Small Town America in an Era of Big Box Development

Small Town America in an Era of Big Box Development PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chain stores
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Articles and essays presented at the March 10-11, 2005, Symposium at Vermont Law School.

Small Town America in an Era of Big Box Development

Small Town America in an Era of Big Box Development PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chain stores
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
Articles and essays presented at the March 10-11, 2005, Symposium at Vermont Law School.

Big-Box Swindle

Big-Box Swindle PDF Author: Stacy Mitchell
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807035016
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
A Book Sense Pick and Annual Highlight With a New Afterword In less than two decades, large retail chains have become the most powerful corporations in America. In this deft and revealing book, Stacy Mitchell illustrates how mega-retailers are fueling many of our most pressing problems, from the shrinking middle class to rising pollution and diminished civic engagement—and she shows how a growing number of communities and independent businesses are effectively fighting back. Mitchell traces the dramatic growth of mega-retailers—from big boxes like Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Costco, and Staples to chains like Starbucks, Olive Garden, Blockbuster, and Old Navy—and the precipitous decline of independent businesses. Drawing on examples from virtually every state in the country, she unearths the extraordinary impact of these companies and the big-box mentality on everything from soaring gasoline consumption to rising poverty rates, failing family farms, and declining voting levels. Along the way, Mitchell exposes the shocking role government policy has played in the expansion of mega-retailers and builds a compelling case that communities composed of many small, locally owned businesses are healthier and more prosperous than those dominated by a few large chains. More than a critique, Big-Box Swindle provides an invigorating account of how some communities have successfully countered the spread of big boxes and rebuilt their local economies. Since 2000, more than two hundred big-box development projects have been halted by groups of ordinary citizens, and scores of towns and cities have adopted laws that favor small-scale, local business development and limit the proliferation of chains. From cutting-edge land-use policies to innovative cooperative small-business initiatives, Mitchell offers communities concrete strategies that can stave off mega-retailers and create a more prosperous and sustainable future.

Main Street Revisited

Main Street Revisited PDF Author: Richard V. Francaviglia
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 0877455430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Popular culture, Francaviglia looks sympathetically but realistically at the ways in which Main Street's image developed and persists. He reaffirms that life can imitate art, that the cherished icons surrounding Main Street have become the substance of popular culture. Ultimately, his book is about the material culture that architects, town developers, and image makers have left us as their legacy. Seen through the lives of the visionaries who created them in their.

Big Box USA

Big Box USA PDF Author: Bart Elmore
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1646425944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Big Box USA presents a new look at how the big box retail store has dramatically reshaped the US economy and its ecosystems in the last half century. From the rural South to the frigid North, from inside stores to ecologies far beyond, this book examines the relationships that make up one of the most visible features of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century American life. The rise of big box retail since the 1960s has transformed environments on both local and global scales. Almost everyone has explored the aisles of big box stores. The allure of “everyday low prices” and brightly colored products of every kind connect shoppers with a global marketplace. Contributors join a growing conversation between business and environmental history, addressing the ways American retail institutions have affected physical and cultural ecologies around the world. Essays on Walmart, Target, Cabela’s, REI, and Bass Pro Shops assess the “bigness” of these superstores from “smokestacks to coat racks” and contend that their ecological impacts are not limited to the footprints of parking lots and manufacturing but also play a didactic role in educating consumers about their relationships with the environment. A model for historians seeking to bring business and environmental histories together in their analyses of merchant capital’s role in the landscapes of everyday life and how it has remade human relationships with nature, Big Box USA is a must-read for students and scholars of the environment, business, sustainability, retail professionals, and a general audience.

Small Towns and Big Business

Small Towns and Big Business PDF Author: Stephen Halebsky
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739122401
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
During the 1990s, a new type of controversy began occurring across the United States: controversies over the siting of superstores, also known as big box stores. In these disputes, which often involved Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, local citizens mounted organized opposition to the proposed siting of a superstores in their town or neighborhood. Opponents criticized Wal-Mart superstores for putting local independent merchants out of business, siphoning money from the local economy, providing substandard jobs, disrupting residential neighborhoods, contributing to the "McDonaldization" of society, inducing sprawl, destroying downtowns and Main Streets, and undermining local uniqueness and small town charm. More generally, these David-and-Goliath controversies represented particularly stark examples of the conflict of interests between local communities and large corporations that have become common in contemporary society. Small Towns and Big Business uses fieldwork and archival sources to comprehensively examine these controversies and the underlying issues. While Wal-Mart is usually able to site its stores at its preferred locations, in some cases local opponents have been able to thwart its plans. Using detailed case studies of anti-superstore controversies in six small cities in five states, Halebsky employs a comparative-historical approach to construct an explanation of how some of these local social movements managed to prevail against Wal-Mart. This explanation is then extended to provide the basis for a model of the general conditions under which local communities may be able to constrain unwanted corporate action. Thus, this is both a study of social movement outcomes and an investigation of community-corporate conflict. Small Towns and Big Business provides insight into the potential of the local state to control large corporations, the inherently problematic nature of corporate retailing, the possibilities for resisting McDonaldization, and the fate of local anti-corporation activism. Book jacket.

