by Joel Garreau
Praise for Edge City
“To look around at the convulsing of American cities is to wonder WHAT’S GOING ON? Joel Garreau has the answer, and a warm, vicious wit.”
—STEWART BRAND
“Fascinating … entertaining and informative.”
—The Economist
“An exuberant, witty book.”
—Business Week
“Lively, thorough reporting.”
—Boston Phoenix Literary Section
“[A] provocative work that brings to popular attention a major restructuring that is … all around us but largely ignored by professional architects and planners.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Fascinating and meticulous … anyone who wants to understand America, better understand this phenomenon.”
—BILL MCKIBBEN, author of The End of Nature
“Eminently readable, thought-provoking.”
—Publishers Weekly
“But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory.”
—Huckleberry Finn
Welcome to Edge City.
We Americans are going through the most radical change in a century in how we build our world, and most of us don’t even know it. From coast to coast, every metropolis that is growing is doing so by sprouting strange new kinds of places: Edge Cities. Not since we took Paul Revere’s Boston and Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia and exploded them into nineteenth-century industrial behemoths have we made such dramatic changes in how we live, work, and play.
Most of us now spend our entire lives in and around these Edge Cities, yet we barely recognize them for what they are. That’s because they look nothing like the old downtowns; they meet none of our preconceptions of what constitutes a city. Our new Edge Cities are tied together not by locomotives and subways, but by freeways, jetways, and jogging paths. Their characteristic monument is not a horse-mounted hero in the square, but an atrium shielding trees perpetually in leaf at the cores of our corporate headquarters, fitness centers, and shopping plazas. Our new urban centers are marked not by the penthouses of the old urban rich, or the tenements of the old urban poor, but by the celebrated single-family home with grass all around. For the rise of the Edge City reflects us moving our jobs—our means of creating wealth, the very essence of our urbanism—out to where we’ve been living and shopping for two generations. The wonder is that these places, these curious new urban cores, were villages or corn stubble just thirty years ago.
Joel Garreau has spent four years exploring America’s Edge Cities. From the Washington area (which alone encompasses sixteen Edge Cities) to Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York, Phoenix, Detroit, San Francisco, Boston, Houston, and Dallas, Garreau explains how these Edge Cities are changing our lives in countless ways, many of them elemental and profound. He examines everything, from the kinds of jobs Edge Cities generate to whether they will ever be good places in which to fall in love or hold a Fourth of July parade. For our new civilization, built on the shoulders of these Edge Cities, reflects once again our perpetually unfinished American business of reinventing ourselves, redefining ourselves, announcing that our centuries-old revolution—our search for the future inside ourselves—still beats strong. Thus, by looking at what we have done, we can more clearly see who we are, how we got that way, where we’re headed, and what we value.
Also by Joel Garreau
THE NINE NATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 1992
Copyright © 1991 by Joel Garreau
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday in 1991. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Doubleday.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Maps by Dave Cook
Photograph—Tysons Corner, Virginia, 1988. Photo by Craig Herndon; copyright © 1988, The Washington Post.
Photograph—Tysons Corner, Virginia, circa World War II. Courtesy of Fairfax County Public Library Archive.
Excerpts from Christopher Alexander’s unpublished manuscript The Nature of Order reprinted by permission of the author.
“Manassas, There’s No Need for You to Die,”
words and music by David W. Lowe,
© 1988, reprinted with permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Garreau, Joel
Edge city : life on the new frontier/Joel Garreau.
—Anchor Books ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Doubleday, 1991.
1. Metropolitan areas—United States. 2. Real estate development—United States. 3. Land use, Urban—United States. 4. Sociology, Urban—United States. I. Title.
[HT334.U5G37 1992]
307.76′0973–dc20 92-12159
eISBN: 978-0-307-80194-4
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.1
TO SIMONE
Who was three when this book began and five
when it ended.
The only times better than the ones
when you left me alone so I could work
were when you didn’t.
AND TO EVANGELINE
Whose surprisingly early arrival
led to that memorable dawn demonstration
that it is in fact possible
to get from Irvine to Los Angeles International Airport
in forty-one minutes.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTION
PIONEERS, FRONTIERS,
AND THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
1
THE SEARCH FOR THE FUTURE INSIDE OURSELVES
Life on the New Frontier
2
NEW JERSEY
Tomorrowland
3
BOSTON
Edge City Limits
4
DETROIT
The Automobile, Individualism, and Time
5
ATLANTA
The Color of Money
6
PHOENIX
Shadow Government
7
TEXAS
Civilization
8
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Community
9
THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA
Soul
10
WASHINGTON
The Land
I
Manassas: Long Ago and Far Away
II
Present at Creation
III
The Machine, the Garden, and Paradise
IV
Pilgrim’s Progress: Boom
V
But What About the Land?
