Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  Yet no matter how insidious and sophisticated are the methods by which issues of safety are addressed, Richmond and Jackson see it as only part of a much larger issue—what it takes to make people feel comfortable.

  They play that game at a very high level. “See that marble floor there?” Richmond asks. “We used to give it a very high, very bright gloss, but we’ve toned it down.” Why, I ask; did women think they were going to slip? Not that, he says. “We found that it brought out feelings of inadequacy. We brought it down to the level of shine on their own floors.”

  Richmond had earlier given me a serious market segmentation by mall floor. On the floor for the affluent, he said, prime customers on weekdays were wives of those senior executives who were in their late fifties. On Saturday and Sunday, it became the territory of women who were thirty-eight, had 2.3 kids, and were working. I thought he was pulling my leg with data that precise and started to josh him. He cut me off. “I’ve got my marketing staff if you’d like to talk to them,” he said stiffly. They do not kid about anything that offers them control.

  They take equally seriously the goal of “comfortable.” The range of custom-crafted lighting systems for the mall, for example, can be manipulated to create an enormous range of moods, varying according to the time of day, the season, and the crowds. That task is so important that it is handled on a daily basis by Richmond, the manager, himself, not by some flunky. And this devotion to “comfort levels” is not peculiar to Bridgewater Commons or even to malls. In Edge City hotels, offices, and commercial areas, glass elevators and glass stairwells are rarely there for the view out. They are there for the view in. Rape is unlikely in a glass elevator.

  Another effort at comfort: the hot trend is to have parking decks with roofs at expensive, “wasted,” warehouselike heights, with light levels appropriate to night baseball. Again, the highest goal is to make women feel safe. The older, more “logical” design, with roofs just tall enough for a car antenna, and lights only bright enough to show car keys, has Alfred Hitchcock overtones.

  Similarly, the lawn designs of Edge City office campuses also broadcast their values. One can see a stranger approaching for a quarter of a mile. The inside of a soaring glass office lobby is about as public a place as is ever built in Edge City.

  Designers who wish to make Edge City more humane frequently advocate that public parks and public places be added to match the great piazzas of the cities of old. That sounds great. But George Sternlieb of the Center for Urban Policy at Rutgers, points out the reason that there’s no equivalent of the old urban parks in Edge City. “They don’t want the strangers. If it is a choice between parks and strangers, the people there would sooner do without the parks.” In Edge City, about the closest thing you find to a public space—where just about anybody can go—is the parking lot. In Edge City, no commercial center could survive if it had as poor a reputation for safety as do the streets of most downtowns. In Edge City, there are no dark alleys.

  In the course of my travels, I never did find any sound, practical, financial, technical, physical, or legal reasons why we could not build more nineteenth-century-style downtowns out at 287 and 78 or anywhere else—if we chose. Yet we do not. Edge City is frequently accused of being the result of no planning. Yet a close examination demonstrates that quite the opposite is the case. The controls exercised in the name of “safety” and “comfort” in Edge City are the result of vast amounts of planning. Also design, money, thought, premeditation, listening to people, and giving them exactly what they say they want.

  There are homeless people in Edge City, for example. But they are not found sleeping outside the centers of commerce and industry. Our planning, design, and control of public spaces that are really private property make sure of that. Every Christmas there is a national flap over whether malls will allow the Salvation Army into their domains. But it isn’t just a question of charity. It’s a question of how much we value safety and comfort. In Edge City there is very little truly “public” space. On purpose.

  Can Edge City ever be translated into something as fragile as “identity”? Or as selfless as “community”? We enter the amorphous realms of the last three major city shapers: culture, companionship, and religion. Is Edge City a barren, sterile wasteland of the spirit? Is it merely a “slurb,” as decried by the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable? Does it do nothing but embody “cliché conformity as far as the eye can see?” Does Edge City even deserve to be described by that very word we have inherited from the word “city,” the word we use in the English language to describe refinement, learning, and the restraint of base cravings: “civilization”?

