Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (24 page)

With its Tolworth project, Tesco is bidding to make the transition from ‘destroyer of town centres’ to ‘creator of sustainable communities’ in one go. Great. The problem is, the ‘sustainability’ of the scheme’s central element – its superstore – is, to put it mildly, questionable. It depends how you define sustainability. Or what it is you’re trying to sustain. In this case, the thing most likely to be sustained by Tolworth is Tesco’s profit margins. As for local shops and businesses, the existing community, or the planet, its likely effect is rather the reverse.

Supermarket urbanism got a significant boost in 2005, when the oft-adjusted PPG6 was finally scrapped in favour of Planning Policy Statement PPS6. Although the new law professed to be aimed at
‘promoting sustainable and inclusive patterns of development, including the creation of vital and viable town centres’, it contained a loophole you could drive a truck through, namely that ‘larger stores may deliver benefits for consumers, and local planning authorities should seek to make provision for them in this context’. PPS6 signalled the green light for ‘supermarket cities’, and planning policy now looks set to be relaxed even further after a 2007 Planning White Paper proposed replacing the PPS6 ‘need test’ (requiring superstores to demonstrate a need) with a new test that ‘promotes competition and consumer choice and does not unduly or disproportionately constrain the market’.
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Quite what the position will be in a few years’ time is anyone’s guess, but one thing is for sure. Supermarket power is not set to diminish any time soon.

Supermarket expansion is now a global game, with larger companies like Tesco concentrating their efforts on finding new markets abroad. Accession states to the EU such as Poland, Hungary and Slovakia have made gloriously easy pickings for the company, with few planning restrictions, and citizens who find a new Tesco on their doorstep as thrilling as Britons did 30 years ago. By 2003, Tesco already had more than 150 stores in Eastern Europe, but even that level of expansion wasn’t enough to keep the chain happy. In 2005 it did a deal with the French giant Carrefour, agreeing to swap some of its Asian holdings in exchange for some of Carrefour’s European ones, and in 2007 it embarked on its most daring venture yet, opening its first ‘Fresh and Easy’ store in the supermarket motherland, the USA. Wherever it chooses to go next, it is likely to find willing customers. When it comes to food retail these days, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a town in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a supermarket.

Fifty years after tropical birds first chirruped at Southdale, Victor Gruen’s dream has become reality. Markets were once the nuclei of cities; now we’re building supermarkets in the middle of nowhere,
putting houses round them, and calling them towns. Perhaps this should come as no surprise – food has always shaped cities; why should it be any different now? But there is a difference. Food was once the most highly regulated commodity in existence; now it is overwhelmingly in corporate hands. Supermarkets enjoy the same monopoly over food that markets once did, but unlike markets, they have no civic role to play. They are businesses with one thing on their minds: making money (remember the words of Victor Gruen). Because we need to eat, supermarkets have got us over a barrel. Wherever they build their stores, we must follow. Control of food gives control over space and people – something our forebears knew very well, but we seem to have forgotten.

The endgame of this trend is the death of public space itself. In 1994 the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that ‘shopping malls have replaced the parks and squares that were traditionally the home of free speech’.
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The finding came after a group of political activists were forcibly ejected from a shopping mall for handing out leaflets, something they defended their right to do on the grounds that the mall was the only place there was anyone to give them to – the traditional downtown was almost deserted. The New Jersey court agreed, concluding that ‘a mall constitutes a modern-day Main Street’.
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But as the recent ban on hoodies at Bluewater confirmed, malls are
not
Main Streets. Unlike real public spaces, they don’t accommodate ‘otherness’. Wear the wrong clothes, hand out leaflets, or try taking a photograph, and you are likely to get yourself thrown out. Markets are public spaces; malls are private ones.

