
As France’s Towns Wither, Fears of a Decline in ‘Frenchness’ - ucaetano
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/world/europe/france-albi-french-towns-fading.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
======
chrismealy
"City leaders had poured money into a high-concept modernistic new culture
center at the town’s edge. And the shopping mall had been built. Large grocery
chains, called hypermarkets, had also been constructed outside the city, with
free parking. It is not that Albi no longer had commerce, or activity. But the
essence of the ancient city was being lost."

When you own a car it costs a lot of money whether you drive it or not. When
you own a car you want free and convenient parking. When you own a car you
want wide roads free of obstacles (that is, people). When you own a car then
retailers can offload distribution costs onto you, which means buying in bulk
at giant stores with giant parking lots. Widespread car ownership is
fundamentally incompatible with dense, walkable towns.

~~~
VLM
How much human suffering is acceptable to imprison people in the dense
walkable cities no one wants for themselves, but desperately want others to
endure for them because it looks quaint? Most ethnic activities die out to the
sound of "It sure would be nice if someone else would...".

~~~
Majestic121
What do you mean 'no one wants for themselves' ? Here (Paris) a lot of people
love to be able to walk everywhere, and there are huge pressures to get cars
out of the city : roads closing, lot of money invested in transports, etc...

Some people with cars are complaining, but it is overall viewed as a good
decision, as cars take up lot of space for walkable/bikable areas, parcs,
etc... and they pollute really badly

I do want a dense city with no car and more transport/the ability to walk to
most places

~~~
PeterisP
A dense city "works" if it has sufficient population, and Albi (<50k)
apparently does not.

This is what I seem to be seeing anywhere - urbanization as all or nothing,
either megapolis or countryside, since the smaller towns seemingly can't
sustain many things, everything (except real estate) is more expensive and
with less options available; and it's even more so with education and jobs,
with many professions simply not having any companies needing them in smaller
towns.

~~~
Majestic121
That's a fair point, walkable city definitely have to reach a certain
density/population to be succesful.

However, I would argue that the number is not necessarily very high : for
example Niort (110k inhabitants) is also pushing pretty heavily to get rid of
cars in the city center [1], making tranports free [2], and having experiments
to push people to get rid of their cars [3]. All those have a pretty positive
feedback from the local population

Albi might be to small for it, but not necessarily by much, and I think it is
also important to have support from the municipality

Sorry about the links in French, but it's pretty hard to find infos on Niort
in English :)

[1] : [https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/cadre-de-
vie/quartiers/centre-...](https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/cadre-de-
vie/quartiers/centre-ville/centre-ville-pieton/index.html) [2] :
[https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/fr/actualites/dernieres-
infos/...](https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/fr/actualites/dernieres-
infos/index.html?tx_news_pi1%5Bnews%5D=5399&no_cache=1) [3] :
[https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/fr/actualites/dernieres-
infos/...](https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/fr/actualites/dernieres-
infos/index.html?tx_news_pi1%5Bnews%5D=5373&no_cache=1)

------
subpixel
This article does a poor job of addressing the root causes of this sort of
urban desiccation. There are likely many that compound.

One is certainly the presence of malls and big box stores nearby. I live
within walking distance of several groceries and bakeries but I mainly shop at
Costco, because of the insane convenience of getting 90% of what I need at one
place, with parking, that also happens to be very inexpensive.

Another is tourism. In tourist towns (Albi is one, apparently), there's a
tipping-point where shops can make more money selling bottled water and
tchotchkes to tourists than they could selling staples to locals, and once you
pass that point things go downhill fast.

Lastly, jobs. If Albi is like many small cities in the US, the jobs are simply
elsewhere.

~~~
rjsw
One thing that is very noticeable in France is that people still buy locally
made products. There isn't nearly the same trend to move production to China
as elsewhere, so smaller factories haven't all closed.