  A close examination of the everyday lives of a couple like Ron and Nancy Murray is instructive. A careful analysis of how people like the Murrays function in such realms is a significant test of Edge City’s claim to urbanity.

  The Murrays are worldly people. Nancy Murray has a master’s degree in psychology and an M.B.A. She researches what consumers think about AT&T and its products. Her commute from their home in Morristown to the 287 and 78 area in Basking Ridge is twenty minutes. Ron is a computer software consultant who is helping to create a claims system for Blue Cross that will carry it into the next century. His commute to the 287 and 80 area of Florham Park is eighteen minutes.

  The Murrays have had a range of experiences with which to compare the texture, spirit, and opportunities of Edge City. Their eleven-month-old son, Gregory, was conceived while they were on vacation in Bali, an island between the Indian Ocean and the Java Sea about as far from 287 and 78 as is possible on this planet. Nancy went to Vassar. Her previous position was with a Wall Street bank. Ron’s previous life was with Mobil on Forty-second Street, across from Grand Central. They’ve lived in Greenwich Village. Ron has voyaged through places like Venezuela, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. And they do not hate New York. “New York is exciting,” says Ron. “It’s a place where you walk down the street and things are happening on every corner. Whether good, bad, or indifferent, they are happening.”

  “I have a sister who lives in Boston, and when she comes here we have to go into Manhattan,” says Nancy. “She finds it exciting to go to the Village and see the interesting types of people, and go to high-priced restaurants and see the European jet set that isn’t in New Jersey. It has a whole diverse culture. It’s a little bit of fantasy. It’s like a TV show in real life. You have South American dictators’ wives at the cosmetics counter in Henri Bendel’s. It’s not your everyday experience.”

  In fact, the Murrays are self-described “certified New Yorkers.” Ron grew up in the South Bronx and moved to the East Side. He didn’t learn to drive until he was twenty-four. We’re talking hard core, here. When Ron first started working in Edge City, he would travel an hour and a half, each way, to Fifty-seventh Street, to get his hair cut for $45. But then he gave some local salons a try, and after careful analysis he came to the studied conclusion: “To tell you the truth, there’s not much difference between the $45 haircut in New York and the $17 haircut in Morristown.” It was an internal struggle, but city boy or not, he finally decided: “To travel an hour and a half each way to get a twenty-five-minute haircut, it’s not worth it.”

  Nancy is equally a product of her upbringing. She grew up in a Boston neighborhood that she compares to Brooklyn. She lived on the West Side of Manhattan so long that she says she forgot how to drive. When she got pregnant after they had moved to Morristown, she says, “I just assumed I was going to have a doctor in New York City and have the baby in the city.” It came to her attention, though, talking to the members of her Lamaze class, that “they had their babies here and they were treated better—nicer.” She has since learned that Edge City hospitals can be large and sophisticated, with neonatal facilities and medivac choppers and all the modern conveniences. They sometimes find it easier, she’s discovered, to attract first-rate interns and residents than downtown hospitals do. In fact, she says, if she gets pregnant again, she th
inks it just might be possible that she could find a baby doctor west of the Hudson.

  They admit, however, that for all their devotion to Manhattan’s virtues, a whole new world, a whole new life, opened up like a flower when Mobil transferred them in the mid-1980s to Texas.

  They moved into a brand-new, 2,200-square-foot North Dallas “beautiful sprawling ranch house with lots of room and a nice big yard for the dogs and it was just a so much more pleasant and comfortable way to live,” recalls Nancy fondly. “It was tremen dous,” said Ron. “I lived in a two-room apartment when I was a kid. To me, this—I didn’t know that this existed. I much preferred this to living in a two-room apartment in the South Bronx.”

  They fought the siren song of the late twentieth century to the bitter end, though. These people are tough. They are New Yorkers. “I was going to business school at SMU,” recalls Nancy, “and I used to take the bus into downtown Dallas rather than bother driving, and people just thought that was so bizarre. I always used to walk every place and people would see me and they assumed my car had broken down.”

