Internet Shopping is Good for You

Our text was shortlisted in an RIBA competition titled Resources, Urbanism, Community and Collaboration – What does the future hold?

This is what we said:

Urbanism & Community

Internet shopping is good for us:

Home deliveries from supermarkets is making hypermarkets and out of town shopping centres change and become spatially less important to us – specialist shops are re-emerging on the high street as people do bulk shopping on line and go to the high street for the interesting stuff. Specialist  services are developing in tandem with this. This process adds weight to the new focus on localism.

This new incentive to go local and build communities gives us a chance to re-examine Colin Rowe’s Collage City: We need to develop the image that we all have of our communities in both their plastic form (where they are and what they look like) and the communities themselves (who they are and how we interact with them).  We know that the city is a process we now need to include specialist groups and communities in our definition of both process and image.

Community and Collaboration

Ideas can be collaged too:

Collaboration between communities and specialists brings about a greater focus on resources and that focus leads the way to a better and more natural understanding of the need to continually re-educate ourselves and those around us about our environment.

Collaging specialists and the resulting interaction within the community  will bring  about a greater sense of ownership and civic responsibility  – and it is here that the environment benefits because a well used environment is the basis of a sustainable environment.