Prairie DD

 A Strong Towns Preview

While I was in the kitchen preparing some very special coffee this morning, my favorite librarian sent me the following video from the living room, where she was awaiting her cuppa. It is from Strong Towns, a sustainability organization that is focused on ways to improve the walkability of urban places. 

Chuck Marrone's discussion of a new coffee shop near his office pertains to the geography of coffee shops, more specifically that poster child of mediocre commodity coffee: Dunkin' Donuts. 

I include this ambulatory screed in this blog, because it is addresses some of the important spatial implications of local coffee shops, and the difference between those that are independent and those that are run by distant corporations, which are in turn increasingly in the thrall of the same sort of "investors" that are eviscerating many sectors of the economy. 

This short video points to something I find fascinating -- when asked about what kinds of businesses people would like to have in their towns, a severe lack of imagination takes over, and people start naming fast-food franchises. People in small places feel their town has "arrived" when a Chipotle or Panera shows up -- even more, it seems, when Dunks arrives. 

I have not been able to update my Coffee Hell page for about a decade (thanks, IT managers!), but it remains a valid introduction to some of the other issues I have had with the company, as does a Dunkin word search on my main blog. Not its workers, of course -- many of my students have been DD employees, even a few from the nearby headquarters. I have not had DD coffee since 2008 -- which takes a bit of effort, living where I do. 

But I include the video for something more useful than my rants -- the speaker describes some specific benefits of local shops for employment, tax base, and sustainability of infrastructure. The original post includes some opposing views, which are worthy of discussion but not convincing. I hope that Strong Towns returns to the site with more specific analysis, as the speaker suggests near the end.

The short video raises two "where" questions this geographer. The first is a "what kind of place" question of situation, to which the answer is, just about any place outside the center of a US city. I was in such a pocket of otherwise gorges Ithaca just last week -- a place I had not been, but that I could navigate almost blindfolded, because it is like every similar place.

The second "where" question is the more precise question of site, to which the answer is Route 210 in Brainerd, Minnesota. I have included a map here that flips the usual map assignment for students posting on this blog. We can see that commodity coffee is easy to find in every direction from the new Dunks, but I wondered about the nearest real café. 

Loco Espress is across the main street, as it turns out, but this part of town has already been ceded to the automobile so that the two businesses are very much isolated. Google suggests that they are 2 minutes apart by car but 30 minutes walking, because a person cannot cross Route 210 in that area. If I ever find myself in Brainerd, however, I know where I am headed -- the boutique café with the clever name that honors its rail yard location. 

Since I have gone this far, I should end with a meta map -- showing the distance from our university (where we talk about good coffee but don't serve it) to Ground Zero of commodity coffee, located 32 minutes by car to our NNW.

Lagniappe: The debate continues

Anybody still reading this will have noticed that I have spent more time writing about the Strong Towns video than it took to produce or watch. So I was about to wrap this up when I noticed this related post in my scrolling.

And as before, not everyone agrees. They say "never read the comments" but sometimes the comments provide an education, in this case revealing some of the attitudes that shape our shared townscapes. Individual decisions have community effects, and the shape of our community constrains our individual decisions.