  It was when they rotated back to Manhattan that their resolve finally crumbled. They sublet an apartment in the Village that their friends considered quite a find. It was, however, “no bigger than that room right here, yeah, the dining room,” interjects Ron. “And in New York, that was considered a nice apartment,” adds Nancy.

  That’s what really broke their will. The usual complaints about the dirt, crime, subway, stress, congestion, cost, and taxes of the big city of course were factors. But the idea of having a brand-new house, in which nothing needed fixing, and space—all the space they could ever use, four fifths of an acre of land, four thousand square feet of house, four bedrooms, a sitting room off the master suite—that’s what finally got them looking at Morris County. Then came the clincher. In this new realm, they discovered, challenging work was more plentiful than downtown. And what’s more, that work was so close to their home that it was almost a return to a younger world. Nancy could actually come home to see her baby—on her lunch hour.

  But what about “companionship,” I ask them. Companionship is an issue crucial to the quality of cities—the extent to which it offers a choice of associations.

  “The women here are very interesting,” reports Nancy of her experience. “It’s cosmopolitan. The woman across the street used to be a pharmacist and now has her own advertising firm. One woman I got friendly with at the mothers’ group is a documentary film producer. In my exercise class I met a few attorneys. Even the women who don’t work right now used to, and they’re very intelligent and they always have something to say. They go into the city, they see plays, and whatever. People in the 1960s rebelled against the suburbs as sterile. I wasn’t rebelling because I hadn’t come from there, so it looked pleasant to me. I never quite understood what they were so upset about. The people who live here aren’t country bumpkins. You have all religions and races.”

  “Let me just go up the neighborhood for you,” says Ron. “The guy in the house right here is the medical director of Prudential Life Insurance in Newark. The guy in the next house is the head partner of Price Waterhouse in Short Hills. The next guy up is with The Limited. He’s British. The Prudential guy is black. The next guy is from Houston. He travels to the Orient a lot for business.”

  (Earlier, Finn Caspersen had taken that diversity question and shot back, “There’s similarity here, sure, but it’s no less a similarity than, say, people living on the East Side of New York City. Manhattan is the most parochial area. You talk about diversity in New York City, you’re talking about somebody maybe living in the Village.”)

  Putting on her psychologist’s hat, Nancy ventures, “There are younger single people I work with now—they have much more an upbeat social life. A lot of them are engaged and getting married or they’re dating. The women I met in Manhattan—a lot were single people who weren’t that happy with the situation at this point in life. I think the old idea that [downtown] is an ideal place for single people—it’s one thing to be twenty-one; it’s another thing to be thirty or forty or fifty and single. Then they’d find out that it wasn’t wonderful to just have one dimension to your life. Their jobs became everything to them. They’d be willing to work till ten or eleven at night because they didn’t have anything else that took up their energy. That made for quite an unbalanced type of life style, led to neurotic behavior—people would go flipping through my desk to see who was working on what projects. Just really neurotic behavior.”

  People in Edge City also have changed relationships with nature. They are by no means all benign. But Edge City is a landscape in which more humans are getting closer to other high-order species than at any time in the past century. Edge City is creating a world in which, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, the majority of the American people—whether they know it or not or like it or not—may soon be sharing their territory with fairly large wild animals. In fact, the New Jersey State Plan, unquestionably the most sophisticated growth-management scheme ever attempted statewide in this country, specifically envisions a world in which “corporate campuses are designed as refuges for wildlife” and “our homes in new subdivisions are clustered and adjoin protected natural streams and wooded areas.”

  American bald eagles winter only twenty miles from 287 and 78, and they are on the increase, according to Jim Sciascia, the principal zoologist with the Endangered and Non-Game Species Program of the New Jersey Division of Fish, Game, and Wildlife. There are 150 black bears in the mountains not distant. Some weigh six hundred pounds. Where does a six hundred-pound bear sleep? Not only anywhere it wants. But right around Interstate 287. “Sometimes they get disoriented, or they get harassed, and they go up in a tree and won’t come down,” reports Sciascia.