~~~
muninn_
People in the US at least have wised up to this as well. There are stores all
over the place that sell made in "insert state here", and people buy! I think
it's good. It helps build a cultural identity, which is something that is
under attack in the West.

~~~
ocschwar
Sometimes it gets a little absurd. In Somerville, MA, there are stores for
locally made goods, and the goods are high quality, and certainly good
examoples of the local esthetic.

Which in turn is built around the cultural identity of the 20 somethings who
move into this area to try to make their way in the world.

~~~
muninn_
Fair criticism for sure, sometimes it can be superficial, but hey at least
they're trying, unlike their parents.

~~~
bsder
The superficial can pave the way for the folks who are genuine.

Gluten-free is definitely a fad, but it sure helps the people who are actually
gluten intolerant,

------
dopamean
I can empathize a bit with the feeling of loss surrounding changes in ones
culture. I grew up in the Hamptons (Southampton to be precise). When I was a
kid nearly every store on the two main streets in town (Main Street and Jobs
Lane) were owned by local people. The ice cream shop was (and AFAIK still is)
owned by the parents of a kid in my first grade class, the clothing boutiques
were owned by friends of my family, my favorite restaurant was owned by the
father of a kid in my Boy Scout troupe. It was all familiar. It was all local.

The town has rules in place limiting the ability of franchises to expand and
so we never got a Starbucks on either of those roads though there is one on
Highway 27 near a McDonalds and Burger King, rather close to the village. One
thing that did change though was the money. There seems to be a lot more of it
there now than when I was a kid and as a result there are about half a dozen
Ralph Lauren stores between Southampton, Bridgehampton, and East Hampton.
There used to be just one. The influx of the larger brands has made Main
Street and Jobs lane feel somewhat soulless. The situation in East Hampton is
even worse.

I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say here. Commerce happens and it has
pros and cons. One of the cons is that it jacks up rents and makes it hard for
local businesses to stay put. Only the well monied corporations can afford a
storefront on Main Street these days and it kind of sucks. I'd be willing to
bet that of the local businesses that still exist there all of them own the
buildings that they are located in.

~~~
m1sta_
You can blame the consumers who still flock to the chain stores. You can blame
the landlords for choosing money over culture. You can't really blame the
chain stores in this instance, they're just meeting demand.

~~~
DanAndersen
"Blame" is such a distracting word in all of this. It leads to this weird
punching back and forth between which group can be looked at as unfortunate
victims of social forces and influences or economics or "just trying their
best to maximize shareholder value", and which groups are consciously "at
fault."

We somehow need to develop a language where we can talk about priorities that
also include the unquantifiable, the fuzzy, and the hard-to-articulate. If all
that enters the political calculus is purchasing power for consumers (and
people only being consumers), and companies only being about making money
without also being about building and maintaining communities and cultures,
then society turns into a paperclip-maximizing GDP-chasing hideous machine
where we end up losing things that we valued yet did not realize we valued.

------
tnjm
As a personal perspective, France seems to have done better than any other
place I've lived in to stem the tide of urban decline.

I live two hours north of Albi; local towns have free parking over lunch, so
restaurants throng nearly every day of the week. Town center parking is free
all day on Saturday, which attracts thousands of people, both locals and
visitors, to the thriving market.

The result is that not only are there no empty shops in town at all, and café
culture is alive and well, but twice a week the towns are packed with several
hundred market stalls. It's really very remarkable.

Of course, tourism makes a lot of this viable; our town of 8,000 people has
over a million visitors each year. But France more generally is a world
champion at this, with 10% more visitors than the USA, 30% more than Spain and
the better part of three times as many as the UK.

------
mlinksva
> To him, Albi’s fate was a cultural misfortune. City leaders had poured money
> into a high-concept modernistic new culture center at the town’s edge. And
> the shopping mall had been built. Large grocery chains, called hypermarkets,
> had also been constructed outside the city, with free parking. It is not
> that Albi no longer had commerce, or activity. But the essence of the
> ancient city was being lost.

In other words, the same car-centered development afflictions as elsewhere,
and the same "strong towns" reforms needed.

