My recent New Jersey trip led to a lot of pieces here, but today’s piece was inspired by our Croatia vacation back in May.

On our drive up the coast from Dubrovnik to Split—somewhere around three hours, both cities being in the country’s south—I noticed something interesting on some of the smaller/local roads. (I wrote about driving Croatia’s expressways here, which are great.)

We saw a number of stands selling fresh fruits, dried fruits, and condiments (that’s what it looked like from the car, anyway; they may have had a few other things, but we didn’t stop at one.) Several of them were identical—same stand, same wares, but presumably different owners. It reminds me of the postwar (and some prewar) architecture in the United States, like diners, or other small structures—motel offices, gas station garages, ticket booths—that were shipped in pieces and assembled by a small crew. Or even just custom-built. It was business at a smaller scale.

We also passed through little towns, or maybe just small agglomerations of car-oriented businesses, where you might see a small restaurant right along the road with an old Coke sign, a sign reading “Grill,” or something like that. Little if any of it was a chain or a brand. There were lots of little villages that had barely sprawled at all, just off the roads.

Maybe doing business this way, at this scale, is something of a cultural thing. But I think it’s something else, because the country roads in the area I grew up kind of look like this—and the earliest generation of car-oriented roadside development in America, 100 years ago or more, looked like this too.

I love a bit from a 1979 article in the Washington Post about Rockville Pike, one of the major commercial thoroughfares in Maryland’s D.C. suburbs. There are a whole slew of these types of articles from that era. It was an interesting period, when these landscapes had already been built out for decades, but their original life as what Chester H. Liebs calls “approach strips” into the city had been outmoded. You had a lot of different eras living side by side in bits and pieces—a lot of stuff that was only a few decades old but truly from another era. An old American highway in the 1970s is kind of like a person who lived from 1860 to 1960.

In Strong Towns last year, I wrote about Rockville Pike and I recounted that article’s presentation of a produce vendor along the road:

The Post article profiles a produce vendor, who opened up back in 1946 when there were dozens of such vendors. By 1979, he was the last one. It’s remarkable how recently you could still find such semi-regulated, small-scale commerce along a major thoroughfare. On many country roads, you still can. It’s heartening, in a way. The stroad form these thoroughfares take today is really quite recent in the big picture.

That’s really neat. It struck me that with these smaller roads in Croatia—though not far off the expressway—it looks as though they’ve managed to retain semi-permanently what in an American context turned out to be the first of many generations of roadside commerce and development, until that became an entire development pattern and way of life. I wonder if they can really keep that.

Is it just inherently transitional—once you have cars—or did we squeeze that out in favor of total orientation around the car?

The man who ran our wine country up by Rovinj, in the country’s northwest, said something like this. Right now, he said, there was just the right mix of traditional culture and modern amenities and commerce. But the younger generation was less interested in the old ways—more “Western,” he said, by which he meant capitalistic. (He was not pining for the communist era, but the old communitarian way of life, centered around the church, the village, and the family.)

Chris Arnade, who walks and observes cities around the world, in a sort of informal layman’s way, said something similar about Seoul recently:

While most businesses are locally owned and run, there are plenty of franchises and larger global companies operating and expanding in Seoul.

The result is a tension (mostly generational) between a Western consumerism (buy this, buy that, wear this, wear that) and a Korean traditional entrepreneurialism (make this, make that, sell this, sell that, don’t wear this, don’t wear that.)…

In Seoul the balance between the traditional past and the franchised future is still that. A balance.

A perfect blend of place based communalism and market based efficiency.

A blend that allows Seoul to have nice things. Many nice things.

A perfect balance, if you can keep it.

Related Reading:

A Little More on Rockville Pike

Thoughts on Density and Distance

Old City Driving

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