VI
The Final Battle
11
THE LIST
Edge Cities, Coast to Coast
12
THE WORDS
Glossary of a New Frontier
13
THE LAWS
How We Live
Acknowledgments
Suggested Readings
Notes
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
Pioneers, Frontiers, and the Twenty-first Century
THE CONTROVERSIAL ASSUMPTION undergirding this book is that Americans basically are pretty smart cookies who generally know what they’re doing.
Lord knows, we have sorely tested that premise over the last four centuries. But it is further ass
umed that this good sense is especially evident when Americans cussedly march off in precisely the opposite directions from those toward which our elders and betters have been aiming us. At such times of apparently rampant perversity, this thinking goes, the correct response is not to throw up one’s hands and decry Americans as fools. It is to echo Gandhi when he said, “There go my people; I must rush to catch up with them, for I am their leader.”
It is just such a period that is the subject of this book. Individual Americans today are once again inventing a brand-new future—the biggest change in a hundred years in how we build the cities that are the cornerstones, capstones, and, sometimes, millstones of our civilization. As usual, it’s all ad hoc: we’re making this up as we go along.
That is the importance of engaging in a little anticipatory archeology—figuring out what, exactly, we are doing, and why. For the one thing Americans demonstrably have done better than any other culture in history—for centuries—is handle chaos and change, and invent the future. Americans are part of a wildly individualistic, determined culture that may or may not know how to resolve dilemmas, but that does attack obstacles—compulsively and reflexively. Americans believe, endearingly and in spite of all evidence, that for every problem, there is a solution. Responding to a challenge by doing nothing is not our long suit. There is little more foreign to an American ear than evil accepted. “What will be, will be” is no more from our language than the phrase “It is God’s will.” Fatalism is outside our repertoire. Once Americans have chosen a future, it is open to being molded and shaped, but anyone merely standing in its way is inviting a trampling.
Sooner or later Americans usually clean up their new order and get it something quite close to right—no matter how terrifying it appears at the beginning. But as a participant in the creation of one Edge City put it, “Go a little easy on these guys. When they started, they didn’t know that what they were doing was possible.”
In all cases, it’s quite a show.
Although this book is entitled Edge City, it is only marginally about asphalt and steel. Its central concern is a fraction of a lifetime still in progress. During this historical blink of an eye, we Americans decided to change just about all our routines of working, playing, and living. We created vast new urban job centers in places that only thirty years before had been residential suburbs or even corn stubble. By capturing Americans making the most literally concrete decisions possible, I hope we can achieve a critical understanding of what our real values are—who we are, how we got that way, and where we’re headed.
This book is the product of thousands of interviews and hundreds of thousands of miles logged over the last decade. It started with The Nine Nations of North America, my previous exercise in trying to figure out how America works, really. During the reporting that led up to that book, and in its aftermath, I became acquainted with large chunks of our very diverse continent. In the early 1980s, then, when I began to see high-rise buildings erupt near my home in outlying Virginia far from the old downtown of the District of Columbia, I knew instantly what I was looking at. This basically was Houston.
Less clear to me was why or how this could be. Or should be. For my first reaction to the phenomenon I would later dub Edge City was to feel threatened. I had always believed that there were only two sensible ways to live—in a yeasty urban neighborhood reminiscent of a Dickens-style nineteenth-century city, or a remote, leafy glade that recalled Thoreau’s nineteenth-century Walden Pond. If that made me a nineteenth-century man, so be it. I never could understand why anybody would want anything in between.
This new world being built along the Washington Beltway, however, was not only “in between.” It was “in between” triumphant. It seemed insane to me. It was a challenge to everything that I had been taught: that what this world needed was More Planning; that cars were inherently Evil and our attachment to them Inexplicable; that suburbia was morally wrong—primarily a product of White Flight; and that if Americans perversely continued to live the way they have for generation after generation, it couldn’t be because they liked it; it must be because They Had No Choice. I even thought that cities were built by Master Architects.
Ah, yes. Live and learn.
