2023-09-03 04:00:30
SThere is a time, at least for the parents, which falls under the chore, it is indeed that of the back-to-school races. What could be more tedious than responding to the wishes of a teacher who specifically requests a 24 x 32 centimeter red spiral notebook, when your child would have opted for a model screen-printed with the effigy of such and such a superhero?
However, the high points of consumption remind us that our commercial practice is closely associated with the status accorded to the act of purchase: chore consumption or pleasure consumption. This distinction, at first sight anecdotal, reveals the great challenges of our contemporary urbanism.
fight through service
When shopping for chores, the utilitarian side takes precedence over any other consideration: optimizing travel in terms of ease and cost of access, going to places that are supposed to display the lowest prices, favoring the concentration of supply to limit the time spent on site. In this game, the peripheral commercial zones of our agglomerations seem unbeatable: they will again attract crowds this fall.
Town center shops try to fight through service: it’s the small bookseller who specifically prepares your list of supplies that you just have to pick up. But, at the same time, the space in the city center has real or perceived comparative disadvantages: prices deemed to be higher, parking difficulties, etc. With a comparable service, the city entrance is therefore a big winner.
But for the pleasure purchase, the tone is completely different. If, for twenty years, developers have worked to make our commercial areas more qualitative, it is because they suffered from a certain handicap due to their utilitarian image. But no matter how finely they do the finest possible work on the atmosphere, the historicity, the heritage quality, what some call the “urbanity” of historic centers generally has no equal.
And paradoxically, when it comes to enjoying the atmosphere of these central spaces, the accessibility constraints so decried during chore shopping are largely minimized here! With the same friends, it will generally be more appreciated to have a drink in a shaded square in the city center than in the gallery of a hypermarket…
Local schizophrenic policies
This often results in a somewhat schizophrenic posture on the part of our local politicians, accustomed to wanting to satisfy everyone: they struggle to curb their desire to expand the commercial peripheries, so frequented by their constituents and deemed necessary for the attractiveness of the agglomeration, while wanting to satisfy the actors of the city center and to be eligible for revitalization programs such as Action heart of the city or Small towns of tomorrow.
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