~~~
wott
Yes. The thing is that France used to have perhaps the best balance in human-
shaped landscapes in the world. A mix of villages, small towns and mid-sized
cities spread rather evenly across the whole land, that made its charm.

And that was butchered like nowhere else. The city entrances are a nightmare
of uglyness. All cities, all towns, even big villages suffer from the same
plague. Roads bordered by commercial areas filled with the cheapest shoebox
building possible, dirty parking-lots, anarchic advertisements.

[http://i.f1g.fr/media/ext/orig/www.lefigaro.fr/medias/2014/0...](http://i.f1g.fr/media/ext/orig/www.lefigaro.fr/medias/2014/07/14/PHO61015ea2-0b42-11e4-bc9d-f56ed247f9da-805x453.jpg)

[http://images.telerama.fr/medias/2010/02/media_52457/comment...](http://images.telerama.fr/medias/2010/02/media_52457/comment-
la-france-est-devenue-moche,M33458.jpg)

And you can use Streetview around any town-centre and get the same kind of
horror along the main roads for kilometres.

That was the first effect: aesthetics; it spread since the 80's. And now the
second effect, the functional one, has been kicking in in the last 10 years:
now not only villages are deprived from the shops there used to be, but every
city except the largest metropolises suffer the same fate.

It is France who invented, developed and exported the concept of
'hypermarkets'. In the 80's, we had one near Toulouse (city which had not yet
grown like the city it is now), in what used to be countryside, that was the
largest in Europe, and I believe in the world. People would drive there on
Saturday from 100, 150 km away.

------
treiz
I live in Albi and I can only agree with all this, I have not been here for
long but already saw many shops closing. In some streets, the only one left
are real estate agencies :). When you check the mainstream local press the
point of view is not the same, this article says Albi is the 4th best place to
live in France [http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2017/01/25/2503345-albi-
clas...](http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2017/01/25/2503345-albi-classee-4eme-
ville-francaise-ou-il-fait-bon-vivre.html) ... From my point of view, I
actually enjoy it here: good food, good pubs and a few places to listen to
artists from the local scene, that's enough for me :)

------
gumby
Good to get some perspective on a process that is happening worldwide.

~~~
gydfi
When I think of what a globalised world will look like, I think of Singapore
Airport. People of all colours and creeds, living peacefully together, with
absolutely no history or cultural memory beyond the present moment, and
nothing to do except shop for globally marketed luxury brands and aspire
towards the ownership of fancier globally marketed luxury brands. A giant,
clean, lowest common denominator shopping mall. But the food court is good.

~~~
manarth

      I think of Singapore Airport.
    

Which - being an airport - is about as transient as you can possibly get.

No community, no common culture, no (historical) shared experiences…just a
brief fleeting visit in the present moment, on your way to somewhere else.

Which is maybe a reflection of the experience of modern life.

~~~
VLM
Its an extreme form of white privilege and domination in that whites do
strongly fetishize the suicide of their own white culture, but other cultures
feel no need to suicide their culture just because whites have a weird desire,
and telling them they're going to have to eliminate their traditional family
life or bulldoze their mosques or forget their traditions and holidays and
histories to fit some kind of white ideal of zen like annihilation of the self
is pretty racist and is likely not to work so well.

In disagreement with grand OPs daydream of a multicultural future utopia, the
multicultural area of the future probably looks a lot more like multicultural
areas of the present and recent past, the burbs of Paris burning, genocide in
Africa and the middle east, raping and violence by refugees in Europe. The
multicultural world of the future will look a lot like Syria, lets say, but
angrier more violent and less functional, and it'll be everywhere not just
"over there". Except for the rich people in their gated communities profiting
off all of it.

