"IKEA IS A BAD IDEA"
A IKEA é o McDonalds do mobiliário, linhas rectas sobretudo, funcional, barato (são feitos em pasta de papel), produzido em série, rápido, montável (a onda kit). Tipo de mobiliário para escuteiros, para telenovelas, para apartamentos hipersuburbanos.
O PM Sócrates declara que a IKEA vai "mudar a face empresarial de toda a região".
Em relação ao aeroporto de Beja, Sócrates declarou que o aeroporto iria "mudar a face do Alentejo".
O IKEA segundo o PM é "motivo de orgulho" para o país. ( Orgulhem-se em ter mobília foleira, globalista, feita por aquela que é considerada a "seita do kit"). A unidade da IKEA foi implantada numa REN, sacrificando parte de uma área protegida.
Curioso este mantra mudar a face. Ler: implementar o mau gosto. Destruir mais floresta.
How people power felled a retail giant
Original publication: Feb. 01, 2001 By Phil ReismanIf there is one thing to be learned from IKEA's decision to pull out of New Rochelle, it is this: You can fight City Hall, and you can win, too.
"This is a case of real people power," an elated Randolph Scott-McLaughlin said yesterday.
He should know. The outspoken professor and director of the Social Justice Center at Pace University School of Law was one of the early leaders in the cause against IKEA's plan to build a furniture store so large that it would have swallowed 16 acres of a racially mixed neighborhood of modest homes, small businesses and two churches. In its blueprint incubator, the thing never seemed to stop growing. Over time, it metastasized from 285,000 square feet to 308,000 square feet and then to 325,000 square feet upon its death, which officially arrived with yesterday's surprise news conference at City Hall.
May it rest in peace, a retail Titanic that never got launched.
There were so many arguments going against IKEA that the project simply collapsed under the weight of logic and reason.
Those arguments were persuasively put forth by well-organized citizens who formulated textbook strategies to oppose City Hall and the wishes of an international corporation that seemed unconquerable.
At least three citizens groups were formed, and more were apparently on the way as the network of opposition grew. Money was raised. Meetings and rallies were held, sometimes in the rain. Advertisements were taken out, and anti-IKEA fliers were printed and posted on telephone poles and homes. Phone calls were made, and untold numbers of passionate letters were written and e-mailed or hand-delivered to politicians, newspapers and anyone else who might read, listen and think.
Their slogan, "IKEA is a bad idea," resonated.
More than anything, these people educated themselves. They read IKEA's thick, nearly incomprehensible draft environmental impact statement and came in with their own traffic engineers and urban planning experts to rip it to shreds. It quickly became clear over the course of 18 hours of public hearings, that the IKEA store, with the expectation of drawing regional customers from all points of the compass, wasn't going to revitalize that little congested neighborhood known as City Park.
On the contrary, it was going to turn parts of New Rochelle, Mamaroneck, Scarsdale and Larchmont into a stinking, safety hazard of bumper-to-bumper cars and trucks.
The turning point against the IKEA plan probably happened during those hearings.
"I have to say that it's a testament," Scott-McLaughlin said, "to the responsiveness of the city officials of New Rochelle that they heard the message. It's to their credit, that they listened. They heard the people, and they realized they had to respond."
That's the way it should be. When the gadgetry of democratic government works properly, power surges from the broad base of public opinion and percolates upward to those at the top who are chosen to serve.
Nobody loses when faith in government is reaffirmed. Nobody, not even the big guys at IKEA who reportedly spent at least $2 million on this gamble, but most assuredly will recoup some of their investment and live another day to find another, more compatible store site.
Now is the time to look forward.
Three things should be considered. First, Albany should reform the law of eminent domain, which theoretically allows governments to condemn private property for a "public use." That the notion of public use has been expanded to include the interests of a private concern like IKEA should be stopped. No one lost their property to eminent domain in the IKEA saga, but the threat was there and it scared and angered people, most notably senior citizens, who didn't want to give up their homes.
Second, the IKEA experience should result in better, more creative ideas for so-called "blighted" areas slated for urban renewal. The people who live and work in those areas need to be consulted about their future, and so do people who live in the neighboring communities. No man is an island, and no city is an island, either.
Finally, attention must be paid to the fiscal problems of small cities like New Rochelle. When it comes to state revenue sharing, for example, New Rochelle is getting short-changed, and therefore it is no wonder that it turned to an ill-conceived panacea like IKEA.
Since IKEA says it now owns 70 percent of the City Park renewal zone and is therefore a "substantial landowner," maybe it will help in the lobbying effort. Now, that would be good corporate citizenship.
posted by Miguel Drummond de Castro | 13:10
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