Supermarkets might bring welcome cash to struggling local authorities, but the ‘urban regeneration’ they offer is really urban destruction. Supermarkets are changing the social and physical texture of cities, and with it the very nature of urbanity. Traditional city centres support a dense patina of individual shops, trades and businesses: the sort of mixed-use grain described by Jane Jacobs and plagiarised by Victor Gruen. Streets are the building blocks of cities, providing something that supermarkets can never provide: a common space with which people identify, in which they have a stake. Above all, streets are
shared
spaces: in both their use and ownership, they form the basis of
the urban public realm. It is no accident that ‘street life’ is synonymous with the social buzz of a busy city, and that no equivalent term exists for suburbia. The suburban ideal has always been one of autonomy: private ownership of your house and garden, garage and car. Now supermarkets are extending that notion to urban dwelling as a whole.

For a snapshot of the urban future, fast-forward to Santana Row, a district just south of San Jose in California first occupied in 2002 and already home to 30,000 people. Described by developers Federal Realty as ‘a real urban neighborhood’, Santana Row consists of a radiating series of luxury apartment blocks on six-lane boulevards arranged around a vast ‘Europe-inspired’ mall replete with open-air shopping arcades, restaurants, gardens, fountains, and even a reconstructed nineteenth-century chapel shipped over from France. The sales blurb makes life in Santana Row sound like one long holiday. ‘Every city relies on vibrant neighbourhoods,’ it purrs. ‘For most, this means a place to relax, shop, or meet a friend for coffee and a stroll along a sunny, tree-lined street.’ Whether or not one buys into this description of a ‘vibrant neighbourhood’ (‘vibrant’ is every urban developer’s favourite adjective), Santana Row has certainly been successful enough to suck all the ‘vibrancy’ out of neighbouring San Jose. As for being a ‘real urban neighbourhood’, pull the other one. Santana Row is a mall without walls: an exclusive, private club masquerading as a piece of city, with its own management systems, security guards, and hidden sets of rules (pets are forbidden). Nothing can be allowed to disturb its smooth commercial operation: when local artist Emmanuel Flipo poured salt on to the street outside his gallery in 2003 to form the words ‘no blood for oil’ – an act for which he had gained permission – it got cleaned up by security within the hour.
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Santana Row is so obviously fake that its claims to full-blooded urbanity barely warrant discussion. However, the phenomenon it represents is very real. Ten years ago, the British town of Hampton, near Peterborough, was a 2,500-acre brownfield site, but by 2015 it is destined to become the largest private development in Europe, home to 18,000 people, with its own commercial district, schools and leisure facilities. Its residential quarters consist of the usual mix of mock-Georgian and faux-Victorian dwellings typical of developer-led
housing projects in Britain, but there is nothing faux (apart from the name) about its so-called ‘Township Centre’ – a socking great 26,000-square-metre mall that includes the second-largest Tesco Extra in the country. Even when supermarkets aren’t building cities, they are replacing what would once have been at their core – lusty, messy, negotiated public space – with the very opposite: controlled, security-sensitive private property.

Supermarket cities might provide places to shop, work and live, but to call them ‘vibrant urban communities’ is very wide of the mark. They are what the French anthropologist Marc Augé calls ‘non-places’: ersatz, branded versions of the real world with little sense of local identity.
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Augé contrasts such places (for example, shopping malls and airports) with what he calls ‘anthropological places’, spaces that carry memories and associations, that express embedded history. Vibrancy can only exist in such places, where public life in all its forms is allowed: not just what is safe, familiar and comfortable, but also what is unexpected, strange, even dangerous. Public life, with all its contradictions – its ‘otherness’ – is the essence of urbanity. Take that away and put it in a corporate box, and you destroy the whole point of urban existence. As Jane Jacobs noted 40 years ago, ‘In city areas that lack a natural and casual public life, it is common for residents to isolate themselves from each other to a fantastic degree.’
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You might as well live in a mall.

