Can a City Go from Nothing to Virtual, without the Physical Infrastructure?
In multiple occasions on this blog, the author mentioned how he misses the convenience store culture that is prevalent in many parts of urban East and Southeast Asia. The ability to walk out to the streets from one's residence or office for five minutes, and find food, drinks, basic medicine, and other daily needs just seem so fitting to a city of the future where dependency on automobiles for personal transport is drastically reduced. Naturally he thinks that dense cities with pedestrian-friendly blocks of dense street-level shops surrounded by high-rise residential buildings is fitting with that future.
The rise of online retail options is not something that the author considered as a factor in the above assessment. Here, "online retail options" no longer means regular ecommerce, where shoppers haunt for bargains in exchange for having to wait for days to get the product. A new breed of online retail, emphasizing real-time delivery of not just products, but services, whenever and wherever clients may need them, may quickly drive the convenience store concept into extinction. After all, how is a convenience store "convenient" when the same can be done in front of a computer in same time?
For newly urbanizing regions, this can be a defining force in the very structure of the city. In a developed city, ecommerce confronts the "brick-and-mortar" stores, with the physical retail either using their inherent advantage of being able to see, touch, and get the products instantly to stay alive, or redirect major focus to provision of group-oriented social entertainment. Some brick-and-mortar will inherently die over time, but many others will adapt to presence of ecommerce, preventing significant atrophy of the cityscape in its physical form.
But for the developing city, where physical retail space is absent to begin with, the ecommerce wave may very much mean that physical retail will never develop. Cities, even as they get bigger and richer, will simply be a cluster of residential buildings and logistics nodes, with little that induce people to venture out of their homes. The lack of government-sponsored public spaces, such as parks and squares, in such cities only make pedestrian lifestyle even more elusive. City-dwellers' mentality change to one where living and working are done in physical space, but entertainment is virtual.
As far-fetched as it sounds, the resulting lack of reasons for people to be on the streets can be a cause for breakdown of community fabric. Without hanging out in the city, people have no reason to demand greater protection of the city's heritage, better street-level security, and more civic education. The author's brief experiences in India's megacities sees worrying trend in this direction. People complain about messy infrastructure and inefficient public services, but the answer to these have not been compelling government change but creating private enterprises, often online, to resolve them.
A hyper-developed and hyper-competitive environment of different apps offering a mind-boggling array of services and products emerge, offering end consumers with everything they need with a few taps on the smartphone. The city, however, remains the same, still full of gridlocks, short of good physical shops, and empty of casual pedestrians, for decades with little signs of significant improvement. After all, with the apps so well-developed, development in the physical space just become unnecessary, especially considering the extra expenses and organizational power.
So to answer his own question, yes, indeed, it is largely possible that a city can go from having little choices for products and services consumption, to one that offers anything one can think of at highly reasonable and competitive pricing...all without having the city change visually in terms of retail offerings. There will be more delivery trucks and warehouses, but there does not need to be more shops and walking shoppers. As much as the health-conscious person bulk at such harsh reality, this can be more beneficial for consumers in terms of choices, convenience, and prices.
A more open-ended question, however, is that whether people are okay with cities becoming something like this. Great cities, as defined by their draws as tourist destinations, are often known for bustling street life, anchored by massive retail outlets that draw masses of people into the streets. This is true even in less developed urban areas, where traditional local markets can draw large number of visitors. But if online retail spells the end for physical retail, would cities, anywhere, be even worthy of defining everyday living for the casual visitor anymore?
The rise of online retail options is not something that the author considered as a factor in the above assessment. Here, "online retail options" no longer means regular ecommerce, where shoppers haunt for bargains in exchange for having to wait for days to get the product. A new breed of online retail, emphasizing real-time delivery of not just products, but services, whenever and wherever clients may need them, may quickly drive the convenience store concept into extinction. After all, how is a convenience store "convenient" when the same can be done in front of a computer in same time?
For newly urbanizing regions, this can be a defining force in the very structure of the city. In a developed city, ecommerce confronts the "brick-and-mortar" stores, with the physical retail either using their inherent advantage of being able to see, touch, and get the products instantly to stay alive, or redirect major focus to provision of group-oriented social entertainment. Some brick-and-mortar will inherently die over time, but many others will adapt to presence of ecommerce, preventing significant atrophy of the cityscape in its physical form.
But for the developing city, where physical retail space is absent to begin with, the ecommerce wave may very much mean that physical retail will never develop. Cities, even as they get bigger and richer, will simply be a cluster of residential buildings and logistics nodes, with little that induce people to venture out of their homes. The lack of government-sponsored public spaces, such as parks and squares, in such cities only make pedestrian lifestyle even more elusive. City-dwellers' mentality change to one where living and working are done in physical space, but entertainment is virtual.
As far-fetched as it sounds, the resulting lack of reasons for people to be on the streets can be a cause for breakdown of community fabric. Without hanging out in the city, people have no reason to demand greater protection of the city's heritage, better street-level security, and more civic education. The author's brief experiences in India's megacities sees worrying trend in this direction. People complain about messy infrastructure and inefficient public services, but the answer to these have not been compelling government change but creating private enterprises, often online, to resolve them.
A hyper-developed and hyper-competitive environment of different apps offering a mind-boggling array of services and products emerge, offering end consumers with everything they need with a few taps on the smartphone. The city, however, remains the same, still full of gridlocks, short of good physical shops, and empty of casual pedestrians, for decades with little signs of significant improvement. After all, with the apps so well-developed, development in the physical space just become unnecessary, especially considering the extra expenses and organizational power.
So to answer his own question, yes, indeed, it is largely possible that a city can go from having little choices for products and services consumption, to one that offers anything one can think of at highly reasonable and competitive pricing...all without having the city change visually in terms of retail offerings. There will be more delivery trucks and warehouses, but there does not need to be more shops and walking shoppers. As much as the health-conscious person bulk at such harsh reality, this can be more beneficial for consumers in terms of choices, convenience, and prices.
A more open-ended question, however, is that whether people are okay with cities becoming something like this. Great cities, as defined by their draws as tourist destinations, are often known for bustling street life, anchored by massive retail outlets that draw masses of people into the streets. This is true even in less developed urban areas, where traditional local markets can draw large number of visitors. But if online retail spells the end for physical retail, would cities, anywhere, be even worthy of defining everyday living for the casual visitor anymore?
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