Brisbane’s weather and constantly improving bike infrastructure lends itself well to shopping trips by bike but Brisbane shopping centres also need to do their bit to attract more cyclists and save themselves money while they’re at it.
Food is great. It titillates your palate, keeps chefs employed and gives you an excuse to stop work in the middle of the day. Best of all though, is that it prevents you from dying. Humans have used various methods throughout evolution to acquire food from hunting and gathering through to the advent of agriculture and eventually to urbanisation and the rise of the supermarket.
But with supermarkets coming about in the context of car-centric urbanisation, a raft of problems came with them. For one, the amount of space required to park all the cars being used for grocery getting at a supermarket often equals or exceeds the space required for the supermarket itself. For all the touting of convenience they use to market themselves, supermarkets (and large retail complexes more generally) are made all the more inconvenient by the need to park a considerable distance from the entrance and then lug all the groceries back the same way prior to exiting while inhaling other shoppers’ exhaust fumes and putting yourself in danger by mingling on foot with cars which are reversing, scrambling for free parks and drivers often losing their shit due to the stress of the whole experience. Continue reading “Civilized Food Gathering”
