Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  A strong urge to believe in the rural myth along with an awareness of industrialization as counterforce to the myth—since 1844, this motif appears everywhere in American writing … It is a complex distinctively American form.

  One springtime, over lunch near his MIT office, Marx observed that Edge City represents “an escape from the negative aspects of civilization. Too much restraint, oppression, hierarchy—you justify building out there in order to start again and have another Garden. You want the best of both worlds. This would be Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia; he very explicitly wanted a land that is midway between too much and too little civilization.”

  In fact, says Marx, the whole thing goes back to the very dawn of our civilization. Captain Arthur Barlowe, captain of a bark dispatched by Sir Walter Raleigh, described Virginia in 1584 in what became a cardinal image of America: an immense garden of incredible abundance. Virginia is a land of plenty; the soil is “the most plentifull, sweete, fruitfull, and wholsome of all the worlde”; the virgin forest is not at all like the “barren and fruitles” woods of Europe. We “found shole water,” Barlowe wrote, “wher we smelt so sweet and so strong a smel, as if we had bene in the midst of some delicate garden abounding with all kinde of odoriferous flowers …”

  What Barlowe was describing, of course, was Eden. That image inflamed the popular imagination as the first English settlement succeeded in America, in Jamestown, Virginia, 1607. It drove Shakespeare when, three years later, he wrote The Tempest.

  What is so striking about these reports depicting Virginia as Paradise Regained—tapping a deep and persistent human desire to return to a natural idyll—is how sharply they conflict with the views of the second set of Englishmen to show up in America to stay. Those were the Pilgrims of the Massachusetts Bay. When the Mayflower hove to off Cape Cod in November 1620, what William Bradford saw shocked him. He described it as a “hidious and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and willd men.” Between the Pilgrims and their new home, he saw only “deangerous shoulds and roring breakers.”

  This wasn’t heaven. Quite the opposite.

  “Which way soever they turnd their eys (save upward to the heavens) they could have litle solace or content … The whole countrie, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage heiw.”

  His people, said Bradford, had “no freinds to wellcome them, nor inns to entertaine or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, no houses or much less townes to repaire too, to seeke for succoure.”

  There was, in short, no civilization. Bradford found this void horrifying, hellish.

  Here, then, is established the enduring divide in the way Americans have related to their land ever since. The hideous wilderness appears at one end of the spectrum, and the Garden at the other. These are such antithetical ways for man to understand his relation to his environment that Leo Marx calls them “ecological images. Each is a kind of root metaphor, a quite distinct notion of America’s destiny.” These vastly different systems of value, noted Ralph Waldo Emerson, would “determine all their institutions.”

  It comes to this. One vision of the American natural landscape was that it had inherent value and should be treasured for what it already was and had always been. The other saw in the land nothing but satanic wastes; there could be placed on it no value until it was bent to man’s will—until civilization was forced into bloom.

  The history of America is an endless repetition of this battle. We are fighting it to this day, nowhere more so than in our current frontier, Edge City. In the unsettled, unsettling environment of Edge City, great wealth may be acquired, but without a sense that the place has community, or even a center, much less a soul. And the resolution of these issues goes far beyond architecture and landscape. It goes to the philosophical ground on which we are building our Information Age society. It’s possible that Edge City is the most purposeful attempt Americans have made since the days of the Founding Fathers to try to create something like a new Eden.

  Edge City may be the result of Americans striving once again for a new, restorative synthesis. Perhaps Edge City represents Americans taking the functions of the city (the machine) and bringing them out to the physical edge of the landscape (the frontier). There, we try once again to merge the two in a newfound union of nature and art (the garden), albeit one in which the treeline is punctuated incongruously by office towers.

