11 ms·

As France’s Towns Wither, Fears of a Decline in ‘Frenchness’

89 points by ucaetano 10y ago

gumby 10y ago
Good to get some perspective on a process that is happening worldwide.
- gydfi 10y ago
  When I think of what a globalised world will look like, I think of Singapore Airport. People of all colours and creeds, living peacefully together, with absolutely no history or cultural memory beyond the present moment, and nothing to do except shop for globally marketed luxury brands and aspire towards the ownership of fancier globally marketed luxury brands. A giant, clean, lowest common denominator shopping mall. But the food court is good.
  - theoh 10y ago
    Food is a form of cultural memory. Maybe the most important one?
    - Apocryphon 10y ago
      What if it all ends up as chic commercial fusion food artisanally and algorithmically optimized for flavor and appeal to the popular taste of the moment?
      - theoh 10y ago
        Disposable fashion is still culture, but I agree, that doesn't sound like a situation you could characterize as "memory" (apart from the fact that it's always going to be catering to acquired or innate taste preferences)
  - manarth 10y ago
    I think of Singapore Airport. Which - being an airport - is about as transient as you can possibly get. 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.
    - VLM 10y ago
      Its an extreme form of white privilege and domination in that whites do strongly fetishize the suicide of their own white culture, but other cultures feel no need to suicide their culture just because whites have a weird desire, and telling them they're going to have to eliminate their traditional family life or bulldoze their mosques or forget their traditions and holidays and histories to fit some kind of white ideal of zen like annihilation of the self is pretty racist and is likely not to work so well. 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.
      - kjdal2001 10y ago
        If you are referring to gydfi's post as the "daydream", I don't think you interpreted the tone correctly. I didn't read it as a description of a utopia. The last sentence gives away that the preceding ones don't describe something good.
      - cycrutchfield 10y ago
        Thankfully, your prognostications are completely divorced from reality. My advice to you is to reduce your Breitbart and Stormfront intake.
      - msie 10y ago
        I have trouble figuring out your point. First paragraph talks about white privilege. Second paragraph disparages multiculturalism.
  - gumby 10y ago
    That was kind of my impression of Singapore the city when I was a kid in the 1960s. Well, wasn't so clean like it is now.
  - gumby 10y ago
    BTW when I said "worldwide" I was also thinking of rural USA.
jacquesm 10y ago
Guess where lots of LePen's voters are?
- nkassis 10y ago
  Well this isn't like the US where a rural area voters have more impact on the election that city voters. LePen will need a majority of votes to win the election. The situation isn't comparable to what happened in the US in my opinion.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Fortunately.
dopamean 10y ago
I can empathize a bit with the feeling of loss surrounding changes in ones culture. I grew up in the Hamptons (Southampton to be precise). When I was a kid nearly every store on the two main streets in town (Main Street and Jobs Lane) were owned by local people. The ice cream shop was (and AFAIK still is) owned by the parents of a kid in my first grade class, the clothing boutiques were owned by friends of my family, my favorite restaurant was owned by the father of a kid in my Boy Scout troupe. It was all familiar. It was all local. 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.
- m1sta_ 10y ago
  You can blame the consumers who still flock to the chain stores. You can blame the landlords for choosing money over culture. You can't really blame the chain stores in this instance, they're just meeting demand.
  - DanAndersen 10y ago
    "Blame" is such a distracting word in all of this. It leads to this weird punching back and forth between which group can be looked at as unfortunate victims of social forces and influences or economics or "just trying their best to maximize shareholder value", and which groups are consciously "at fault." 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.
tekklloneer 10y ago
This is happening everywhere, though. Young people in every western nation seem to be flocking to central, dense urban areas while at the same time market forces cause retail to thin its margins and coalesce. It sucks, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's different.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  It's actually a really good thing. Instead of shopping at places like JCPenny or other big-box retailers, people are spending more money and buying higher-quality or locally made things in those areas. It's a win for everybody except sweatshops and cheap, disposable goods.
- mxfh 10y ago
  For most young people it's not a choice. First the higher education to get today's jobs is not available in smaller towns, so you have to move away first. While in parallel the old hands-on jobs and professions are disappearing from smaller towns due to rationalization and centralization tends to move away higher skill jobs as well, so people less often stay or find an incentive to come back after their college years. 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/#11/43.9278/2.1475/en http://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/europakarte/#11/43.9278/2.14...
