Dangers of the 'doughnut effect'

  • 2001-01-11
  • Mike Walford
The construction of the biggest shopping center in Lithuania is due
to begin in March (see TBT #232). It will be located on the A1
highway near Kaunas. But, as Mike Walford, a cultural planner from
Bradford University, reports, the project has hidden hazards.

Plans for a proposed shopping center to be built outside Kaunas on
the A1 highway are disturbing. It seems that this development
proposal appears so enticing to the Kaunas municipality that they
have assigned land beyond their powers.

It speaks immediately of a very ill thought-out plan. Of course it
can make excellent headlines as a high-profile development funded by
Foreign Direct Investment. FDI has not come to the Baltic states in
anything like the amount expected by the founder of the "Shock
Therapy" approach to economic development, Jeffrey Sachs.

Accepting any FDI going, regardless of how appropriate the project
is, will create long-term problems for Kaunas and, by implication,
other municipalities across the Baltic region. The specific problem
here is the so-called "doughnut effect," which has destroyed town and
city cen-ters across Britain and is a direct outcome of developments
like the projected one on the outskirts of Kaunas.

This effect has been caused by exactly the sort of development now
likely to be established at Kaunas. The expression comes from a sort
of cake that has a hole in the center, and describes the hollowing
out of the center of cities as a dynamic living entity.

It is an effect caused by "creaming off" the most successful retail
outlets and the richest customers and concentrating them in a place
easily reached by car. This means that not only Kaunas will be
affected but also cities, towns and villages up to about an hour's
drive away, so shops as far away as Vilnius may be affected.

In a country like Lithuania, where car ownership is still relatively
low by Western standards, this removal of the richest segment of
society from the city center will make it very hard for Kaunas to
increase the range of choice and prices in shops in the city center.

In a country with large differences between rich and poor, the
doughnut effect may be even more marked than in countries such as the
U.K.

It is well known that in the recent past in Britain, which has very
tight planning regulations, large scale shopping developments have
been forced upon cities when they were not really wanted.

Normally the development team will argue that more jobs will be
created. What they don't explain is that many small shops will be
forced to close, because customers are attracted away from the city
centers or smaller shopping centers in other parts of the city.

Not only are the net number of jobs likely to be lost by this
development, but the most vulnerable people such as the old, disabled
and single parents will lose out. Local shops will disappear and far
greater distances will have to be traveled to get basic commodities.

In Britain, once some of these centers had been established and the
actual outcomes of this policy could be measured and evaluated, many
councils were doubtful about granting permission for these places to
be established.

But the developers were in a very powerful position. They threatened
local councils that they would develop in another municipality
nearby, so that jobs in the center would be lost anyway and they
would not be replaced by jobs created by the development.

This is now recognized at national level and the government is much
more careful about encouraging development on these ou- of-town
sites, preferring instead to utilize reclaimed industrial land called
"Brownfield sites."

The report in The Baltic Times in November about the Kaunas project
came on a day when the internationally known architect Richard Rogers
produced a significant report funded by the British government. This
investigated ways to revitalize British cities that have suffered
both from the effects of older industries closing down and from the
effects of poorly thought-out developments like "ou-of-town" shopping
centers.

Richard Rogers is particularly concerned about developing cities in a
sustainable way, which means ensuring that the environment within the
city is pleasant and safe to live in, using far fewer natural
resources than before.

There are some criticisms of Rogers from leading geographers like
Doreen Massey and Nigel Thrift, who suggests in a recent publication
called "Cities for the Many not the Few" that Rogers still
concentrates too much on architecture and urban design from the "top
down" rather than opening up planning questions that involve all the
stakeholders.

Nowadays, the best practice in Britain based on hard and brutal
experience is that development energies and investments should be
concentrated on the cities. They actually already exist making far
better use of existing physical, material and human resources than is
currently happening.

Kaunas is a fantastic city with excellent cultural and other
resources for a city of its size. The way the citizens use Laisves
Aleja on a Sunday night, for instance, is reminiscent of the Italian
tradition of la passagiatta, where vast numbers of the inhabitants of
even small towns come out to engage in the public sphere of Italian
cities.

The fact that on a Sunday evening in summer there is now music
available in the open air makes the city a wonderful place to be. It
is this sort of cultural lived practices that make Kaunas a great
city to live in and visit, making a good foundation on which to build
a stable tourist industry while ensuring that the city is primarily
designed physically and socially for the good of its own citizens.

Kaunas needs to make more of its natural advantages and its
architectural heritage. Many parts of the Old Town, which is full of
fine old buildings, are suffering from serious neglect. Development
resources should be directed to regenerating areas like this, which
will then provide a development dynamic for the central city as a
whole.

The current strategy of developing out-of-town shopping centers
threatens the hard-won gains of small local businesses in Kaunas that
have struggled in very harsh economic circumstances, many of which
have been results of policies inflicted on Lithuania by financial
institutions such as the IMF.

The likely outcome of this development is that social division will
be made larger and a disproportionate amount of profit will be taken
out of the country by large overseas concerns that will have put
little back into the productive capacity of the country.

Ecologically this development will encourage car dependency at a time
when most Western countries are becoming gridlocked. For Lithuania,
with no natural oil supply and world oil prices spiraling upwards,
this can only mean yet more imports.

Improving what is already a basically good transport infrastructure,
by upgrading and updating, and planning a more integrated system that
is better able to cope with elderly, disabled and frail people, is a
crucial part of a city infrastructure that will make the city
attractive to a wide range of outside investors.

Cities with comfortable citizens make for a comfortable and
interesting, varied working environment. Many large western
corporations now recognize that they have a social responsibility to
all stakeholders where they invest.

Perhaps Objeckt-Entwicklung, the German real estate developer behind
the project, can be persuaded to change its plans and instead put its
investment into city-center and other out-of-town developments. This
would make a far more sustainable package for the long-term. But then
perhaps the quality of life of the citizens of Kaunas is not their
primary interest.

Foreign direct investment is certainly needed, but it must be the
right sort of investment, which uses and enhances the skills and
enthusiasm of the people of Kaunas so that the successful export of
goods and services in the global market takes place.

Had a more open planning system been used, so that the likely
outcomes of this development had been properly assessed by large
numbers of the various stakeholders in the Kaunas community, it seems
likely that a different project or projects might well have happened.
The keywords in planning nowadays are openness to stakeholders,
accountability and sustainability. It seems pertinent to ask how well
this project measures up against these benchmarks. Maybe there is a
lesson here for stakeholders in Kaunas. On a cultural planning
research visit I made to Kaunas in 1998, many people I interviewed
commented that it was very hard to persuade Lithuanian people to work
together. If this remains the situation then overseas competition
will move in where they perceive a vacuum.

In the current global economic climate, the most successful cities
are those that achieve dynamic creative partnerships between
business, local government and the NGO sector. It is partnerships and
open planning processes that underlie this approach which create
projects that enhance the quality of life of citizens in a very rich
and rewarding way.

The rest of us just get out-of-town shopping centers, which all seem
to be the same whatever country you are in.