  More than corporate jobs are multiplying in 287 and 78; so are Eastern coyotes. They are bigger than Western ones, in the small German Shepherd range. Red-tail hawks are a common sight sitting in the trees along Interstate 78, staring at the carefully maintained grassland habitats of the shoulder and median, waiting for rabbits, mice, and rodents to make a break for it.

  Edge City changes the ecology in ways that can be unexpected. As with any change that happens quickly, specialized species that do not adapt easily are in big trouble. The vesper sparrow, the upland sandpiper, and other grassland birds are endangered by the decline in pasture in the 287 and 78 area. Wood turtles are endangered by the decline in wetland. The bobolink, savannah sparrow, grasshopper sparrow, and bog turtle are threatened. Neotropical songbirds like the wood thrush, oven bird, and vireo require large tracts of continuous forests for their nests; otherwise, they are raided by more competitive birds.

  On the other hand, adaptable species like beaver—not to mention raccoon and skunk—are booming. The result is not wilderness. What remains is a far less diverse ecology than what was there before. But if you measure it by the standard of city, it is a far more diverse ecology than anything humans have built in centuries, if not millennia.

  There is a great deal of “edge,” in the biological sense of the word, in Edge City, Sciascia notes. Edge is the zone where different ecologies meet—between woodlands and grasslands, for example, or the wetlands between deep water and dry land. Diversity of life abounds in “edge.” Edge City has a lot of it because of the way it has a surprising amount of small grassland and woodlots which add up to tremendously large acreage by any historical standard of city. This abundance of edge is “good for prey population,” says Sciascia. Which is why you find predators there. Including rattlesnakes and copperheads. The Garden State, indeed. Right down to the serpents, Edge City does lay legitimate claim to garden-ness. It is not wild. As in agriculture, it is managed and controlled and selected-for by man. Yet it is an urban civilization in which children are at least as likely to be acquainted with fireflies as they are with cockroaches. A relationship with nature is seen as a key element—second only to safety, in the opinion polls—in what ma
kes it a good place to live. You wonder why 76 percent of all Americans consider themselves environmentalists? Perhaps it is because a lot of them live near Edge City.

  Sciascia agrees with the New Jersey State Plan that sprawl “compromises the quality of life in our state.” He scorns “people who freak out because they don’t want to deal with animals” and call him to get rid of critters holed up in their basement or attic. He acknowledges, though, that vastly more numerous are those who “get off on the wildlife.” In fact, he says, they lay out so much supplementary food that they contribute to the population explosion, and their neighborhoods offer sanctuary from hunters. There are 150,000 deer in New Jersey. In the Edge City of Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study had to name a Wildlife Control Officer to recruit bow hunters after the deer population increased by a factor of six.

  Throughout human evolution, most people lived in the countryside; few in the city. Only in the last century was that order reversed, and cities became top-heavy. Maybe Edge City is reversing it again. The Machine in the Garden, indeed. Despite the best work of the bulldozers, the hottest topic among foresters today is that oxymoron the “countrified city.” The good news is that people who live amidst small woodlots take meticulous care of them. The bad news is that a forest fire would be awesome.

  Again, this is an attempt at a new equilibrium. It does not involve moving to Montana, but it is by no means a total rejection of the old downtown. Take another measure of urbanity: culture. Nancy Murray acknowledges that eleven-month-old Gregory has changed her habits. But typically, she said, “we used to go out on Saturday night to a nice restaurant or something; maybe half the time we’d go into Manhattan and half the time we’d just stay out here. Then Sunday every three weeks or so we’d try to go in. I joined some Off-Broadway theater groups where you get tickets for the season. And when I was pregnant I got a subscription to the ballet.”