One of the benefits of older cities and neighbourhoods is that their scale and rhythm of development often allow for walkability and a wide variety of experiences in a short period of time (here's a related post). The typical characteristics include small lot sizes, diverse ownership, short city blocks, a mix of uses, and visual variety. And in planning speak, this is typically referred to as fine-grained urbanism.
Here's a random block example from Toronto that I'm choosing simply because I had a wonderful sourdough sandwich on this street over the weekend:
The longest lots in the middle of this block are over 45 metres deep and under 5 metres wide. The result is some very long and narrow buildings, but at the same time, a lot of storefront variety when you're walking along Dupont Street. It has the bones for a great retail street. The only problem is that, for the most part, we don't build our cities like this anymore. We do the opposite. We build bigger, which is conversely referred to as coarse-grained urbanism.
But since we know that fine-grained urbanism makes for better street experiences, it is common to try to impose it on new developments. Cities will say, "Hey, I know that you have a big, wide, shallow retail space on the ground floor of your building, but can you chop it up into smaller, fine-grained spaces such that they all become totally unleasable?" (I half kid. See here for some context.)
The result:
To be clear, I am in no way picking on this development. As a rule, I don't do that sort of thing on this blog. Development is hard. I also like it. I just think it's perhaps the clearest example of what all urban-minded planners and developers are trying in earnest to do, and that is to create coarse-grained urbanism masquerading as fine-grained urbanism. The architectural rhythm of the storefronts matches the existing context, but the scale of the retailers may not.
And that's okay. This is the reality of the world today, and modern retailers want what they want. I'm also a believer in the power of free markets. But to this same end, I want to point out something that is exceedingly obvious: the best way to create fine-grained urbanism is to simply encourage small-scale development!
Every hurdle we erect only increases the incentive for developers to build bigger and coarser. It becomes the only way to underwrite profitable projects. The solution is to lower the barriers to development and, in turn, make small more feasible. Because if we do that, we already know it'll make our cities better. I think we'll also find that the market will respond with a different category of tenants and entrepreneurs.
Tomorrow, we'll talk about the specific ways in which Toronto and other cities could execute on this better.
This month, Amazon announced that it will be opening a new 230,000 sf big box store in the suburbs of Chicago. Half of the store will be consumer-facing, where customers can browse aisles for groceries, household items, and general merchandise, and the other half will serve as a kind of micro-fulfillment center.
Supposedly, the municipality applied a restriction to the lands requiring it to be a consumer-facing store; it can't just be for fulfillment. But it seems that some kinds are allowed.
My understanding is that the "fulfillment" component of the project will allow customers to order (on kiosks throughout the store) certain items "from the back" and have them delivered to the front of the store for checkout. Importantly, it also decouples inventory management and optimizes the back-of-house for online grocery.
This is a big store; bigger than even a Walmart Supercenter. It also sits on a 35-acre site, which means the lot coverage is only around 15%. However, there's also a large stormwater management pond and room for additional pad buildings based on this site plan:
A store this massive is a fascinating signal because it's a clear admission from Amazon that it needs to get its brick-and-mortar strategy right if it wants to compete in grocery. Even after its Whole Foods acquisition, it's only about 3% of the US grocery market, whereas Walmart is sitting at over 20%.
Ten years ago, it did not feel like this would be where we would end up. Retail as a real estate asset class was out of favor. Brick-and-mortar retail seemed destined to be disrupted by e-commerce and drone delivery. But retail evolved and grocery proved to be a unique facet of retail. At least so far.
Cover photo by Brittani Burns on Unsplash
Wing, the aerial delivery company owned by Alphabet, recently announced an expansion to 150 more Walmart stores across the US this year. This also includes four new cities: Los Angeles, St. Louis, Miami, and Cincinnati. The company now says that it has completed over 750,000 deliveries since it launched in 2012. And the goal is to be flying out of 270 Walmart locations by 2027.
There was a period over a decade ago when drone delivery was in its "hype phase." This also coincided with retail being out of favor as a real estate asset class. Drones made e-commerce seem even more threatening. Then things quieted down when regulation, noise, privacy, and other obstacles got in the way of the drone hype. But as with all new and promising technologies, the building continued, just less publicly.
Noise and privacy are serious concerns, but I understand that there are now "bladeless" drones and drones that use shrouds to direct sound upward. For the sake of argument, let's assume these problems can be solved. Now I wonder: Who is this for and where do they live?
Because of weight limitations, drone delivery payloads tend to be smaller items (under five pounds). And because there's only so far that these drones can fly on a single battery charge, they tend to be for quick local deliveries. So, the use case seems to be for people who don't have the luxury of being able to walk 10 minutes to a corner store, or can't be bothered to do so.
This also aligns with the early adopters of this tech: people who live in suburban homes and have driveways where a drone can easily land. This makes sense as an easy first solution, though I think you could make the case that landing on the roof of a tall building might actually be less conspicuous and disruptive at scale.
As it stands, drone delivery is an overwhelmingly suburban solution. The environment is convenient for takeoff and landing, and it's an environment where fetching small items probably isn't convenient. This solves that. And the company appears to be scaling. But how far will it go? And will it ever become a widespread urban solution?