Beyond high streets as we know them?

Reflection #1: beyond shopping?

This is a timely, insightful, well supported, and cogently reasoned article. In the following, I will share some reflections inspired by its reading. My reflections are deliberatively lacking nuance and are rather seeking extremes. They are framed as provocative, ‘what if’ questions, rather than firm statements, and they hope to trigger further thoughts and discussions on this vital theme.

Matthew Carmona’s article focuses on the shopping function of high streets. His interpretation of shopping is broad, and sensitive to the significance of shopping for many aspects of public life, not just commerce. An even more radical interpretation of the nature of high streets is possible. This would put their function as quintessential social public spaces central (Mehta 2013), and see shopping as one among many component functions. The latter could also and just as importantly include the likes of play, conversation, socialization, discovery, restoration, political and artistic expression, and of course, in its many forms, movement (Von Schönfeld and Bertolini 2017). This more radically open and plural framing of high streets would put things as surprises, frictions, encounters, confrontations, contestations, negotiations, and improvisations – next to commerce – at the centre of the social and spatial dynamics of high streets. It would see high streets as a complex adaptive system, or an ‘ecology’ (Mehta 2014). It would focus on ways of enabling a diversity of users and uses to express themselves and acknowledge and accommodate each other. These emergent dynamics were constitutive of high streets before modern times but have been largely lost in highly regulated and commodified contemporary streetscapes (Norton 2014). Regulation and commodification might have made some conflicts more manageable, and allowed unprecedented capital accumulation, but they have arguably also much impoverished social public space. What if we framed high streets in the first place as plural and open public spaces, rather than primarily as spaces for commerce? What would it mean for our appreciation of their present arrangements and their possible futures?

Reflection #2: beyond the market and the state?

Matthew Carmona’s article focuses on the crucial resources and responsibilities that market and state actors have in shaping high streets. He especially and rightly elaborates on the importance of the interactions between these actors: the need of them to acknowledge each other’s distinctive roles and better yet, to collaborate. He also explores some of the concrete forms this collaboration could take. This is vital. It might be interesting to widen the perspective even further. A third, key type of economic actor seems to be neglected in the account, or at least not given a comparable weight: civil society. Most recently and forcefully feminist and other alternative economists (e.g., Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy 2013; Raworth 2017) have stressed and demonstrated that there is more to the economy than the market and the state. There are also sizable and essential economies based on family, friendship, and other communal relationships. In these complementary economies neither state nor market regulation are primary mechanisms. A key one is instead that of the commons (Dietz at al., 2003). While vulnerable to failure, under certain conditions the commons are particularly apt in ensuring the mix of freedom of access and self-regulation which enables community members to thrive and essential resources to be maintained and regenerated. This is a balance that seems also worth pursuing in high street governance. What if we considered the potential of the commons as a complementary mechanism to regulate access and management of essential resources (e.g., space) in high streets? What if we considered high streets as a commons (Nikolaeva et al. 2019)?

Reflection #3: beyond curating?

A central notion in the approach to planning and managing high streets proposed by Matthew Carmona’s article is that of ‘curating’. Curating strikes an ingenuous balance of controlling development and letting development happen, focusing on shaping an environment where synergistic mixes of initiatives can flourish. This is perhaps one of the most original and thought-provoking ideas in the article, and there is much to say for it. There might be also a risk. Let us call it the ‘risk of over-curating’. High streets are complex, adaptive systems, and as such their future is irreducibly uncertain. We might, for instance, advance hypotheses of how they could or should look like after the pandemic. However, we can’t know how they will actually look, as this depends on many unpredictable factors, which importantly also include what we collectively will decide to learn (and not to learn) from this disruptive experience (Marsden and Docherty 2021). As others have forcefully pointed at (e.g., Taleb 2012; Solnit 2016), rather than seeing it as an annoying constraint we should see this irreducible uncertainty of the future as a fortunate opportunity. To turn uncertainty into opportunity requires shaping conditions for generating possibilities and exploring them as they arise rather than attempting to anticipate and shape the future. Concretely, in high streets this could entail enabling temporary rather than permanent users and uses, continuously learning from their unfolding, and adapting planning and management approaches accordingly (Bertolini 2020). This is what, in more general terms, Taleb (2012) labels as ‘tinkering’. What if we would put a concept as ‘tinkering’ central to our approach of intervening in the complex, adaptive system that high streets are?

Reflection#4: beyond what we know?

Matthew Carmona’s article is a skilled, original and readily actionable synthesis of what we know. This is invaluable, and it should be the foundation. From there, we could push the borders further. Next to what we know, there is also much that we do not yet know, and in that, there might be something essential. In a ‘Futures Literacy’ workshop I recently participated in,¹ workshop leader Loes Damhof reminded us that the future does not exist, but our imaginations of the future do. The key question, accordingly, is not how the present might impact the future, but how our imaginations of the future impact the present. Imaginations of the future could take different forms. They could be formal forecasts, but they could also be informal narratives. In all cases, and irrespective of their internal rigour, they are human constructions, and as such are inevitably based on assumptions. Existing imaginations of the future can therefore always be contested, and different ones can be advanced. Different imaginations of the future will shed a different light on the present, and disclose previously unseen possibilities, or risks. The ‘existential crisis’ which confronts traditional shopping streets, and which Mathew Carmona’s article so vividly and forcefully articulates, begs also for an opening up of the imaginations of their futures. What could such an opening up look like? What if it put the street as quintessential social public space at the centre? What if it explored the potential of the commons as complementary regulatory mechanism and governance approach? And what if it made permanent experimentation, or ‘tinkering’, a defining feature of planning and policymaking? What might we then see that we do not yet see?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The workshop was held at the University of Amsterdam, on 23 September 2021. On Loes Damhof and Futures Literacy see: https://www.hanze.nl/nld/onderzoek/kenniscentra/researchgroup-futures-literacy/