Is your town starting to look like every other town?

Oh yes.

The cookie cutter houses, stores, and streets.
>sigh<
same scene here in austin.
Even the " free spirited" people look the same now.

I am giving in to the thought that we are all Sims ,
4 basic human templates.
I just cant wait to shatter mine..

For the corp. It's all about brand recognition. People know what to expect from Mc D's ( note: see Cav's avatar.) It's also much easier for developers to have X amount of model houses and layouts to increase profitability.
I think the bottom line is profit.
Plain and simple.

Happiest moment for me in the last few years was when our GAP went out of business.

I guess even with those blase acoutrements (sp?), Cambridge is still fairly unique. After all, there's only one Harvard U and one MIT.

Mrs. Throbber and I have talked about this. It's sad but true. Of course we're the only ones with an Area 51.

We do have several Starbucks and a Baby Gap in my neighborhood, but no McDonalds, no Burger King and no
Home Depot, and no strip mall either.

In the city itself there are of course all these franchises
present including IKEA (hurraaahh), but quite well hidden
from tourists who come here to enjoy the beauty of
the city.

I'm moving soon...from a tiny war era (one bathroom) house, in a neighbourhood with four story trees to new sub division and I'm kinda dreading it.

No trees, an homage to concrete and cars- driveways, garage pads and sidewalks. Every house dressed in shades of pastel siding, save mine. Stripmalls all strategically placed with all the same stores you see everywhere else. But it's what the dude wants so...maybe one day I'll learn to like it.

I've been watching this sort of thing for a long time. I can't remember a single franchise site on the main street of my home town, (Middle Connecticut, middle 1960's) but now it is one corporation plant after another. What happens then to the person who wants to put his or her mark on a business? Can that still be done in the fields where corporations have already made their mark? Think: doughnuts or submarine sandwichs or pizza or even printing services.

Joe(Everything looks the same from Here)Nation

They pull out the spray paint....

I'm trying to mentally pace-down through harvard square. I don't think there's a starbucks, but there are 2 Au Bon Pains and a dunkin donuts, Pete's, Uno Pizzeria, Finagle Bagel.... no mcdonalds or burger king. If you head either way down Mass Ave (to porter square or central square) there are mcdonalds and starbucks.

I saw this in action in Naperville, our old town. The main street had been quirky old family-owned businesses, and by the time we moved in they were all there -- Gap, Ann Taylor, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Williams-Sonoma, Barnes and Noble -- all of it. This did bring in a lot of people and a lot of money. The family-owned businesses were being priced out of downtown, and were folding one by one.

Meanwhile, in a to me closely related development, the biggest housing trend was to tear down old interesting houses near downtown and build new giant monstrosities.

Good luck, Ceili. My good friend from across the street, who moved the week before us, did that -- moved from a cool old house in an area with giant trees to a subdivision. He hates it, and is just marking time until they move again.

At a guess, if you drove through Farmington, you would recognize over 80% of the restaurants. Again, just guessing, you would recognize the same percentage of retail stores if you go by sales volumn.

David Byrne played last years folk fest. When they interviewed him, he said he was dismayed with the miles of neon and all too familiar signs. He thought Canada would have held out, sadly...

What scares me is most of these stores don't provide a living much less raise a family but how do you compete?

Soz, the house has a few redeaming features. I have pretty much carte blanche with the design - we haven't built yet, and the backyard backs on to a ravine. So I think I'll be alright. Plus, I'm not planning to sell my house any time soon, so I'll always have a piece of the old neighbourhood. But I will miss my elms and the trains.

European towns still have their local/regional/national flair.

But when you don't look up the buildings ... I bet, my town Lippstadt looks the same with the shops as Rouen in France or Harlow in England or ...

Interesting thread, Joe. New York is still not the same as anywhere else that I've ever been or even heard about, but it's moving in that direction. But I guess you knew that already.

My home town of Rochester, NY has that homogenized look too. And Orlando, where I used to live? Forget about it. That's got to be one of the prototype cities for this kind of generic plastic-osity.

I think even NY has been affected by this plague. It appears every building is being held up by a Starbucks. Isn't there a KMart on Astor Place? In the late 80's The Gap opened on E. 8th Street and changed the whole East Village feel from punk to yuppie in a single swoop.

There's a great scene in the movie "Super Size Me" about this very topic.

It's a global phenomenon. In Slovakia it comes with some local touches. All new houses have identica hideous (i'd say heyneous if I could spell it right, but i can't) white plastic windows, preferably with matching white plastic fence. Not exactly a welcoming local touch, but there it is. Otherwise it's Kmarts, Tescos, Ikeas, McDonalds, Burger Kings everywhere.

(Paraphrased from West Side Story...just for you, Joe)

I like to be in Generica
Ok by me in Generica
Everything free in Generica
For a small fee in Generica....

Generica... . Okay. I'm stealing that word for this idea while you all look the other way. Generica.

I started thinking about this trend, and I do think it is an international one, from two different directions, 1) is how we seem to get imprinted with forms and shapes and patterns, our mother's face, the voice of our father, the sillouette of two brothers standing on the familiar porch steps and how we, or rather, our deep unconscious constantly searchs for those patterns and records them as we go through life, so that even in a strange land we will mistakenly think we see the face of an old friend or the back of the head of a former teacher. 2) While thinking about ebeth's upcoming trip to our fair city, New York, and whether or not she should try Katz's deli, I was reminded of another visitor. She was the daughter of an old friend, visiting New York because she thought she wanted to be discovered as an actress. ( Yes. That's a completely different story in itself, I'll have to share later. Apparently there are those innocents left, but they are few, aren't they?) At any rate, she arrived and we were supposed to go to dinner.

"I love Italian food" she gushed, and I pictured us strolling through Little Italy, looking, smelling, reading menus, trying to remember where that really good zuppa was...Umberto's, no, Il something wasn't it, it was off of Mulberry next to the place with the garden out back... when she went on, "I hope there is an Olive Garden here because that's the best." There are, if you can believe Cityscapes, about three thousand Italian restaurants in Manhattan...I let Mrs. Nation take our wide-eyed guest to the Olive Garden.

And that's when it hit me. Why would New York want an Olive Garden? Or a Gap or an Abercrombie&Whatever or a Victoria's Secret, if the idea is to draw people from other places to come visit here? If this place is the same as what you left, what is the appeal? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, we still have MOMA, and the Natural History Museum and Soho and ... so maybe my question is why would Tulsa, Knoxville and Ft. Worth want all the same stores (they even have the same paint on the walls, it's like the old Catholic Mass, no matter where you went it was identical too.)

Anyway, this thought, if you can call it that, is still mushy in my head. Is this striving for sameness something new or is it the result of the constant drumming of marketing, think :'soft drink' drink Diet Coke, think: home improvement, drink Home Depot.?

Here in Generica,
we like our style to be in style,
we see the smile
of all our mothers
on the faces of the ladies
selling cars on the tv screen
look there are our brothers
standing in line at Starbucks
wearing the same color khakis as the fellow in the ad.
Yet,
we sleep so well,
so deep
we no longer have those anxious
dreams impelling us to unfamiliar places,
to unclaimed stairways
unopened doors.

Joe(Not on purpose, I try to be a little more like everyone everyday)Nation

I live in the suburbs so my city looks like every other suburb.