  If that is true, Edge City represents Americans once again trying to create a new and better world—lighting out for the Territory, in the words of Huckleberry Finn. If that new world happens to be an unknown and uncharted frontier, well, that’s where we’ve headed every chance we’ve had—for four hundred years. Frank Lloyd Wright genuinely believed that Americans continued to be the sons and daughters of the pioneers. He called us “the sons of the sons of American Democracy.” Wright saw us as heading out of our old cities, freed from old verities, creating a new spiritual integrity in community. The enduring, exhilarating, and frightening themes to be examined in Edge Cities are if, whether, and how we are pulling that Utopian vision off.

  This goes to the ultimate significance of Edge City. The battles we fight today over our futures do not have echoes only back to 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower changed America forever with the creation of the interstate highway program. Nor does it go back only to the New Deal of the 1930s, during which Frank lin Delano Roosevelt shaped America into a society of homeowners. It goes to the core of what makes America America, right back to the beginning, with the Pilgrims in 1620 and the Virginia Cavaliers of 1607.

  It addresses profound questions, the answers to which will reverberate forever. It addresses the search for Utopia at the center of the American Dream. It reflects our perpetually unfinished American business of reinventing ourselves, redefining ourselves, restoring ourselves, announcing that our centuries-old perpetual revolution—our search for the future inside ourselves—still beats strong.

  It suggests that the world of the immigrants and pioneers is not dead in America; it has just moved out to Edge City, where gambles are being lost and won for high stakes. It adds another level of history to places already filled with ghosts. That is why one day Edge City, too, may be seen as historic. It is the creation of a new world, being shaped by the free in a constantly reinvented land.

  * For quick information on sources, calculations, and methods, see “The List,” “The Words,” “The Laws,” and the Notes at the back of this book.

  2

  NEW JERSEY

  Tomorrowland

  For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we—you and I—shall build.

  —John Cheever, 1978

  THE SEAFOOD COUNTER alone is world class. Even in the New York area, an emporium grabs one’s attention when, for eighty linear feet, it spreads out not only six different kinds of sliced octopus—fresh—but snow crab legs next to broiled eel near Chilean abalone next to geoduck sashimi, adjacent to a display of spiny sea urchins with golden, creamy, sensuous interiors intended to be eaten raw.

  The fashion plaza, too, is dazzling. Amid cascades of gold and stacks of high couture, a mannequin sports a sexy red jogging suit with this precise mystery across its chest: “Don’t Take It Easy: To Be Frank With You I’m Afraid of You at First But, Now Become Changed We Are Great Member.”

  The electronics mart sprawls under the name Saiko, which connotes “fantastic” in Japanese, and it is. Amid the televisions with vast screens and camcorders that fit in a palm, there are household appliances so unusual that, like the Zojirushi electric airpot, its very function is unfamiliar. Not distant, there is a display of $149.95 Sony Repeat Learning Systems, designed to teach English to Japanese. Sample sentences: “There’s something about him that rubs me the wrong way,” and “I’m under a lot of pressure.”

  But the real show-stopper of this sophisticated megamart is actually out in the Hudson River. It stands on piers, with a pano
ramic view of the skyline. It is the Chinzan-So restaurant, built in the gracefully curved pyramidical image of Rokuon-ji, a fifteenth-century temple. Amid pools of quiet, reflective water is—inside—a two-story, ten-ton pile of volcanic boulders freighted from the side of Mount Fuji. Its Kaiseki cuisine, devel oped through the centuries by great masters of the tea ceremony, is the height of Japanese culinary creativity. The Aoi entrée is $100. For one.

  This strange, fascinating, and wondrous display is the Yaohan Plaza-New York. It is one of the largest such all-Japanese hypermarkets in the world. It features everything from a Japanese bookstore to the Pony Toy Go Around toy store, to a Super Health drugstore that offers cotton gauze masks to people with colds who might be riding the subway, to a bakery producing breads shaped like alligators. Tokyo Gardens sells bonsai junipers. The Promotion liquor mart flaunts an astounding variety of sake. The produce market features everything from ohba leaves to pears flown in from Japan in mesh plastic nests. The UCC Cafe Plaza window displays uncannily realistic plastic models of its offerings. One is labeled HAM SANDWICH.

