Decent and interesting-looking cafes seem to stop popping up once you pass the ends of tram lines. I would suggest that that's one of the markers for where the city becomes the suburbs.
Looking beyond the trams, along the various train lines there are usually small local shopping strips. Real estate advertising would have you believe that these places are trendy, bustling and generally desirable places to live close to. The reality is quite the opposite.
The vitality of shopping in the suburbs is found either in small pockets of local shops where the local council and business owners have obviously made the effort to pursue policies to make these places interesting, or in large malls. The latter have the advantage of being able to amass a large amount of specialty retail alongside supermarkets and budget stores. This comes at the expense of herding customers into a soulless round of halls, usually through soul-destroying parking lots. Malls really seem to reduce consumerism down to the essentials of a compulsive fetish.
For me, the measure of any shopping area is whether the place seems to have vitality. Coffee is the acid test. As a confirmed long black drinker, it is a sure sign that things are pretty bad when it comes with more water than coffee. In the city you get the taste of the coffee; in the suburbs you're lucky if the poor barista even knows that the coffee is the point.
No comments:
Post a Comment