~~~
kjdal2001
If you are referring to gydfi's post as the "daydream", I don't think you
interpreted the tone correctly. I didn't read it as a description of a utopia.
The last sentence gives away that the preceding ones don't describe something
good.

------
jacquesm
Guess where lots of LePen's voters are?

~~~
nkassis
Well this isn't like the US where a rural area voters have more impact on the
election that city voters. LePen will need a majority of votes to win the
election. The situation isn't comparable to what happened in the US in my
opinion.

~~~
jacquesm
Fortunately.

------
maximswim
That's why i'm a strong advocate of universal income. It would be a first step
to completely rethink the urbanization of the country. If you don't need to
live in Paris to have a job, then you can go repopulate a beautiful town like
Albi !

------
edblarney
They should reduce business taxes out of urban areas to encourage companies to
move and setup there. In today's world, there economic advantage of being
collocated is not as strong.

Bankers, lawyers etc., sure, downtown, but everything else can be way out in
the townships.

Aside from Paris and London, most European cities don't have sprawling burbs,
rather, you go through tons of little villages in the periphery.

With high speed trains making 'town XYZ to Paris' in 1 hr, it shouldn't be so
bad to put companies within a couple of hours driving distance from main
centres.

This is also an issue of migration: most newcomers move to cities.

------
gorkemyurt
Took a trip to the Provence region last summer and a bookstore in a small town
called Banon caught my attention. Anyone visiting the region should stop by
Banon and visit this bookstore. I don't think all of San Francisco has a
bookstore of this quality.

[https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g2359785-d3930...](https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g2359785-d3930181-Reviews-
Librairie_le_Bleuet-Banon_Alpes_de_Haute_Provence_Provence.html)

------
DanAndersen
One thing that is missing from the article is an actual link to Florian
Jourdain's blog. I was really wanting to see it, but no reference was to be
found. As an English speaker only, I found myself hitting a wall when trying
to search for more info. The most I was able to find was a news article (
[http://www.centpourcent.com/les-infos/albi-pour-un-centre-
vi...](http://www.centpourcent.com/les-infos/albi-pour-un-centre-ville-
dynamique-6241) ) mentioning just a little blurb (and a bit from Stéphane
Kuntz, presumably the head of the merchants association mentioned in the NYT
article).

If there are any French-speakers around here, I would love to see any links to
prior articles about this (either about the blog or this other fellow's
opposition).

~~~
GuiA
The blog:
[https://albicentreville.wordpress.com](https://albicentreville.wordpress.com)

An article from Le Monde about Albi, and the blogger:
[http://transports.blog.lemonde.fr/2016/05/19/albi-sa-
cathedr...](http://transports.blog.lemonde.fr/2016/05/19/albi-sa-cathedrale-
ses-boutiques-vides-et-son-lanceur-dalerte/)

A few other news articles: [http://www.leparisien.fr/midi-pyrenees/un-
albigeois-repertor...](http://www.leparisien.fr/midi-pyrenees/un-albigeois-
repertorie-les-commerces-fermes-dans-sa-ville-12-03-2016-5619301.php)

[http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2016/03/10/2301060-cree-
page...](http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2016/03/10/2301060-cree-page-
facebook-denoncer-marasme-centre-ville.html)

------
tekklloneer
This is happening everywhere, though. Young people in every western nation
seem to be flocking to central, dense urban areas while at the same time
market forces cause retail to thin its margins and coalesce.

It sucks, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's different.

~~~
mxfh
For most young people it's not a choice. First the higher education to get
today's jobs is not available in smaller towns, so you have to move away
first. While in parallel the old hands-on jobs and professions are
disappearing from smaller towns due to rationalization and centralization
tends to move away higher skill jobs as well, so people less often stay or
find an incentive to come back after their college years.

Unless smaller towns specialize or remote work plus high rent pressure in
centers drives people back out I dont see how that trend will reverse.

