Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  With this in mind, I walked back down Susan Gruel’s park-bench-lined courtyard that separated the parking lots as Moses did the Red Sea. And I went back and ran my hand over the fieldstone that the people of Bridgewater had insisted be used to build the footings for the covered bridge. That’s a material widely used in the walls of these parts, they had said, stubbornly, and they wanted some in their new place. They didn’t much care whether the experts thought it fit into the design of the mall. Any more than they were going to let anyone laugh at Mac’s Brook and say it didn’t amount to spit, and it should just be buried in a culvert. Those experts, after all, have come and gone, and Mac’s Brook and the people of Bridgewater flow on.

  And so do the kids. The kids like that gazebo their elders cared enough to build for them near the mall, and they have made it their own. They have noticed that Mac’s Brook has a nice wild feel to it, and surprising solitude, even if you can occasionally pick up the distant smell of french fries. It even looks like a stream by which it would be good to read a book.

  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if one spring day some outcast, some kid who doesn’t fit in to the food-court crowd, even discovers Susan Gruel’s little concrete music hollow.

  He might even bring his guitar.

  And sit down and begin to play.

  * For quick reference, see the Notes and other sections at the back of this book.

  * For a list of Edge Cities, see Chapter 11.

  3

  BOSTON

  Edge City Limits

  Form ever follows function.

  —Louis Sullivan, 1886

  TWICE AS FAR from downtown Boston as Walden Pond, yet close enough to the Massachusetts Turnpike that the road’s rumble always sounds like a waterfall, there is a town-house subdivision called Lordvale.

  The entrance to Lordvale is distinguished by what its developer is pleased to call an “active water feature.” That is a collection of trucked-in rocks, over which water is pumped. The sound of this new waterfall is not as pervasive as that of the Pike, but its size does catch the eye of the highway’s drivers as they speed by.

  There are perhaps two hundred town houses in Lordvale, arranged in eight-packs. The rhythm of their façades is garage door, front door, front door, garage door—each unit being the mirror image of the one on either side. They are stained in variations of two colors—beige and gray.

  Given that Lordvale is forty-two miles into the countryside from Boston Common—a commute of more than one hour each way—it is heartening that the development pays some small homage to Henry David Thoreau’s “life in the woods.” Several dozen trees still stand on Lordvale’s once-forested slope. Boulders have been added to accent the curving drives. There is even an assemblage of oval rocks that has been carefully stacked vertically, then horizontally, for no discernible reason. The residents instantly dubbed it Suburban Stonehenge.

  For all that, Lordvale is not at all what most people have come to expect from suburbia. For one thing, there are few lawns. The patches where one might expect grass to grow after the snow melts turn out to be brown year round. They have been covered by wood chips. Wood chips are low maintenance. It is assumed that the buyers of town houses at Lordvale will be young, struggling, dual-career couples. Where would they find time to mow lawns?

  More disconcerting than the lack of lawns, however, is the density of this development. Although there is no “town” for miles, these “town homes” are so crowded together that, as in a nineteenth-century city, there are few places for an active toddler to play outdoors, other than the street.

  People who still come equipped with pre-Edge City expectations of what a suburb is, are amazed by places like Lordvale. They drive out from the old downtowns into what they think of as the wide-open spaces of the country, only to find themselves confronted by town houses jammed together at a distant exit, miles beyond even the outer beltways. Who would want to live “like that,” these people invariably say, “out here”? Well, Gilbert and Caron Merrill, and their toddler, Wyatt, live “like that, out here,” in Grafton, Massachusetts.

  Their Lordvale town house is to the Information Age what the tenements of Boston were to the Industrial Age: it is worker housing. As such, it has become one of the distinctive visual marks of the new order marked by Edge Cities. Housing like the Merrills’ offers exquisite lessons in the forces, worldwide, that make Edge Cities grow—or die.

  In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Boston was a fascinating place in which to examine the dynamics of growth—as well as the backlash created by its limits. At more than 350 years, Boston’s is the most mature metropolitan area in the United States. It was also the first area in the East to calve Edge Cities the way glaciers do icebergs. From the dawn of the computer age, the Edge Cities along Route 128 became synonymous with the romance of high technology. Companies that made history clustered around the verdant interstates—Digital, Lotus, Wang. The Edge City-driven Massachusetts Miracle of the 1980s in one decade lifted New England from the poorest region in America to its richest. In 1988, New Hampshire posted the lowest state unemployment rate ever recorded: 2.0 percent. Vermont was second in the nation, with 2.5 percent. Connecticut tied for third at 3.0. Rhode Island, at 3.1, was tied for fourth. Massachusetts, at 3.4, was sixth. Some business names that cropped up in Bangor, Maine—of all places—were Advanced Data Systems, Systems Management Services, Professional Financial Consultants of New England. In 1986, grim Worcester got a fashion magazine. Yes, Worcester. It was called Prelude.

