the other hand, was indeed intended to serve the citizens of the village. This type of business isn't necessarily a growth business.

After the first chains of McDonalds, Lidl, Aldi, and the like set up shop, they rapidly installed huge signs near the highway. Attracting more customers and thus sales they could lower their prices. The villagers of course liked that very much, abandoned the shops within their old town, and joined the drain. The deserted entrepreneurs from town tried to compete with the specialized chains but lost in the end because the rising cost-disadvantage in comparison to the fancy, new chains muscled them out. Years went by and the town even grew a bit but its shape developed from host to client-village in the end. Citizens have now a clearly designated and calm residential zone with a school and a commercial zone with a mall-like character.

Now is it a bad thing to live in a calm client-type village? I believe it is because at first, a place like that cannot develop a character. That one is actually outsourced to the marketing department of a bunch of chains. Second, there is the lack of  transparency that emerges. In an ideal type of host village one can follow the activities starting for instance with the ranger marking trees, over the lumberjacks chopping them, up to the carpenter turning the timber into say a stool. Think of a McDonald in which you could buy burgers with beef from the pasture next door. Many don't like that level of reality, seeing ones food walking around, yet I'd rather have a go with that than with mincemeat from anonymity-land. But it is the third point that bothers me the most in those client-type towns: our children don't learn by sight what businesses actually mean. They grow up in isolated residency zones in which nothing really happens aside from school and studying. Instead they get trained like Pawlow's dogs seeing a burger sign and yelling "Next exit out please" from the backseat. To counteract this development a town needs politicians that can grasp the idea of long-term aspects in business. If the leaders from my hometown would've resisted the supposedly great business deals, the citizens would still have their bustling environment. Better think twice before you open the doors of change in the direction of commercial zones.

¹c.p.: Meinhard Prill, "Der Zweck heiligt die Mittel - Bayern und seine Gewerbegebiete" ["The ends justify the means - Bavaria and its commercial zones" (translated)] 2011, Bayrischer Rundfunk; "The trouble with outsourcing", July 2011, The Economist.