Getting What You Need?

By Pam Hadder

As a small kid living in northern Manitoba, our Childcraft Encyclopedia series was a vital part of play time. From those magical volumes, we not only learned about the outside world, we read stories and prose, and kept ourselves occupied with a wide variety of crafts and role play activities. (This was pre-Internet, of course, but not quite prehistoric!)

I remember an excercise in entrepreneurship that facinated me at age seven - you had to choose businesses to create a vital community. Would it be the bakeshop, a fruit stand, or a shoe repair shop - which was more important and in which order would you select them? I used to love imagining my ideal village where everything would be "just so!"

In recent weeks, I have had the opportunity to work in rural Manitoba, and it has been interesting to survey the types of enterprises that comprise small town business districts these days. I was pleased to find a local bakeshop with wonderful "fresh daily" goods that also sold homemade sandwiches and soup for take-out. But an ATV shop - how can you make a living in a tiny community by solely selling and servicing ATVs?

Our cityscape is equally interesting - you can't drive more than a couple of blocks without seeing all of the following: tattoo parlour, nail salon, yoga studio, and sushi take-out; oh, there's another tattoo place! And, those businesses weren't included in the Childcraft selections, by the way...

Something is definitely afoot - either what we need has dramatically changed since I was a little kid building my imaginary model community, or everyone eats Japanese three times weekly with fake nails, full tattoo sleeves; in the lotus pose. Many urban environments suffer from what is called "sprawl", and the result is a dilution of services like access to public transit, door-to-door mail delivery, and proximity to food retailers and other requirements for daily living. As a result, suburbanites rely on the use of motor vehicles in order to work, shop, and participate in community activities.

Rural people are accustomed to driving a distance for work, for activities and for shopping - consider how much additional time and effort each rural child spends justs to get to school five days a week! Nonetheless, many rural communities are seeking to diversify, keep up with the times and offer local alternatives to city bound pilgrimages - that's how the fried chicken/bus depot/post office/laudromat/small appliance repair centres come into being!

Services typically arise as a result of need - no matter if you live in a small hamlet or in the midst of a metropolis. It is interesting, however, that many of us move to urban centres for convenience - to access education, employment, health services and so on. But then we drive hundreds of kilometres per week, all within our "convenient" environment. It's a funny kind of progress if you think about it.