  - wott 10y ago
    [About the map] 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.
mlinksva 10y ago
> To him, Albi’s fate was a cultural misfortune. City leaders had poured money into a high-concept modernistic new culture center at the town’s edge. And the shopping mall had been built. Large grocery chains, called hypermarkets, had also been constructed outside the city, with free parking. It is not that Albi no longer had commerce, or activity. But the essence of the ancient city was being lost. In other words, the same car-centered development afflictions as elsewhere, and the same "strong towns" reforms needed.
- wott 10y ago
  Yes. The thing is that France used to have perhaps the best balance in human-shaped landscapes in the world. A mix of villages, small towns and mid-sized cities spread rather evenly across the whole land, that made its charm. 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/2014/07/14/PHO61015ea2-0b42-11e4-bc9d-f56ed247f9da-805x453.jpg http://i.f1g.fr/media/ext/orig/www.lefigaro.fr/medias/2014/0... http://images.telerama.fr/medias/2010/02/media_52457/comment-la-france-est-devenue-moche,M33458.jpg 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.
chrismealy 10y ago
"City leaders had poured money into a high-concept modernistic new culture center at the town’s edge. And the shopping mall had been built. Large grocery chains, called hypermarkets, had also been constructed outside the city, with free parking. It is not that Albi no longer had commerce, or activity. But the essence of the ancient city was being lost." 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.
- VLM 10y ago
  How much human suffering is acceptable to imprison people in the dense walkable cities no one wants for themselves, but desperately want others to endure for them because it looks quaint? Most ethnic activities die out to the sound of "It sure would be nice if someone else would...".
  - m1sta_ 10y ago
    I would prefer to live in the dense walkable town. I realise I'm a sample of one but don't assume there aren't people who don't prefer that model.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - ocschwar 10y ago
    Funny thing. The densest, most walkable city in Massachusetts, Somerville, is now the most sought after city in the Commonwealth, and among the most sought after in the country.
    - gozur88 10y ago
      By what measurement?
miguelrochefort 10y ago
Hopefully they don't attempt to mimic Quebec's Language Police...
- manarth 10y ago
  The Académie française predates the Office québécois de la langue française by over 300 years. That discussion has been going for a long time.
  - miguelrochefort 10y ago
    As far as I know, France still allows McDonald's to sell "McNuggets" and people to register companies with English names.
    - mraison 10y ago
      True, however all ads in English or any other foreign language must be accompanied by a translation.
- eniotna 10y ago
  Why is the language policy in Quebec bad? From my understanding, it was created to protected their right to be served in their native language. Not everyone has the luxury to learn and speak English fluently.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    It's bad because people should be free to use whatever language they want to use. Dictating the size of signs in French and other such nonsense serves no good, and in fact is one of the reasons why Quebec is not exactly a hotbed of progress. (To put it very mildly.) 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.
subpixel 10y ago
This article does a poor job of addressing the root causes of this sort of urban desiccation. There are likely many that compound. 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.
- rjsw 10y ago
  One thing that is very noticeable in France is that people still buy locally made products. There isn't nearly the same trend to move production to China as elsewhere, so smaller factories haven't all closed.
  - muninn_ 10y ago
    People in the US at least have wised up to this as well. There are stores all over the place that sell made in "insert state here", and people buy! I think it's good. It helps build a cultural identity, which is something that is under attack in the West.
    - ocschwar 10y ago
      Sometimes it gets a little absurd. In Somerville, MA, there are stores for locally made goods, and the goods are high quality, and certainly good examoples of the local esthetic. 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.
      - muninn_ 10y ago
        Fair criticism for sure, sometimes it can be superficial, but hey at least they're trying, unlike their parents.
edblarney 10y ago
They should reduce business taxes out of urban areas to encourage companies to move and setup there. In today's world, there economic advantage of being collocated is not as strong. 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.
beatpanda 10y ago