Strong Towns

Strong Towns PDF Author: Charles L. Marohn, Jr.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119564816
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem. Inside, you’ll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles—and why it just doesn’t work. New development and high-risk investing don’t generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens’ quality of life. Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the “traditional” search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.

Small Town America

Small Town America PDF Author: Richard R. Lingeman
Publisher: Putnam Publishing Group
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
"The history of America is the history of its small towns. For better or worse, small town values, convictions, and attitudes have shaped the psyche of this nation...[This book] chronicles the rise and fall of small towns from the Atlantic to the Pacific and interweaves the story of their development with the main strands of American history..."--inside flap.

Small Town Economic Development

Small Town Economic Development PDF Author: Joaquin Jay Gonzalez III,
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786476788
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
We tend to associate small town economic development with the decline of the rural United States--empty houses, shuttered shops and rusting factories. A common diagnosis of sluggish small town recovery is their lack of lifestyle amenities that attract new residents and businesses. Yet many small towns have shown progress and potential in recent years. This collection of recent articles by experts presents stories of small-town America's struggle and describes innovations and practices behind successful revivals.

An Equal Place

An Equal Place PDF Author: Scott L. Cummings
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190215933
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
An Equal Place is a monumental study of the role of lawyers in the movement to challenge economic inequality in one of America's most unequal cities: Los Angeles. Breaking with the traditional focus on national civil rights history, the book turns to the stories of contemporary lawyers, on the front lines and behind the scenes, who use law to reshape the meaning of low-wage work in the local economy. Covering a transformative period of L.A. history, from the 1992 riots to the 2008 recession, Scott Cummings presents an unflinching account of five pivotal campaigns in which lawyers ally with local movements to challenge the abuses of garment sweatshops, the criminalization of day labor, the gentrification of downtown retail, the incursion of Wal-Mart groceries, and the misclassification of port truck drivers. Through these campaigns, lawyers and activists define the city as a space for redefining work in vital industries transformed by deindustrialization, outsourcing, and immigration. Organizing arises outside of traditional labor law, powered by community-labor and racial justice groups using levers of local government to ultimately change the nature of labor law itself. Cummings shows that sophisticated legal strategy engaging yet extending beyond courts, in which lawyers are equal partners in social movements is an indispensable part of the effort to make L.A. a more equal place. Challenging accounts of lawyers' negative impact on movements, Cummings argues that the L.A. campaigns have achieved meaningful reform, while strengthening the position of workers in local politics, through legal innovation. Dissecting the reasons for failure alongside the conditions for success, this groundbreaking book illuminates the crucial role of lawyers in forging a new model of city-building for the twenty-first century.

Theme Town

Theme Town PDF Author: Thomas Wayne Paradis
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1469725630
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
This book changes the way we view our everyday human landscapes by taking us on a 22-stop adventure through the heart of Flagstaff, Arizona. In Flagstaff's America Tour, the reader encounters four distinct though interacting landscape scenes: a themed historic business district, a pre-War multi-ethnic neighborhood, an expanding university campus, and a dynamic automobile commercial strip. Prior to the tour, Part 1 introduces us to the fascinating study of geography and the interpretation of human landscapes. In Part 2 Paradis discusses the expansion of the AT&SF Railway and its role in Flagstaff's own historical development. He further analyzes the implications of this global cargo corridor on Flagstaff's local community and themed landscapes. The entire book integrates a variety of cultural, economic, political, global, and environmental perspectives to understand the complexities of our everyday world. Whether enjoyed from the bustling streets of downtown Flagstaff or from the comfort of our own homes, Theme Town will encourage us to see our own local places with fresh and inquisitive eyes.