  The Yaohan Plaza-New York organization runs twenty-three such malls worldwide, from Brazil to Hong Kong, and ninety in Japan. This extravaganza, which opened in 1988, is exactly the same as would be found in Tokyo, say its founders. Except, of course, it has more variety. After all, it is almost five times bigger than average. The typical sale in the grocery areas alone is over $100. This should come as no surprise. Yaohan Plaza-New York is serving one of the most cosmopolitan metropolitan areas on the globe, right? Why shouldn’t it be the height of sophistication?

  This leaves, perhaps, only one question.

  Why is it in New Jersey?

  Why put such an exotic creation a full $50 cab ride from the presumed worldliness of midtown Manhattan? In the Edge City of Fort Lee? On the far side of Harlem?

  Hiroaki Kawai, Yaohan Plaza’s spokesman, seems a little perplexed by the question. The answer is perfectly obvious to him. Forty percent of Yaohan Plaza’s business comes from the sixty thousand Japanese working for their global companies in the New York area, he patiently explained. Few of them live in Manhattan. He is startled that anyone would think otherwise. Why would a Japanese come to America to live in a cramped apartment?

  They live around here, in Fort Lee, he says, where they can have houses and cars and get around. Or in nearby Westchester County, New York, around the Edge City of White Plains, proximate to the world headquarters of IBM.

  Another thing, he says: Look at the size of Yaohan Plaza. It would not be possible to build something like this in Manhattan. Where would you park the cars? A place this large and sophisticated needs support from people all over the region. Even here, the major problem is that there are only four hundred parking spaces, and they are so full now on weekends, what with chartered buses arriving from as far away as Philadelphia and Washington, people sometimes have to wait thirty minutes for a spot to open up. What is really needed is at least eight hundred slots, he says, plus more space on which to build. His consortium covetously eyes the riverfront land next door occupied by the looming Hills Brothers coffee plant, which fills the salt air of Yaohan Plaza’s parking lot with the fresh aroma of roasted brew. Knock that flat and you could build a brand-new world out here, with attractions that dazzle the mind, Kawai explains matter-of-factly. A Japanese culture center, a Japanese hotel, amusement facilities, all nice and safe, marked by abundant free parking.

  His English is quite fluent, but Kawai nonetheless occasionally stops to ask his listener if he is using the right words to get his points across. He seems to find it curious that anybody would find the Yaohan Plaza’s location curious. Oh yes, he says, we’ve already opened several such hypermarts in North America, and have plans to open ten more in the next ten years. He starts ticking off the locations. Costa Mesa—an Edge City in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. San Jose—an Edge City in Silicon Valley. Arlington Heights, near Schaumburg—an Edge City of Chicago. “In old downtowns it is very difficult to find enough space for us,” he says. “So we go out to new towns, where there is plenty of space.” Kawai is so engrossed with his Edge City locations around North America that I finally ask, “Who did your site location research for you? Did somebody coach you on this, or did you figure it out all by yourself?”

  We figured it out all by ourselves, he says. Japanese people who were familiar with the States because they had gone to school here were a big help. But to him the logic of locating in an Edge City rather than an old center like Manhattan is patent. If you look at the way people live in this country, the land of opportunity is New Jersey.

  Joel Kotkin is the California co-author, with Yoriko Kishimoto, of The Third Century: America’s Resurgence in the Asian Era. Kotkin is bullish on America’s future because of its ability to be flexible and innovative and because it is capable of assimilating waves of immigrants who supply immense entrepreneurial energy—especially, in this era, Asians. But even he guffaws when told that the Yaohan Plaza-New York is actually in Edgewater, New Jersey. “When I was growing up,” says the transplanted New Yorker, “being from New Jersey was a social disease.”

  But it is no surprise that Hiroaki Kawai feels at home in New Jersey. New Jersey is, in many respects, America’s urban future. It is the first state in the Union to be more densely populated than Japan. It is also the first state in the Union to be more urban.