I understand the frustration at the core of this article, and it's the reason why I live in a bigger city. It's only in bigger cities in America that you can find institutions like a local butcher or bakery that you can walk to. It would be great if that lifestyle were available outside of a few big cities. Conversations about how to achieve this have been happening on the left for a long time. 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.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  Not sure what your last paragraph has to do with the article.
  - beatpanda 10y ago
    This article is being published at this time in part because an anti-immigrant politician is leading in the polls in France, as they are in many Western democracies. All of their platforms always include some element of using police violence to assault or incarcerate undesirable minorities. And it is unclear to me what these proposed solutions have to do with the problems people say they are experiencing.
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      Did you read the same article I did? There was zero reference to immigration, Marine Le Pen, police violence, minorities, or incarcerations. I think you're projecting rather than commenting on the actual article.
      - beatpanda 10y ago
        From the 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.
tnjm 10y ago
As a personal perspective, France seems to have done better than any other place I've lived in to stem the tide of urban decline. 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.
DanAndersen 10y ago
One thing that is missing from the article is an actual link to Florian Jourdain's blog. I was really wanting to see it, but no reference was to be found. As an English speaker only, I found myself hitting a wall when trying to search for more info. The most I was able to find was a news article ( http://www.centpourcent.com/les-infos/albi-pour-un-centre-ville-dynamique-6241 http://www.centpourcent.com/les-infos/albi-pour-un-centre-vi... ) mentioning just a little blurb (and a bit from Stéphane Kuntz, presumably the head of the merchants association mentioned in the NYT article). 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).
- treiz 10y ago
  Here is the facebook page created by Jourdain: https://www.facebook.com/Albi.Centre.Ville.En.Perdition/ https://www.facebook.com/Albi.Centre.Ville.En.Perdition/ .
- GuiA 10y ago
  The blog: https://albicentreville.wordpress.com https://albicentreville.wordpress.com An article from Le Monde about Albi, and the blogger: http://transports.blog.lemonde.fr/2016/05/19/albi-sa-cathedrale-ses-boutiques-vides-et-son-lanceur-dalerte/ http://transports.blog.lemonde.fr/2016/05/19/albi-sa-cathedr... A few other news articles: http://www.leparisien.fr/midi-pyrenees/un-albigeois-repertorie-les-commerces-fermes-dans-sa-ville-12-03-2016-5619301.php http://www.leparisien.fr/midi-pyrenees/un-albigeois-repertor... http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2016/03/10/2301060-cree-page-facebook-denoncer-marasme-centre-ville.html http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2016/03/10/2301060-cree-page...
gorkemyurt 10y ago
Took a trip to the Provence region last summer and a bookstore in a small town called Banon caught my attention. Anyone visiting the region should stop by Banon and visit this bookstore. I don't think all of San Francisco has a bookstore of this quality. https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g2359785-d3930181-Reviews-Librairie_le_Bleuet-Banon_Alpes_de_Haute_Provence_Provence.html https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g2359785-d3930...
maximswim 10y ago
That's why i'm a strong advocate of universal income. It would be a first step to completely rethink the urbanization of the country. If you don't need to live in Paris to have a job, then you can go repopulate a beautiful town like Albi !
maximswim 10y ago
That's why i'm a strong advocate of universal income. It would be a first step to completely rethink the urbanization of the country. If you don't need to live in Paris to have a job, then you can go repopulate a beautiful town like Albi !
treiz 10y ago
I live in Albi and I can only agree with all this, I have not been here for long but already saw many shops closing. In some streets, the only one left are real estate agencies :). When you check the mainstream local press the point of view is not the same, this article says Albi is the 4th best place to live in France http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2017/01/25/2503345-albi-classee-4eme-ville-francaise-ou-il-fait-bon-vivre.html http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2017/01/25/2503345-albi-clas... ... From my point of view, I actually enjoy it here: good food, good pubs and a few places to listen to artists from the local scene, that's enough for me :)
cycrutchfield 10y ago
Honestly, and this seems to be an unpopular opinion, the nostalgia and fetishization of the past is completely useless. Do we also yearn for the days of feudal France and its romantic castles dotting the landscape? 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.
mdekkers 10y ago
I recently moved to France, and see the same in the towns around here. Small towns that have a mall or hypermarket close by are invariably dead. Interestingly, I visited Sete, which has a mall and hypermarket about 15km away, and the town center is vibrant and alive. I certainly think that this phenomena is mostly due to the availability of malls.

89 points by ucaetano 10y ago

gumby 10y ago

Good to get some perspective on a process that is happening worldwide.

gydfi 10y ago
When I think of what a globalised world will look like, I think of Singapore Airport. People of all colours and creeds, living peacefully together, with absolutely no history or cultural memory beyond the present moment, and nothing to do except shop for globally marketed luxury brands and aspire towards the ownership of fancier globally marketed luxury brands. A giant, clean, lowest common denominator shopping mall. But the food court is good.
- theoh 10y ago
  Food is a form of cultural memory. Maybe the most important one?
  - Apocryphon 10y ago
    What if it all ends up as chic commercial fusion food artisanally and algorithmically optimized for flavor and appeal to the popular taste of the moment?
    - theoh 10y ago
      Disposable fashion is still culture, but I agree, that doesn't sound like a situation you could characterize as "memory" (apart from the fact that it's always going to be catering to acquired or innate taste preferences)
- manarth 10y ago
  I think of Singapore Airport. Which - being an airport - is about as transient as you can possibly get. 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.
  - VLM 10y ago
    Its an extreme form of white privilege and domination in that whites do strongly fetishize the suicide of their own white culture, but other cultures feel no need to suicide their culture just because whites have a weird desire, and telling them they're going to have to eliminate their traditional family life or bulldoze their mosques or forget their traditions and holidays and histories to fit some kind of white ideal of zen like annihilation of the self is pretty racist and is likely not to work so well. 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.
    - kjdal2001 10y ago
      If you are referring to gydfi's post as the "daydream", I don't think you interpreted the tone correctly. I didn't read it as a description of a utopia. The last sentence gives away that the preceding ones don't describe something good.
    - cycrutchfield 10y ago
      Thankfully, your prognostications are completely divorced from reality. My advice to you is to reduce your Breitbart and Stormfront intake.
    - msie 10y ago
      I have trouble figuring out your point. First paragraph talks about white privilege. Second paragraph disparages multiculturalism.
- gumby 10y ago
  That was kind of my impression of Singapore the city when I was a kid in the 1960s. Well, wasn't so clean like it is now.
- gumby 10y ago
  BTW when I said "worldwide" I was also thinking of rural USA.

jacquesm 10y ago

Guess where lots of LePen's voters are?

nkassis 10y ago
Well this isn't like the US where a rural area voters have more impact on the election that city voters. LePen will need a majority of votes to win the election. The situation isn't comparable to what happened in the US in my opinion.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Fortunately.

dopamean 10y ago

I can empathize a bit with the feeling of loss surrounding changes in ones culture. I grew up in the Hamptons (Southampton to be precise). When I was a kid nearly every store on the two main streets in town (Main Street and Jobs Lane) were owned by local people. The ice cream shop was (and AFAIK still is) owned by the parents of a kid in my first grade class, the clothing boutiques were owned by friends of my family, my favorite restaurant was owned by the father of a kid in my Boy Scout troupe. It was all familiar. It was all local. 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.

m1sta_ 10y ago
You can blame the consumers who still flock to the chain stores. You can blame the landlords for choosing money over culture. You can't really blame the chain stores in this instance, they're just meeting demand.
- DanAndersen 10y ago
  "Blame" is such a distracting word in all of this. It leads to this weird punching back and forth between which group can be looked at as unfortunate victims of social forces and influences or economics or "just trying their best to maximize shareholder value", and which groups are consciously "at fault." 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.

tekklloneer 10y ago

This is happening everywhere, though. Young people in every western nation seem to be flocking to central, dense urban areas while at the same time market forces cause retail to thin its margins and coalesce. It sucks, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's different.

muninn_ 10y ago
It's actually a really good thing. Instead of shopping at places like JCPenny or other big-box retailers, people are spending more money and buying higher-quality or locally made things in those areas. It's a win for everybody except sweatshops and cheap, disposable goods.
mxfh 10y ago
For most young people it's not a choice. First the higher education to get today's jobs is not available in smaller towns, so you have to move away first. While in parallel the old hands-on jobs and professions are disappearing from smaller towns due to rationalization and centralization tends to move away higher skill jobs as well, so people less often stay or find an incentive to come back after their college years. 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/#11/43.9278/2.1475/en http://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/europakarte/#11/43.9278/2.14...
- wott 10y ago
  [About the map] 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.

mlinksva 10y ago

> To him, Albi’s fate was a cultural misfortune. City leaders had poured money into a high-concept modernistic new culture center at the town’s edge. And the shopping mall had been built. Large grocery chains, called hypermarkets, had also been constructed outside the city, with free parking. It is not that Albi no longer had commerce, or activity. But the essence of the ancient city was being lost. In other words, the same car-centered development afflictions as elsewhere, and the same "strong towns" reforms needed.

wott 10y ago
Yes. The thing is that France used to have perhaps the best balance in human-shaped landscapes in the world. A mix of villages, small towns and mid-sized cities spread rather evenly across the whole land, that made its charm. 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/2014/07/14/PHO61015ea2-0b42-11e4-bc9d-f56ed247f9da-805x453.jpg http://i.f1g.fr/media/ext/orig/www.lefigaro.fr/medias/2014/0... http://images.telerama.fr/medias/2010/02/media_52457/comment-la-france-est-devenue-moche,M33458.jpg 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.

chrismealy 10y ago

"City leaders had poured money into a high-concept modernistic new culture center at the town’s edge. And the shopping mall had been built. Large grocery chains, called hypermarkets, had also been constructed outside the city, with free parking. It is not that Albi no longer had commerce, or activity. But the essence of the ancient city was being lost." 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.

VLM 10y ago
How much human suffering is acceptable to imprison people in the dense walkable cities no one wants for themselves, but desperately want others to endure for them because it looks quaint? Most ethnic activities die out to the sound of "It sure would be nice if someone else would...".
- m1sta_ 10y ago
  I would prefer to live in the dense walkable town. I realise I'm a sample of one but don't assume there aren't people who don't prefer that model.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ocschwar 10y ago
  Funny thing. The densest, most walkable city in Massachusetts, Somerville, is now the most sought after city in the Commonwealth, and among the most sought after in the country.
  - gozur88 10y ago
    By what measurement?

miguelrochefort 10y ago

Hopefully they don't attempt to mimic Quebec's Language Police...

manarth 10y ago
The Académie française predates the Office québécois de la langue française by over 300 years. That discussion has been going for a long time.
- miguelrochefort 10y ago
  As far as I know, France still allows McDonald's to sell "McNuggets" and people to register companies with English names.
  - mraison 10y ago
    True, however all ads in English or any other foreign language must be accompanied by a translation.
eniotna 10y ago
Why is the language policy in Quebec bad? From my understanding, it was created to protected their right to be served in their native language. Not everyone has the luxury to learn and speak English fluently.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  It's bad because people should be free to use whatever language they want to use. Dictating the size of signs in French and other such nonsense serves no good, and in fact is one of the reasons why Quebec is not exactly a hotbed of progress. (To put it very mildly.) 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.

subpixel 10y ago

This article does a poor job of addressing the root causes of this sort of urban desiccation. There are likely many that compound. 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.

rjsw 10y ago
One thing that is very noticeable in France is that people still buy locally made products. There isn't nearly the same trend to move production to China as elsewhere, so smaller factories haven't all closed.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  People in the US at least have wised up to this as well. There are stores all over the place that sell made in "insert state here", and people buy! I think it's good. It helps build a cultural identity, which is something that is under attack in the West.
  - ocschwar 10y ago
    Sometimes it gets a little absurd. In Somerville, MA, there are stores for locally made goods, and the goods are high quality, and certainly good examoples of the local esthetic. 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.
    - muninn_ 10y ago
      Fair criticism for sure, sometimes it can be superficial, but hey at least they're trying, unlike their parents.

edblarney 10y ago

They should reduce business taxes out of urban areas to encourage companies to move and setup there. In today's world, there economic advantage of being collocated is not as strong. 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.

beatpanda 10y ago

I understand the frustration at the core of this article, and it's the reason why I live in a bigger city. It's only in bigger cities in America that you can find institutions like a local butcher or bakery that you can walk to. It would be great if that lifestyle were available outside of a few big cities. Conversations about how to achieve this have been happening on the left for a long time. 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.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Not sure what your last paragraph has to do with the article.
- beatpanda 10y ago
  This article is being published at this time in part because an anti-immigrant politician is leading in the polls in France, as they are in many Western democracies. All of their platforms always include some element of using police violence to assault or incarcerate undesirable minorities. And it is unclear to me what these proposed solutions have to do with the problems people say they are experiencing.
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    Did you read the same article I did? There was zero reference to immigration, Marine Le Pen, police violence, minorities, or incarcerations. I think you're projecting rather than commenting on the actual article.
    - beatpanda 10y ago
      From the 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.

tnjm 10y ago

As a personal perspective, France seems to have done better than any other place I've lived in to stem the tide of urban decline. 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.

DanAndersen 10y ago

One thing that is missing from the article is an actual link to Florian Jourdain's blog. I was really wanting to see it, but no reference was to be found. As an English speaker only, I found myself hitting a wall when trying to search for more info. The most I was able to find was a news article ( http://www.centpourcent.com/les-infos/albi-pour-un-centre-ville-dynamique-6241 http://www.centpourcent.com/les-infos/albi-pour-un-centre-vi... ) mentioning just a little blurb (and a bit from Stéphane Kuntz, presumably the head of the merchants association mentioned in the NYT article). 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).

treiz 10y ago
Here is the facebook page created by Jourdain: https://www.facebook.com/Albi.Centre.Ville.En.Perdition/ https://www.facebook.com/Albi.Centre.Ville.En.Perdition/ .
GuiA 10y ago
The blog: https://albicentreville.wordpress.com https://albicentreville.wordpress.com An article from Le Monde about Albi, and the blogger: http://transports.blog.lemonde.fr/2016/05/19/albi-sa-cathedrale-ses-boutiques-vides-et-son-lanceur-dalerte/ http://transports.blog.lemonde.fr/2016/05/19/albi-sa-cathedr... A few other news articles: http://www.leparisien.fr/midi-pyrenees/un-albigeois-repertorie-les-commerces-fermes-dans-sa-ville-12-03-2016-5619301.php http://www.leparisien.fr/midi-pyrenees/un-albigeois-repertor... http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2016/03/10/2301060-cree-page-facebook-denoncer-marasme-centre-ville.html http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2016/03/10/2301060-cree-page...

gorkemyurt 10y ago

Took a trip to the Provence region last summer and a bookstore in a small town called Banon caught my attention. Anyone visiting the region should stop by Banon and visit this bookstore. I don't think all of San Francisco has a bookstore of this quality. https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g2359785-d3930181-Reviews-Librairie_le_Bleuet-Banon_Alpes_de_Haute_Provence_Provence.html https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g2359785-d3930...

maximswim 10y ago

That's why i'm a strong advocate of universal income. It would be a first step to completely rethink the urbanization of the country. If you don't need to live in Paris to have a job, then you can go repopulate a beautiful town like Albi !

maximswim 10y ago

treiz 10y ago

I live in Albi and I can only agree with all this, I have not been here for long but already saw many shops closing. In some streets, the only one left are real estate agencies :). When you check the mainstream local press the point of view is not the same, this article says Albi is the 4th best place to live in France http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2017/01/25/2503345-albi-classee-4eme-ville-francaise-ou-il-fait-bon-vivre.html http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2017/01/25/2503345-albi-clas... ... From my point of view, I actually enjoy it here: good food, good pubs and a few places to listen to artists from the local scene, that's enough for me :)

cycrutchfield 10y ago

Honestly, and this seems to be an unpopular opinion, the nostalgia and fetishization of the past is completely useless. Do we also yearn for the days of feudal France and its romantic castles dotting the landscape? 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.

mdekkers 10y ago

I recently moved to France, and see the same in the towns around here. Small towns that have a mall or hypermarket close by are invariably dead. Interestingly, I visited Sete, which has a mall and hypermarket about 15km away, and the town center is vibrant and alive. I certainly think that this phenomena is mostly due to the availability of malls.