Quote:
Originally Posted by jammer139
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Covent Market changing its business hours is a reflection of the changing times.
The purpose and role that a community’s core has traditionally had is changing, and will change much more in the future. Futurists such as Alvin Toffler were predicting this sort of dramatic technology-driven change 40 years ago in his work “The Third Wave” (still a relevant work). The role that city cores have played had not dramatically changed in hundreds (dare I say thousands) of years. Being centrally located for all in a community (i.e. – same distance to travel to), it has been a communally convenient place to conduct group activities such as commercial trade of goods, provision/sale of services, social administration, social events, and much more. With the advent of the industrial revolution, a mass migration from rural areas to cities occurred, making the role of the city core even greater, and that growth continued right up to perhaps the 1980’s.
Starting at about that time (1980’s), the next wave, the information-based revolution, began when the cost of mainly digital hardware and software became sufficiently low to be employed by many of those traditional activities undertaken in city cores. Within a span of perhaps 30 years following that, a large business that once required an internal army of staff simply to perform filing of endless (hardcopy only) records, sorting and distributing internal mail, or conducting clerical functions only needed a small fraction of that traditional army of staff for those functions, and resultantly the size of those organizations proportionally shrank. The introduction of high throughput communications systems being installed beginning in the 1990’s made the requirement for regional offices for many large businesses to be greatly reduced or even made completely unnecessary, as control and governance for an organization at a provincial or national scale could be exercised from a small handful of large head offices scattered across the nation. Again and again, more reasons for having fewer and fewer people in those city cores continued to manifest themselves in the past 30 or 40 years.
With the imminent introduction of artificial intelligence, extremely high throughput communication systems, eventual mass robotics, and changing social expectations of where work can/should be performed (or even the changing definition of work and leisure) will only continue (and likely accelerate) the erosion of, and in many cases perhaps eliminate, many of the customary activities/reasons for city cores to exist. The commercial trade of goods is already all but gone (other than of niche/boutique sector). The provision/sale of services has been reduced to specialized or professional services. What remains will need to be reasons that lean more towards a more communal function. There will for the time remain good reasons for administrative functions to have a place in a communities’ core because it still benefits the larger population. The overriding reason for a city core in the future however will be increasingly social: people will have to want to be there for its own sake. People wanting to live there. To spend leisure time there. To gather there socially. To learn there. Instead of a traditional city core having 30,000 people working there and only several thousand living there, it will need to be 30,000 people living there and less than half of that working there. That is why the development of residential accommodations is so critical to the survival of the cores of medium sized cities, and it is a race against time.
To close the loop, with Covent Market altering its business hours to better accommodate a growing residential population downtown, and acknowledging the continuing decline of the employment population, it points to things trending positively and smart businesses are recognizing the future ahead.
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