Compared to eastern Europe and Spain France has relatively low pressure with
the demographic change in rural areas:
[http://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/europakarte/#11/43.9278/2.14...](http://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/europakarte/#11/43.9278/2.1475/en)

~~~
wott
[About the map]

What you see there is in fact the influence of Toulouse's growth. Inhabitants
are flowing from Paris and the Northern parts of country, and they are ready
to settle very far away from Toulouse. People not only settle 10 or 20
kilometres away, but also up to 80 and 100 km away. And then they drive that
distance to work.

There are several problems with that. The first is that there is a continuous
urban spread around Toulouse, more or less US-style; and then, farther away,
there are small urban spread around small towns and villages. People did not
move there to live in a city or village apartment, they want a house/villa,
with a garden and a swimming pool.

The second is that the "god" figures that you can see on map do not reflect
the reality on the field. The consequence of what I said in the previous
paragraph is that these places are turned into bedroom communities, into
dormitory village. There is no more life after these people have settled than
there was before. These people activities are turned towards the metropolis,
there is no gain in vitality for the village.

Another factor, in more remote places where the influence of Toulouse is small
or nil, is that people who fled the countryside in the 50's and 60's are back
there for their retirement. So that makes good figures: stabilisation or small
growth. But as you can imagine, that doesn't translate into more activity and
life. As years pass, the biggest employer of the municipality becomes the
elderly home. You can't base a local economy on this. And that is not
sustainable either, early baby boomers won't last forever.

A final point about what makes such maps look better than reality. My place
used to be 4000 inhabitants in 1850. It is now "stable" under 800 inhabitants.
Neighbouring communities underwent even more serious losses. But the major
'emigration' waves happened long ago (in the 50's and the 60's for the last
one), so it doesn't show on such maps. Afterwards, the flows and the leaks
have been moderate, compared to past bleedings.

------
cycrutchfield
Honestly, and this seems to be an unpopular opinion, the nostalgia and
fetishization of the past is completely useless. Do we also yearn for the days
of feudal France and its romantic castles dotting the landscape?

Those who wish for a return to a bakery and a cafe on each corner are
prioritizing some fond memory of a bygone era over economic efficiency.
Consumers speak with their wallets, and apparently their voices have been
heard. Yes, everybody enjoys that romantic idyll, but nobody wants to pay for
it.

------
mdekkers
I recently moved to France, and see the same in the towns around here. Small
towns that have a mall or hypermarket close by are invariably dead.
Interestingly, I visited Sete, which has a mall and hypermarket about 15km
away, and the town center is vibrant and alive. I certainly think that this
phenomena is mostly due to the availability of malls.

------
miguelrochefort
Hopefully they don't attempt to mimic Quebec's Language Police...

~~~
eniotna
Why is the language policy in Quebec bad? From my understanding, it was
created to protected their right to be served in their native language. Not
everyone has the luxury to learn and speak English fluently.

~~~
jacquesm
It's bad because people should be free to use whatever language they want to
use. Dictating the size of signs in French and other such nonsense serves no
good, and in fact is one of the reasons why Quebec is not exactly a hotbed of
progress. (To put it very mildly.)

Isolation because of language is something fairly unique to Francophone areas,
you see the same in Belgium.

Quebec is near the bottom of the pack when it comes to per capita GDP, close
to the Maritime provinces and that's _including_ all the government entities
present there.

If Quebec would let go of the 'French first' mentality it would likely recover
at some point in the next two decades but creating this barrier to commerce
has not served it well.