Every man is a product of his environment, and mine was the newsroom of the Washington Post. Thus, when I decided to “get to the bottom of this,” in the back of my mind was the notion that if I could find out who was “doing this to us,” it might be possible to get the SOBs indicted. Were not, after all, Edge Cities a clear and present danger to Western civilization?
What I found when I dug into the story was a tale far more rich and complex. It was by turns inspiring, discouraging, heartwarming, and frustrating. It was, of course, summed up in the wisdom of Pogo. I have met the enemy. And he is us.
That is why there is so much “edge” in Edge City. It is a psychological location—a state of mind—even more than a physical place:
• This new world is the cutting edge—of how cities are being created worldwide.
• This upheaval is occurring physically on the edge—of the urban landscape.
• The rules that govern its creation involve a search for edge—for advantage.
• And right now, at least, Edge City puts people on edge. It can give them the creeps.
Edge City is hardly a theoretical work. I am a reporter, not a critic. The characters in this book are real. And characters they are. They genuinely are the sons of the pioneers—endowed with the unfettered human spirit, with all that is both uplifting and despair-causing in that. The thirsts they slake are those of Everyman; their hungers universal. That is the global importance of grasping Edge City—why those who do not will lose power, money, and influence. American traits and American landscapes have been imitated by other nations not so much because they are American but because so much of modern history arrives in the United States first. Americans, after all, are still those humans most commonly in possession of that rare, potent, and dangerous combination: the power, money, and opportunity to do whatever they think best.
This is why I take these Edge Cities seriously. It is also why you will find that this book metamorphoses as it moves. The first half is devoted to what make Edge Cities tick. In the beginning chapters you will find me exploring how these places operate, on their own terms. In so doing, I marvel at how ingenious Edge Cities are, and at how successfully they manage to deliver just about anything quantifiable—like jobs and wealth. In so doing, I pay tribute to the infinitely fecund imaginations of the people who created them.
Progressively, however, chapter by chapter, I systematically try to cast my net ever more wide. As the book advances, you will continue to find yourself meeting Americans creating a brand-new world. But the farther toward the back of the book you are, the more you will find them grappling with ever more wonderful and profound questions—about identity, and community, and civilization, and soul, and all the other attributes of the good life for which we yearn. For that is the most interesting and challenging task—of really penetrating our latest attempt at Utopia. And of trying to gauge how far along we are.
At the end of my travels, I remained guardedly optimistic, but by no means tranquil. For it is an enormous challenge we have handed ourselves, to find the future in our deepest desires, and to achieve that future through wisdom.
That, ultimately, is why the book ends with the chapter about the land. That, in more ways than one, is where I found bedrock. That, I came to think, is the real limit beyond which we cannot go. If the rise of Edge Cities is genuinely a turning point in our history—one at least as dramatic as the upheaval of 150 years ago that ushered in the age of the Machine—then the place for us to seize the opportunity is with our relationship to the land.
Only, I came to believe, if we come to see it all as sacred—the land on which we build as sacred as the land we leave untouched—will we break through to higher ground and reunite our fragmented universe. That is precisely how and where w
e can help save our world.
1
THE SEARCH FOR THE FUTURE INSIDE OURSELVES
Life on the New Frontier
But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory.
—Huckleberry Finn, at the close of Mark Twain’s novel, 1885
AMERICANS are creating the biggest change in a hundred years in how we build cities. Every single American city that is growing, is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles, with multiple urban cores.
These new hearths of our civilization—in which the majority of metropolitan Americans now work and around which we live—look not at all like our old downtowns. Buildings rarely rise shoulder to shoulder, as in Chicago’s Loop. Instead, their broad, low outlines dot the landscape like mushrooms, separated by greensward and parking lots. Their office towers, frequently guarded by trees, gaze at one another from respectful distances through bands of glass that mirror the sun in blue or silver or green or gold, like antique drawings of “the city of the future.”
The hallmarks of these new urban centers are not the sidewalks of New York of song and fable, for usually there are few sidewalks. There are jogging trails around the hills and ponds of their characteristic corporate campuses. But if an American finds himself tripping the light fantastic today on concrete, social scientists know where to look for him. He will be amid the crabapples blossoming under glassed-in skies where America retails its wares. We have quaintly if accurately named these places after that fashionable tree-lined promenade created in the late 1600s—the Mall in London’s St. James’s Park. Back then, its denizens even had a name for the hour when the throng of promenaders “giggling with their sparks” was at its height. They called it High Mall. Pity we’ve not picked up that usage. We have certainly picked up the practice, because malls usually function as the village squares of these new urbs.