  And in countless ways, if this is America’s urban future, the future is bright. Not only is New Jersey headquarters to dozens of Fortune 500 companies, as well as thousands of entrepreneurial start-ups; it is a place of immense diversity, from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, which cradled Albert Einstein, to ethnic neighborhoods like Trenton’s Chambersburg, with memorable restaurants on every corner. New Jersey is a kind of California of the East Coast. It gave birth to fiber optics, the transistor, the solar cell, sound movies, the communications satellite, evidentiary proof of the Big Bang hypothesis of the origin of the universe, and Bruce Springsteen. It has 127 miles of beaches. It is the home of the NFL’s Giants, the NBA’s Nets, and the NHL’s Devils. It is lavishly blessed with jealously guarded natural beauty, from the backpacking country of the Delaware Water Gap and Ramapo Mountains in the Appalachian Highlands to the pristine and solitary Atlantic shores of Cape May. New Jersey is not called the Garden State for nothing. Its truck farms supply local supermarket chains with 35 percent of their produce in season. It is laden with extravagant rolling estates. More than 40 percent of the entire state is still in forest. At one million acres, the spooky and beautiful Pinelands, with peat-stained water the color of tea, is by far the largest such horizon-to-horizon wild area north of the Everglades and east of the Mississippi.

  Yet all this variety, beauty, economic prowess, density, and urbanity has been achieved without New Jersey’s having within its boundaries what most people would consider even one major city. Whatever their virtues, Newark and Elizabeth are rarely described as big time. All this proves, however, is that most Americans’ idea of what makes up a city no longer matches reality, because it doesn’t encompass the central reality of New Jersey: Edge Cities.

  An old-fashioned downtown—sporting tall concrete-and-steel buildings with walls that touch each other, laid out on a rectangular grid, accented by sidewalks, surrounded by political boundaries, and lorded over by a mayor—is only one way to think of a city. In fact, it is only the nineteenth-century version. These sorts of cities, epitomized in the United States by Manhattan and San Francisco, are proud places that will always be cherished. But they are relics of a time past. They are the aberrations. We built cities that way for less than a century. Those years, from perhaps 1840 to 1920, were by no means unimportant. They encompassed both the Industrial Revolution and the era of America’s Manifest Destiny. Thriving old downtowns that have bright futures because they continue to be rejuvenated still bear their stamp, from Chicago to Seattle.

  This does not begin to exhaust the idea of city. Fr
om ancient times, what made a city a city was how it functioned, not how it looked. And this is especially true today, for we have not built a single old-style downtown from raw dirt in seventy-five years.

  The Edge Cities of New Jersey, instead, represent our new standard. If New Jersey was described by Benjamin Franklin as “a barrel tapped at both ends”—Philadelphia and New York—suddenly New Jersey is the right side of the rivers. In the late 1980s, New Jersey’s Edge Cities grew more rapidly and generated more jobs than the entire state of New York. These Edge Cities now rise as their own commonwealths, from the one in the Route 1-Princeton area to the office tower forest emerging along Interstates 80 and 287 near Whippany and Parsippany. New Jersey’s Edge Cities exemplify the new mix of urbanity, demonstrating what people want, can afford, and can stand. These Edge Cities, in fact, are the fruit of our attempt to strike a delicate balance between the advantages and disadvantages of 19th-century cities and the opportunities and challenges of the coming age. As such, they are being copied all over the world.

  Making sense of an Edge City requires the following leap of faith: any place that is a trade, employment, and entertainment center of vast magnitude is functionally a city. That is true no matter how sprawling and strange it looks physically, and no matter how anarchic or convoluted it seems politically. If it is sufficiently diverse, vibrant, and specialized—which mainly is to say huge—it is a city. Conversely, any place that isn’t, doesn’t qualify: Fort Peck City in Montana is not urban no matter what it is called by its six hundred proud denizens.

  Libraries have been written about why humans ever built cities in the first place, but most historians agree that, for the last eight thousand years, cities have been shaped by seven purposes: