New and Old #257
Retail and walkability, aging out of driving, continuity in the built environment, and the beauty of retro electronics
Which comes first: Small scale retail or walkability?, Love of Place, Angie Schmittđ¶ââïž, February 28, 2028
Here is the beauty of living in a walkable neighborhood with kids: The whole day could unfold in kind of a fun, unplanned way.
My husband decided to take the van and drive home. My daughter and I agreed to walk because we wanted to stay a little longer. My son was still shooting hoops with a friend, so I said either get a ride home or walk. Home is less than a mile away.
I said to my daughter, âletâs go to the donut shop on the way home.â But we hadnât gotten one block before I noticed we were going right past a new book shop. We stopped in and browsed. And my daughter picked out a couple books. Then, we continued on our way to the donut shop.
As we were sitting there eating, I was kind of in disbelief of my good fortune. (That happens to me a lot lately.) One reason is, this corridor we were walking on has just recently really come alive with small scale retail. The book shop â people are thrilled about it. The donut shop is just a couple years old.
Right next to the donut shop was this amazing local vintage clothing store. And so I said to my daughter, letâs stop by just for a few minutes. Again, this is a relatively new addition to the street. Itâs got to be one the of the coolest vintage clothing stores in the country. Itâs great for kids. There is an actual plastic tube slide where you can slide from one floor to another.
This is such a nice piece. In America walkable urbanism is often pooh-poohed as something you do when youâre young and immature, or as some kind of distraction from the real work of life. Thatâs so silly, because, as Angie describes, walkability enhances many aspects of daily life. It isnât some vacation from responsibility.
But as she also makes clear, walkability is not just a design question, of whether itâs comfortable or safe to walk. Itâs also an economic and amenity question of whether there are things to walk to. Is there a reason to walk? This kind of delightful, idiosyncratic small-scale retail might not be absolutely essential for walkability, but it certainly helps a lot.
She continues:
It got me thinking, how great that is. Being able to accomplish a few tasks on foot is the ultimate life hack imo. Itâs healthier and more fun, imo. Thereâs social rewards as well, I believe. Close to home, you run into people that you might know.
I feel like if thereâs one thing people in my field (transportation planning) could accomplish that would really improve life for average people, it would be creating more opportunities for average folks to make a useful trip on foot every once in a while. Too few people have that opportunity right now. Even if they live near retail, itâs often designed to be as hostile as possible to pedestrians. For example, a Target store might abut a residential neighborhood, but have a fence that prevents anyone from accessing it from the neighborhood side.
Itâs kind of a shame that this does sound like some blissful fantasy, like some beautiful thing it would spoil us or soften us to let ourselves have. But itâs so utterly normal, and really so much a part of being human.
We may soon have 70 million boomers too old to drive, too car-dependent to stop., Carbon Upfront!, Lloyd Alter, February 25, 2026
Quoting me, from this piece, Alter writes on the question of a very large cohort of people getting too old to drive:
He [Del Mastro] raises âthe question of what exactly people in a largely car-dependent country are supposed to do with themselves as they age out of driving responsibly.â It is a problem we all have to face as the big baby boomer bubble pushes into their eighties. It is going to be a huge issue; I know, because I have seen this movie before.
My late father joked that he didnât want to live to be eighty because he would have to take a driving test that he knew he would fail. He was not alone in thinking that he would rather die than lose his driverâs license. Unfortunately, he got his wish, and a few years later, the Conservative premier of Ontario, pandering to the seniorsâ vote, changed the rules so that only a vision test and a five-minute cognitive screening exercise were required to keep your licence.
This is a real problem. He gives some examples of people he knew who lived in fairly walkable areas who still wanted to drive. Even if you can run basic errands locally, there are still likely to be many things you canât get to anymore without a car. I donât know what that must be like, to shrink the world youâve made for yourself for your whole life, or keep it and risk killing another person. We should never have been put in this situation.
I left this comment on his piece, trying to further articulate this:
It isnât about cars per se or land use per se (I mean it is, but not entirely); itâs that a whole lifetime of using a car to go wherever you want whenever you want deeply acculturates you to that mindset, and you are giving up an entire way of existing in the world when you give up a car. Some of that is real and some of that is the automakersâ fantasy and some of it necessity, but wherever it comes from it is what people actually experience.
Alter concludes:
I keep going back to David Foot, who wrote that âdemographics can explain two-thirds of everything.â It is inevitable: Take 70 million aging baby boomers and put them in big SUVs and pickup trucks on North American roads, and you have a whole lot of accidents waiting to happen.
Yep. No good.
That Chinese place around the corner, Street Haunting, Anandi Mishra, February 23, 2026
Gröna Brunnen (Swedish for an abundant, green well) looks like an time worn, almost forgotten, urban provincial restaurant from eons ago. You step in and feels like youâve stepped into the 1980s (in a good way). From the outside the place feels and looks like it belongs to the neighbourhood but once inside it also immediately transports you to another era. There are no large, bright screens, no loud latest Spotify playlist crooning from the speakers, none of that idle selfie-wielding razzmatazz of 2026. I stepped in and locked myself into a comfort Iâd long known but somehow lost access to.
I know that feeling, so well. âNone of that idle selfie-wielding razzmatazz,â what a great line.
More:
From my numerous visits in 1.5 years in Gothenburg, Iâve noticed that its mostly the retired, old people of the neighbourhood who frequent it. One summer evening as M and I sat outdoors, grabbing our chilled Falcon along with pork dimsums, a gaggle of five friends who wouldâve easily been in their mid- or late-seventies came to take the table next to ours. As they chugged beers and indulged in what seemed like seasoned, practised banter, one of them spotted another friend on the other side of the street. She hollered at the friend, calling at her in Swedish to come and join them. The friend joined in and they all raised their glasses at us in a gesture of conviviality and everyday communion.
This is so normal; so human. Itâs a question of culture, and economics, and also of the built environment. Are there commercial spaces small or cheap enough for small proprietors to keep a place like this open? Can older folks who canât or donât drive get there? Urbanist questions that can sound abstract and arcane are really about the ground rules of how we build the places we live in together. Few things really affect our lives more.
For the fourth item today, Iâm just passing along this very cool Sony home computer from 1984. Itâs remarkably futuristic looking for that time, when most home computers were some variety of beige box, looking very much like office equipment.
Hereâs a little Reddit thread about it.
This is what I mean when I say that no one makes electronics anymore.
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