Loss of retail units and future problems

Wed 1 Nov 2006, 13:27

A simple point, and related to the Sustainable Charlbury initiative, which does need to look at things beyond heading for the fluorescent lightbulb as the first reaction to hearing the words "climate change".

OK. What is killing local shopping is the car culture, unsustainably low transport costs - the motorways are now our warehouses - and the overwhelming power of the corporate food supply monopolies coupled with the floods of computer digit money rampaging around the global financial systems that enable their market capture. All basic non-autistic economics, as the French would put it.

However, this situation won't last - peak oil happened this year and transport fuel is going to skyrocket in price over the next decade or so due to rising global demand. Note global demand and political disruption of supplies, we're quite some way from running out.

Thus economics will either shift or fail.

If it fails we're into 3rd world or Argentinian style meltdown for the comfie middle classes like most people around here. Yes it can happen here, our economic system resembles and elephant trying to balance with grace and dignity upon a chair leg. So smug complacency is no longer an option.

If the economy goes back to local circuits that will mean local outlets for material and food sources (oh, and a lot of local work for people to do).

But what happens if all the retail units have gone in the villages, all been turned into housing units?

Perhaps the town as a whole ought to be looking seriously into some sort of corporation to purchase freehold or leasehold on long leases retail units and other potentially commercial sites, "banking" for the next generation (and when a lot of us will be into old age by then, and sans personal transport for all sorts of economic and health reasons).

This was the way things often used to be a century ago, and wildly out of fashion nowadays as the fuel cost lunacy has driven society in the west collectively insanse.

But things will change. Perhaps "we" should start collectively doing things now so that when they change it goes in the correct direction and not the "l'horreur economique" as the French call the globalised economies autistic "logic". (Excuse my lack of French grammar).