~~~
eniotna
I have to disagree with you, not everything is about money or commerce. Laws
are put in place to protect people, so that everyone feels like they are part
of the society they build. Honestly, it's about respect for the local people.
I don't see how having a sign in both French and English so that people can
understand you better is a big deal.

~~~
jacquesm
It's easy to say 'not everything is about money or commerce' if the rest of
the country is being heavily taxed to support that region.

This is in the end not about having the sign in both French and English, the
government can do with its signs whatever they want with _their_ signs. They
are telling people what to do with signs that are not theirs.

There is no 'protection' to be had from signs, nor is it a sign of disrespect
to have a sign in English only.

There are plenty of 'English only' signs where I live and it's neither French
speaking nor English speaking and nobody actually cares because they don't see
it as a sign of disrespect or feel that they need to be protected.

If the Quebec government would combat corruption and actual crime as zealously
as they go overboard on how-high-the-lettering-on-your-English-sign-is then
Quebec would be in better shape already.

As for the last part of your comment: it isn't a big deal, that's the whole
point, so don't make the language of a sign into a big deal. In fact, don't
make language into a big deal. There is no need to protect it, it will change
over time and fighting that will hurt you more than that it will help because
of the inevitable isolation it will cause.

------
beatpanda
I understand the frustration at the core of this article, and it's the reason
why I live in a bigger city. It's only in bigger cities in America that you
can find institutions like a local butcher or bakery that you can walk to. It
would be great if that lifestyle were available outside of a few big cities.
Conversations about how to achieve this have been happening on the left for a
long time.

Not sure what this has to do with increasing state violence against immigrants
and minorities, which seems to be the entire agenda of this far-right wave
we're seeing.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Not sure what your last paragraph has to do with the article.

~~~
beatpanda
This article is being published at this time in part because an anti-immigrant
politician is leading in the polls in France, as they are in many Western
democracies. All of their platforms always include some element of using
police violence to assault or incarcerate undesirable minorities. And it is
unclear to me what these proposed solutions have to do with the problems
people say they are experiencing.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Did you read the same article I did? There was _zero_ reference to
immigration, Marine Le Pen, police violence, minorities, or incarcerations.

I think you're projecting rather than commenting on the actual article.

~~~
beatpanda
From the article:

The campaign is like few before it in France, because of the looming question
of whether the far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, will do the once-
unthinkable, and win. She has already pushed the discourse rightward and made
a visceral promise to voters: to protect not just France, but Frenchness.
Whether the menace is defined as Islam, immigration or globalization, her vow
to voters is the same: I am the woman to preserve the French way of life.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I admit that I had forgotten that paragraph. Still, it's one paragraph in a
quite lengthy article. The immediate next paragraph begins:

"The visible decline of so many historic city centers is intertwined with
these anxieties. Losing the ancient French provincial capital is another blow
to Frenchness — tangible evidence of a disappearing way of life that resonates
in France in the same way that the hollowing out of main streets did in the
United States decades ago."

And from there the article goes on to talk about loss of businesses in city
centers, vacancy rates, and malls. The point is protecting France, not against
immigrants, but against the change of lifestyle.

So, my "zero" claim was wrong. I still assert that the gist of the article is
very much _not_ about immigration, Marine Le Pen, police violence, minorities,
or incarcerations.

~~~
beatpanda
You could just admit you didn't read it that carefully and move on.

This article appears here because of a larger political context, which is
explicitly mentioned in the article. My comment is relevant for this reason.
I'm sorry you disagree. It would be great if you could respond to what I said
instead of picking a nit about what percentage of the article would have to be
related to my comment for it to be relevant to you.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I am responding to what you said. I'm saying that it's wrong, which you don't
want to hear. Instead, you want to accuse me of not reading the article
carefully.

The context of that paragraph was that the author had visited the city before,
in the context of a political campaign, and this time wasn't. Rather, this
time the author was there to look into the change in culture caused by the
decline in city centers in provincial cities. And that is the last mention of
national politics in the article. There's a bit of discussion of city-level
politics in the creation of shopping malls outside of the city center, but
nothing more about national politics.

So I've read the article carefully enough to be confident in my assertion -
that you are projecting your perspective onto the article. You're taking what
is only peripherally mentioned, and trying to make it a central issue.