  This kind of extraordinary growth also resulted in the Boston area being among the first to discover the limits to Edge City in the twenty-first century. Despite—and because of—the velocity of this economic boom, Boston’s growth imploded as the 1990s began. Growth was stagnant. The actual number of jobs shrank. How could such a brainy, high-technology boom collapse? A central reason is that the region from northern Rhode Island to southern New Hampshire simply ran out of capacity. There were few terrific places left to put new jobs and expanding companies.

  Edge Cities are living, growing things. They are ecologies. By examining the first metropolitan area that, for better or for worse, really began to choke off the supply of what they require, it is possible to determine what Edge Cities’ most important life mechanisms are. This, in turn, makes it possible to discern how Edge Cities can be shaped by individual and government decisions, both inadvertent and purposeful.

  To understand these limits, says David L. Birch, you have to understand growth. And for that, he claims, first you have to understand entrepreneurs. Birch is director of MIT’s Program on Corporate Change and Job Creation. He is also president of Cognetics, Incorporated, a consulting company that tracks growth nationwide.

  Cognetics’ headquarters, as it happens, is located in the Edge City growing up around the Alewife T (for Transit) station in Cambridge northwest of Harvard and MIT. Its office building has an atrium, indoor trees, blond wood, and hanging vines; the men’s rooms have built-in blow-dryers. This is the part of Cambridge’s uptown where a rail line connects with the Concord Turnpike—Route 2—which leads out to the high-rent suburbs near Walden Pond.

  When a person growing a company starts looking around for places to put his people and his jobs, says Birch, he invokes the Rubber Band Principle of Edge City Location.

  Imagine you’ve got a pegboard, says Birch, on which has been drawn the map of your region. Wherever on that map there exists something that is important for your business—an airport, for example—drive a peg. If affordable housing for your workers is important, drive a peg to the north, where you can find that. Easy access to your most important clients? Drive pegs to the west, where they are located. Access to universities? Drive pegs to the east. Fenway Park? Cape Cod? A mansion for the chief executive officer? More pegs.

  Now, imagine you have a metal ring. Imagine that knotted around it are rubber bands of varying strengths.

  Here’s the trick.

  Hook
a rubber band around each peg that you’ve driven into the board. The more important the factor (peg) is to you and the closer you want to be to it, the more heavy-duty should be the rubber band that you attach to that peg.

  Now, with all the rubber bands stretched out and hooked over all the pegs, let the ring go. When everything stops quivering, examine where the metal ring stabilizes. It will be over the point that is the best place for you to put your company. That place is the best compromise; the one that puts you as close as possible to everything you say you value.

  This ingenious metaphor explains a great deal about why Edge Cities are located where they are. If, in the 1980s, you wanted relatively low land costs, attractive housing, good roads, and proximity to O’Hare International Airport, the metal ring would have settled for you in the Chicago metropolitan area somewhere around Schaumburg or Oakbrook, well west of downtown Chicago. That’s why those areas became huge Edge Cities.

  If you wanted to be near the most prestigious residential areas of Houston plus the medical research centers plus the towers of its downtown, the ring would have settled for you over the Galleria area.

  Tysons Corner, Virginia, is not only in the midst of highly valued housing and roads; it is halfway between Dulles Airport and the Pentagon.

  In the Boston area, however—and in other metropolitan areas where the problems of growth became crises in the late 1980s—the Rubber Band Method began to collapse. Therefore, so did growth. No matter how you configured your metaphorical pegs, and no matter how far you stretched your rubber bands, there were few places left for the metal ring to stabilize that did not prove to have fatal flaws. Growth simply had to move elsewhere, or not take place.

  To be sure, forces other than geography were at work in the resultant Massachusetts Massacre. Edge Cities do not create wealth and jobs. They enable them. Edge Cities are dedicated attempts to clear away obstacles from the path of growth. For growth to exist, however, the world has to desire whatever it is you are producing. And in the Boston area, firms like Wang and Data General, which had bet their futures on pricy midsized computers, found their market in the 1990s cannibalized by powerful and flexible personal computers. Outfits like Raytheon and General Dynamics, which rose with the Reagan military budget, also hurt when it contracted. Politicians like erstwhile presidential aspirant Michael Dukakis, who did not control spending when times were good, were clobbered by budget deficits when the boom years inevitably slowed.

  Nonetheless, there are other quite comparable metropolitan areas in America that did not go the way of Boston. In other places, the natural cycle continued. Older companies faded, but they were replaced by new start-ups or concerns that moved in from elsewhere. In the Boston area, however, existing companies found it difficult to grow—the fastest growing high-technology companies in America in the late 1980s were typified by Microsoft, which thrived in Seattle, not the Bay State, and Compaq, which boomed not on 128, but in Houston. And moving a new company to the area from another region was a nightmare. The cost of everything from power to sewers to car insurance became prohibitive. “In almost every category we’re first or second highest in the country,” noted Anthony J. Ferrera, chief of the Boston office of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Boston area essentially declared itself full. The bust, therefore, came. And once again, Boston became a fascinating laboratory—this time, in which to watch Edge City Limits.

