LIFE & DEATH OF A DOWNTOWN
The first thing I noticed about Springfield, Missouri was that there were four Walmarts flanking each corner of the city.
I had moved to Springfield to take up a teaching job at a university in 2010, and when I arrived, the city was just starting to buzz with its downtown revitalization scheme, which had became abandoned after shopping malls and big box stores had opened up along the highway. Coming from more metropolitan settings where I was used to walking everywhere, I found it a hassle to own a car and decided to live in a loft downtown and walk, bike or take a bus to the university where I was teaching. And it seemed like I had arrived just in time for its downtown revival.
The downtown had maintained its distinct imprint of the main square, with a signature design by the famous landscape architect Lawrence Halprin back in the 60s, and the main street coming off of that, which used to be full of vacant buildings and storefronts with boarded up windows, started filling up with lofts, restaurants, pubs, art galleries and boutique shops. There were even events being hosted to attract more people to downtown, such as a gallery walk on First Friday of each month and International Food Festival every fall.
The highlight of this buzz was a grand opening of a new gourmet grocery store — the Bistro Market — right in the heart of the downtown, on the edge of South & Walnut streets. I couldn’t be more thankful that my move to Springfield coincided with the opening of this life source. I would have been stripped of any access to food or amenities, had this store not opened just in time for my arrival.
The Bistro, to my marvel and excitement, started by stocking up everything gourmet possible — from fresh fish, organic vegetables, wine, cheese, artisan gelato to locally baked bread, and a buffet that featured gourmet burgers and pizzas. I would routinely drop in on my way back from the school, to the point that the store manager called me the ‘best’ customer.
After two years, however, they started removing all the fresh items and only started selling boxed and packaged items. All the staff in their matching white chef uniforms and hats disappeared and were left with two cashiers monitoring the checkout. It became more like a drug store rather than a supermarket. By the time I left Springfield in 2015, it had turned into a liquor store that primarily sold bottled drinks and snacks.
Over the course of five years, it was incredulous to witness a store being stripped down from a vibrant gourmet supermarket to a drug store to a liquor store. It was as if to witness all the high hopes and grand visions being succumbed to no other purpose than to simply staying alive.
The Bistro could not compete with the cheaper prices at Walmart, and it wouldn’t even have survived as long as they did, had it not been owned by a local supermarket chain.
Most people found it more convenient and more economical to drive to one of four Walmarts flanking each corner of the town and load up their cars with low priced, big-bulk items. I stuck with Bistro because I had no other choice. There was now even the talk of Walmart planning to open up its ‘local’ corner shop version directly inserted into neighborhoods, against which there was vehement resistance by the community and a petition going around to oppose it.
Incidentally, restaurants and shops that had opened up in downtown when I arrived started moving out and relocating to the shopping malls along the highway, where they were likely to attract more customers. By the time I left Springfield in 2015, the downtown of Springfield, Missouri, which was starting to buzz with hight hopes and visions of revival when I first arrived, started to lose its momentum and energy.
It seemed that in order to revive the downtown of not only Springfield, but downtowns everywhere, incentives and initiatives to attract more businesses and developers to downtown didn’t work. ‘If you build it, people will come,’ Edward Glaser pointed in Triumphant City, was an ‘edifice complex’ — a fallacy that many cities fell for and realized that it didn’t fundamentally create an economic base for their city.
There was a larger systemic force at work against which all the incentives and initiatives fell helpless. Namely, the force of capitalism — the big fish eating the little fish — because in the end, cheaper prices and convenience won over quality of life. This was the inherent contradiction of capitalism: what was supposed to be a ‘free competition’ enviably ended up being a ‘monopoly’ because you couldn’t survive in the market unless you offered the cheaper price, and in order to offer the cheaper price, you had to be big — trade at a big bulk volume.
This was a phenomenon in the Midwest, but what was happening in downtowns everywhere, including suburban downtowns and city centers across post-industrial cities across America. But perhaps the effect was more acutely felt in the Midwest, because there wasn’t a diversity of big box stores that competed against one another, but Walmart dominated everything. But even on either coasts, it was only a matter of time that a single store would come to dominate the market, hence more concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. Now it was big box stores and shopping malls being eaten up by a single online retailer that didn’t even have a geographic base, leaving the carnage of dead shopping malls and abandoned big box stores along the highway.
Shall we just accept it as the logic of ‘creative destruction’ and this is how innovation happens? The big fish deserved to win, because it offered ‘the most value for money’?
At the center of this was the human quality of life, which was being compromised by the larger systemic force — even though humans invented and implemented it themselves. Just as technology that humans invented came to dominate human lives, capitalism came to rule human lives. As Kishore Mahbubani points out in ‘Time to visit Asian factories for capitalist lessons’: 'the West came to regard capitalism as an 'ideological good' rather than a 'pragmatic instrument to improve human welfare.’
There needed to be a fundamental questioning of the larger systemic force at work that allowed the forces of capitalism to rule of our way of life in the first place, and challenge it at that level, such as the assumption that ‘markets know best:’ Mahbubani points out that one of the strategic errors that the West made was ’For capitalism to work well, governments had to play an essential regulatory and supervisory role…Instead, the West deferred to the ‘markets know best.’
What could have been the role of the government — that actually facilitated the market, rather than blindly serving the market — such as taxing the big fish and using the money to support nurturing and growth of the small fish? And what was the big fish doing for the well-being of the community other than milking the profit? And what could the citizens have done — rather than yielding to what was the most convenient and cheapest, but supporting, even at the expense of costing a bit more, what fulfilled their vision of a ‘quality of life’? Who had the power to determine the quality of life — beyond chasing after what offered the ‘most value for money’?