If it weren’t for Amazon, Austin wouldn’t be what it is today. A critical amount of urban density was necessary for the “creative class” revitalization of downtowns that happened in places like Austin, Portland, and now Nashville.
While the headline is shocking, the quirky evolution of cities, as shown in Portlandia and places like Asheville or Brooklyn, required broader trends in urbanization to take place first, one of which required E-commerce. Amazon liberated us from a chunk of big-box stores. Yes, maybe Amazon destroyed Main Street. But it also buried Circuit City and Kmart.
E-commerce drained at least a little bit of the footprint of big-box stores, which were choking American cities into dullness. All of the new city growth at the turn of the century appeared to be in suburbs built around giant, open-air shopping centers. These mega strip malls had all the usual suspects: Home Depot, Costco, and Target. These shopping centers are worse than regular malls because at least malls have a contained narrative to them. You go there partly to have some experience. Visiting mega strip malls, on the other hand, are more frequent and transactional. The epic parking lots for both, though, are the ultimate symbol of what was wrong with city development in the latter half of the twentieth century.