  Overbuilding is as old as the Pyramids. The historian Frederick Lewis Allen wrote about Manhattan in the 1920s: “The confidence had been excessive. Skyscrapers had been overproduced. In the spring of 1931, it was reliably stated that some 17 percent of the space in the big office buildings of the Grand Central district, and some 40 percent uptown, was not bringing in a return; financiers were shaking their heads.”

  Just so, since as much as 80 percent of the growth that was financed during the roaring real estate years of the 1980s occurred in Edge City, one might expect to find most of the empty buildings there today. But that is not generally the case. In Boston in 1989, for example, the downtown area had an average vacancy rate, compared with its Edge City competitors. Some of the more far out and hence more speculative locations were worse off than downtown. But the most prestigious and convenient Edge City locations were healthier than downtown. This was typical of most markets. High vacancy rates were not a function of whether a location was in Edge City or downtown. Vacancies were highest wherever the speculation had been greatest—and thus where it had been most easy for developers to overshoot the market. Manhattan’s downtown—the Wall Street area—was a victim of speculative excess, as were the Edge Cities of Phoenix. The truly healthy places were those which had grown at only a moderate, boring pace during the boom—the Interstate 494 Edge City outside Minneapolis, for example. At the same time, the Chicago market became so comparatively healthy that in 1991 it passed midtown Manhattan in having the highest rents in the nation.

  This is why the lessons of the growth years are the keys to Edge City limits. Consider the distribution of Edge Cities in the Boston area. There are five of them, not counting downtown. Five more are in the embryonic stage.

  The map of the Boston area makes the hearts of planning academics go pittypat. It is as close to their theoretical ideal as exists in the real world. At its center is a thriving downtown. As long ago as 1858, the homage accorded that core was so overheated that Oliver Wendell Holmes noted, “Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn’t pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.” Bostonians, naturally, completely missed Holmes’s irony and blithely nicknamed Boston “the Hub.”

  No matter. Boston’s quality of life is justifiably renowned, with beaches and mountains close, neighborhoods on a human scale, universities and cultural attractions of the first order, and, of course, the existential pleasures of the Red Sox. In the 1980s, downtown showed all the marks of prosperity. It was ripped up for tall buildings from Quincy Market to the Back Bay. But its future, too, was to be controlled by exactly the same limits as its Edge Cities.

  Around this hub, in an arc with a ten-mile radius, the Boston area has one of the first beltways built in America—Route 128. About twenty miles beyond 128, there is a second beltway—I-495. That one describes a half circle from almost-Rhode Island to almost-New Hampshire. This outer beltway is highly unusual in American urban areas: it is not just on the drawing boards; it is actually built.

  The two beltways are regularly intersected by almost a dozen roads that lead like spokes from downtown into the heartland.

  It is at each of the intersections of circulating beltways and spokes that, in principle, an Edge City should have sprung up. That is because each such meeting of two high-capacity freeways can be reached by an astounding number of people. The developer’s rule of thumb is this: a mall should have 250,000 people within a fifteen-minute drive of it. The quarter of a million people the developers want within a ten-mile radius is more than live in Las Vegas or Des Moines. That’s a lot of people in a fairly small place. It should come as no surprise that such intersections have attracted urbanization. It worked the same way when St. Louis rose at the intersection of the Missouri River and the Mississippi.

  David Birch of Cognetics thinks that the first big corporations that moved out to Edge City environs did so primarily for the advantage of being near the interchange that allowed people to get there from home, and from there to the world. They did not care about being near other companies. Their relationship to one another was distinctly secondary. The AT&Ts and the IBMs of this world didn’t have to be near any other company—they brought all their support troops with them, in-house. They didn’t require proximity to outside lawyers or accountants or computer experts, of which the downtowns were full. It was just a pleasant coincidence, Birch believes, that these corporations ended up being near one another. They grouped around locations to which it was most easy for people to get. The seeds of Edge City were accidentally sow
n.

  It was the small and medium firms, Birch says, that created true Edge Cities at these intersections. Outfits too small to support a company cafeteria, for example, were the ones that stimu lated an appetite for nearby restaurants. They were the outfits that fostered the need for yet other small new entrepreneurial companies, from office-supply houses to helicopter services. They were the shops that gave rise to Edge Cities.

  One might expect, then, that Edge Cities would grow up wherever there was a high-capacity interchange. That, however, is precisely what never happens. Ten major roads cross 128, but only four Edge Cities have grown on that inner beltway.

  They include the considerable skyline of Quincy-Braintree. It is a backshop Edge City, meaning that it is full primarily of people performing routine functions on computers. With the rise of the chip it is no longer crucial for, say, reservations agents to occupy the same expensive headquarters office space as high executives. So corporations have begun to uncouple themselves. In this case, accounting and filing departments have floated away from downtown, down the T line to where the Southeast Expressway meets 128, closer to southern Massachusetts, where housing is less prestigious and more affordable. Since that means fewer drivers on the suicidal approach to downtown and Logan International Airport from the south that is I-93, everybody’s happy.