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While I found all of James Kunstler’s article on Peak Suburbia interesting, the thing that struck me the most was the following graph, taken (by Mr. Kunstler) from the pages of Shopping Centers Today, the house organ of the International Council of Shopping Centers, dedicated to serving the global retail industry.

I had intuited over my years sojourn in the environs of London that I was somehow spending less time in commercial spaces, but those numbers are just staggering. Eight times as much retail space in the States as in the UK?

How can I square that with my experiences of more variety in the types of stores I can go to, even in deepest darkest Essex?

How do I explain the profusion of shops in walking distance of my flat while still assuming the validity of that statistic? I had assumed on getting here and wandering around that there was much, much more retail going on that anywhere else I had ever been.

Perhaps the two are not as opposite as I had initially thought. Perhaps my perceptions were of improved variety and choice, not of increased retail space. Does variety really play that big a part in a consumers apprehension of the retail landscape?

If so, then the mega-stores in the US are failing completely in their bid to convince people (me at least) that they actually provide variety. It seems that variety has more to do with the number of shops and less to do with the number of goods or space that those goods consume.