When Wal-Mart moves out, what does the company leave behind? Along with customers and employees, an abandoned superstore’s most visible legacy is a huge, empty, warehouselike structure. When another company fails to fill the space, the local community has to step in. In Big Box Reuse (MIT Press), Julia Christensen writes that “the reuse of these buildings seems unlikely, with their directly corporate associations and their aesthetically bland hulk.” Nevertheless, she continues, big boxes currently house museums, schools, libraries, and even churches across the country.
Big Box Reuse looks at a number of community projects that transformed stores once operated by Kmart or Wal-Mart, two corporations, Christensen notes, “that have made a drastic impact on the global economy” and whose structures have “changed the trajectory of development in our cities and towns.” Each of the projects faced problems unique to superstores, like what to do with acres of parking spaces and byzantine side streets connecting to the lots. The author, who traveled to each project site, recounts her frustration on one trip to a Wal-Mart-cum-elementary school in Laramie, Wyo.: “My computer-generated directions have become completely irrelevant. The highway is to the left of me, I can see it, and somehow I have entangled myself in a mass of tiny roads that connect a string of parking lots.”
Yet the shape and size of a big box can be an advantage. The principal of a charter school located in an abandoned Kmart near Buffalo, N.Y., tells the author, “I used to work in a traditional school building, and the curriculum there was often hindered by the structure.” At the big box, he said, expansion and constant renovation were possible. The owner of a cafe located in the new county library in Lebanon, Mo., says that renovating a former Wal-Mart building was “the best thing that has happened to this town in a long, long time.” Christensen relates that the renovation “was truly a community affair,” requiring “the enthusiastic efforts of literally thousands of locals.” Another advantage is environmental, she says: “Despite the blatant environmentally harmful construction of a big-box building, reuse is a powerful tool in the fight against the increasing dangers of sprawl.”
A visiting professor of emerging arts at Oberlin College, Christensen argues that the physical and conceptual transformation of superstores allows formerly corporate spaces to reflect the public’s needs and interests. By taking back the big box, she writes, “communities continuously reconnect their needs and activity flow to the landscape.”
***
Two American independent truckers, played by Humphrey Bogart and George Raft, struggle to find enough loads to keep their rig from being repossessed in the 1940 film They Drive by Night. They will not sign with a trucking company, preferring independence over job security. As Shane Hamilton writes in Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (Princeton University Press), the men realize that although independent trucking is a gamble, “the psychological dividends of self-assured manhood make the risk worth taking.”
Hamilton, an assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia, seeks to show how, beginning in the 1930s, independent truckers defied the push for increased government regulation of the transportation industry (and thereby the food industry) by refusing to join unions like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The rogue individualism of the truckers, Hamilton writes, countered “New Deal liberalism” with a jolt of free enterprise.
Ultimately, that came at the cost of introducing a “low-wage, low-price business model” that would later be adopted by companies like Wal-Mart. Indeed, Trucking Country suggests that independent long-haul trucking allowed agricultural businesses to cultivate “the antistatist, antiunion ideologies that made post-New Deal capitalism palatable” to many Americans. By circumventing government regulations of the transportation of foodstuffs and other goods, independent truckers helped foster market competition, which drove down prices.
But the government did limit independent truckers to “hauling ‘unregulated’ commodities — particularly farm and food products — that brought low returns for sweated labor,” writes Hamilton. Anger over that limitation festered over the years and contributed in 1979 to a violent, sweeping highway blockade that left crops rotting in fields, and Americans scrambling to buy out grocery-store shelves.
The author resists the notion, which he says is sometimes proposed by Democrats, that the modern Republican Party is founded on “a devil’s bargain” between economic conservatives and socially conservative blue-collar Americans whose financial interests are not best served by the alliance. To the contrary, free-market zeal “had been coalescing for decades on the nation’s rural highways,” Hamilton insists. That zeal was born out of “pocketbook politics, not cultural conservatism,” he asserts; whether or not independent truckers benefited financially by maintaining their freedom, they believed that unregulated competition was best for the economy, and themselves.
In popular myth, independent truckers are cowboys and outlaws, “knights of the road.” The effects of their “masculine economic culture” not only challenged government regulation, Hamilton suggests, but also changed the way Americans buy their food.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 9, Page B18