If supermarket cities are the future, where does that leave those of us living in cities (or anywhere else, for that matter) made by the finer-textured food systems of old? The answer, for some at least, is in a ‘food desert’. As local shops close down, entire tracts of inhabited land (especially in low-income areas unappealing to supermarkets) are being stranded without any source of fresh food. A 2000 study undertaken by the University of Warwick found that many residents of the West Midlands town of Sandwell had no fresh food within 500 metres of their homes – the distance a fit person is considered to be able to walk in 10–15 minutes.
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That might not sound very far, but when you
consider that not everyone is fit, that many people have to work, look after children, or have other calls on their time, plus the fact that any walk to the shops inevitably involves walking in the opposite direction laden with shopping, you start to see the problem. The study found that Sandwell residents either had to use public or private transport to get to the shops, or survive on what was available locally: predominantly ‘high fat, high salt, cheap, easily storable foods’. The situation is similar all over Britain, not least in its capital. A hundred years after Charles Booth’s survey of the lives of the London poor, the statistics are, if anything, even more shocking. According to the London Development Agency, 53 per cent of inner-London children live below the poverty line, and according to the same survey, 13 wards across three inner-London boroughs contain sizeable tracts of food desert.
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Urban sprawl has made food distribution within cities as much of an issue as getting food to them once was. Back in the days when residential streets had corner shops and neighbourhoods local markets, food reached every part of the city through a fine-grained distribution network, supported by the wholesale trade. But those supply systems are long gone. Wholesale markets in Britain today are the food-supply equivalent of oxbow lakes, remnants of the days when food’s journey through the city was very different. Just 20 per cent of London’s fresh food is now dealt with wholesale, and all but two of its markets (Smithfield and Borough) have moved to the periphery. The wholesale trade now concentrates on the public service sector (schools, prisons and hospitals), the catering industry, and the few independent local shops still trading. The rest of the city’s food supply is mostly controlled by supermarkets.

As ever in matters food-related, Paris’s approach is different to that of London. All wholesale trade in the French capital is concentrated at Rungis Market, which does good business supplying a wide range of foods to the city’s shops and restaurants. Rungis offers traders the equivalent of a one-stop shop, making it more convenient to use than London’s scattered approach. Following a joint review carried out by Defra and the Corporation of London in 2002, plans are now underway to try something similar in London, closing all but three markets – New Covent Garden, New Spitalfields and Western International – and expanding those remaining in order to offer a wider range of produce
and more user-friendly service.
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The success or failure of the project could determine the future of independent food retail in London.

In 2006, the London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, launched a Food Strategy that attempted to address some of the issues facing the capital. Acknowledging that the current system was neither doing a very good job, nor very eco-friendly, the strategy set out its vision to ‘deliver a food system that is consistent with the Mayor’s objective that London should be a world-class sustainable city’.
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Specific objectives included reducing London’s ecological footprint, supporting a ‘vibrant food economy’ and improving the city’s food security. Among the proposed actions were the expansion of direct selling between producers and consumers, the use of the planning system ‘to protect the diversity of food retail provision where viable and appropriate’, and the setting up of ‘food hubs’ to provide an alternative food supply network within the capital.
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The trouble was, the strategy was put together without any co-operation from the supermarkets. As the document itself recognised, this presented something of a difficulty:

The Strategy has already noted that just four major supermarkets account for 70 per cent of grocery sales in the UK. The scope for these retailers to achieve positive change is huge. Equally, if their involvement is not secured, the potential of the Strategy to make real improvements throughout the food chain will be severely constrained.
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Well, quite. The non-involvement of supermarkets, coupled with the traditional lack of support from central government, meant that the chances of London’s Food Strategy achieving much more than a cosmetic sound bite or two were negligible even before its launch. For all its noble aims, London’s Food Strategy cannot tackle the real forces shaping the city’s food systems. The Mayor can approve or disapprove high-rise tower blocks, give the nod to swathes of housing developments, and win Olympic bids. What he or she cannot do is control the capital’s food supply. As far as that is concerned, civic aims and corporate power simply co-exist in Britain. When their aims and goals conflict, there can be only one outcome.