America is growing. By 2000, it had a population of over 280 million people, and it is still growing ever larger. For instance, according to npg.org, the projected size of the U.S. population forty years from now will be well over 400 million. And you don’t have to look far either to see that the population has effectively doubled since 1950.
With such a massive population growth, it’s interesting to note the effects of it. Traffic, for instance, is growing every year. According to RAND Florida, the size of the Miami population has in 20 years increased from 3.3 million to 5.1 million, and at the same time the freeways and arterial highways traffic has doubled; but the average hours spent by motorists in traffic delays has exploded from 5 to 29.
While down in Mankato, MN yesterday, checking out the Vikings Training Camp, I headed downtown for a coffee during exercise sessions and got to talking to a gentleman running a book exchange store on one of the downtown main streets. We talked a bit about our common ancestry (his grandparents were either Swedish or Norwegian, I think), and then came upon the subject of urbanization and society growth. And it’s easy to see how stores like his would be threatened by America’s growth. Minneapolis keeps growing, larger chainstores move in, and soon you have a Wal-Mart in town that kills all the little Mom-and-Pop stores. While Mankato has yet to feel the brunt of this unquenchable capitalist force, it is only a matter of time; a while ago I read that Wal-Mart feels it is possible to double, or even triple, its current presence in the United States.
Every generation in this world has been different from the last. Our elderly sit on benches and complain about how much better life was in the fifties (or at least, how different it was). I bet the elderly back in the 1860′s sat on the benches and complained about how all these civil wars swept the world these days, all the youngsters that get killed, and how all of these Mom-and-Pop specialty stores threaten the traditional farming structure of the society. Interestingly enough, Henry David Thoreau would carry out his experiment in simple living (Walden) already in 1845.
I suppose we’re still trying to find our place in this world; still trying to define our society, using blunt and sometimes inaccurate tools of either releasing or restraining capitalistic forces. Zoning commissions, city councils and legislative boards all do their part, but the actual shaping of the land is much up to business. Shopping malls, of which the Mall of America is a good example, tend to localize and congregate smaller stores into retail centers. Stores grow larger, so does parking, freeways, and all the other accomodations necessary to house these gigantic warehouses of commerce. For sure, Mom-and-Pop stores may not be the Ultimate Way to do things, and probably neither are the shopping malls of the 20th century; although maybe malls are better way than the last one. And what if our population grew a hundredfold? What would a society of 20 billion look like?
Clearly, some remedies against overcrowding are clearly available, although they may in different places be severely underutilized. For instance, subways and light-rail transportation networks become ever more necessary the larger the population grows, and is a marvelous tool against urban sprawl; and as a European it is strange to look at the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area of about three million people, which just recently opened its first Light Rail line (for a comparison, see the overview of the Stockholm, Sweden metropolitan subway/light rail network; Stockholm is about half the population size of the Twin Cities).
Trying to foresee the future is always difficult. The world is in a state of explosive growth in many places. The structures by which our society expresses itself keep changing all the time. Is it a bad thing that small stores go out of business, to be replaced with shopping malls and superstores? For sure, it’s different. But maybe the Wal-Marts, Targets, Sears and Home Depots of today are just another milestone in the development of our society. While we may not grieve the loss of them, someday I have a feeling that they will be replaced with something even more humongous, and that day our kids will sit around and gripe about all the freedom we had when we still could drive our own cars.