Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode …

  Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

  There is a replica of Thoreau’s ten-by-fifteen-foot handcrafted house on the shores of Walden Pond today, rebuilt by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management. It seems as snug and handy as his place must have been 150 years ago, when he refused the gift of a doormat—preferring to wipe his feet on the grass rather than disturb the simplicity of his life by taking in an object he would only have to shake out.

  “In the long chronicle of our American distrust of the city, two names stand out above the rest: Jefferson and Thoreau,” wrote J. B. Jackson.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of his friend who built that tight, warm, one-room abode, out beyond what is now Route 128, “No truer American existed than Thoreau.”

  And to this day, Americans harken to his distant drum; there are still some things, it seems, they value far more than the building of cities.

  * For a more detailed explanation of the various kinds of Edge Cities see Chapter 4.

  * For a further discussion of this logic, see Chapter 13, “The Laws.”

  4

  DETROIT

  The Automobile, Individualism, and Time

  Americans are in the habit of never walking if they can ride.

  —Louis Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, 1798

  WEST OF DETROIT, just off Interstate 94, stands the classic clock tower and lofty steeple of Independence Hall.

  Those who always thought the sanctuary of the Liberty Bell was located six hundred miles east, in Philadelphia, might find startling this apparition on the Michigan plain. But it does have its own compelling logic. For this replica of the building in which the Declaration of Independence was approved on July 4, 1776, was erected in Dearborn by Henry Ford. It serves as the main entrance to the massive Henry Ford Museum, near Ford’s old private estate. Ford meant the museum to be a monument to the American genius for invention and change. He regarded the signers of the Declaration to be no less brilliant in this regard than his friend Thomas Edison—or future Americans, for that matter.

  The very first exhibit in this vast museum, with twelve acres under roof, makes this point in the most forceful way. There sit two vehicles, side by side. One is the Quadricycle, Ford’s first experimental 1896 automobile. The other is a Lunar Roving Vehicle, the first of which was driven on the moon July 31, 1971; three of them are parked up there still.

  The two flivvers are stunningly similar. Each is a bare platform, at the four corners of which are wheels. You can see right through the wheels of each, the Quadricycle having spokes, and the Rover having tires made of screenlike mesh to save weight. Each seats two, the moon vehicle with an affair of webs, and the Quadricycle an upholstered love seat. The Rover, six feet wide and a little over ten feet long, is not much bigger than its antique counterpart. The Ford vehicle has on its right front bumper a beautiful brass lamp. The moon vehicle has at exactly the same location a television camera covered in foil of radiation-deflecting gold. It is tied to an uplink transmission dish. The two technologies—worlds apart—are separated by only seventy-five years.

  It is fitting that these two monuments to American ingenuity are approached through a replica of Independence Hall, for they are testimonials to a society that has put a boundless value on freedom and individuality for centuries. Those values, embodied in these forms of individual transportation, have in turn resulted in our new Edge Cities.

  When the millionth Model T rolled out of Highland Park in 1915, it changed the world. The product of Ford’s invention of the moving assembly line in 1913, it heralded the most luxuriant flowering of the Industrial Age. As a result of the breakthroughs in mass production and mobility it represented, all manner of other miracles—the refrigerator, the telephone, the air conditioner, the television—became so inexpensive as to enter the lives of every working person. At the same time, those years brought to surge tide the wave of humans leaving woods and fields for the urban areas where the factory jobs were. These jobs paid so well that when Henry Ford announced in 1914 that he would pay his employees $5.00 a day, there were riots in the streets of Detroit among the thousands who had traveled from as far as Chicago, Dayton, Indianapolis, and Cleveland to claw at one another for the work. That kind of pay, at a time when highly skilled labor secured thirty cents an hour, drew migrations from as far as Eastern Europe, Palestine, and the American Deep South. Detroit in 1915 was a boomtown more raucous even than Houston in the 1970s. In fact, contemporary writers, casting about for something to equal it, settled on the Oklahoma land rush. The Motor City quadrupled its population in only twenty years, from 285,000 at the turn of the century to well over a million by 1921.

  Ironically, this massive wave of urbanization, culminating in a high-rise skyline, brought to an end the evolution of the downtown-dominated nineteenth-century-style city in America. We have not built an old downtown from raw ground in seventy-five years—not since that millionth Model T in 1915. True, even today some people have a mental image of the gritty centers of the Industrial Age—Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York—as the standard form of American city. But these old downtowns were highly aberrational. We built those huge, acutely concentrated centers for fewer than a hundred years.

  We started building them only in the mid-1800s. The key ingredient for a high-rise city—Bessemer steel—was not poured commercially in America until 1864. Before that, in the decades following the American Revolution, when Americans thought of a city, they thought of places like Paul Revere’s Boston or Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia. Those cozy, compact, European-style centers were the standard form of American city for far longer than any other kind; they were finishing their second century by the time the steam engine was perfected. These early cities of the 1600s, 1700s, and early 1800s were entrepôts—coast-hugging trade centers. Their point was the exchange of the raw wealth from the endless North American interior for the luxuries and finished goods of Europe. They were marked by countinghouses down by the wharves and, up on the hills, magisterial courts, churches, government houses, and mansions. A very small percentage of Americans lived in these antique cities. Most people lived in the countryside.

  In the latter 1800s we blew these sleepy old hubs wide open and out—into industrialized cities on a scale far more vast. By the turn of the twentieth century, those Revolutionary-era cities were almost unrecognizable for what they once had been. That transformation was the previous great American revolution in how we built our cities. It was comparable to the tsunami we are undergoing today in Edge City.

  The upheaval of a century ago was also technology-driven. We replaced the cities the Founding Fathers knew with the metropolis of the railroad, the factory, and the steam engine. Immigrants flocked to the tenements, apartment blocks, and boarding-houses of these new places, packing themselves together in neighborhoods huddled as close as possible to places of work. The reason for this density was simple: people didn’t have a lot of choice. There were only two technologies available for getting to work: walking directly to the job site, or walking to the nearest station to hop some sort of railroad—a subway or a streetcar—and then walking to the job site. Either mode put a premium on high densities, because, even then, Americans did not much like to walk.

  The beginning of the end of that arrangement was the transportation revolution of 1915. The downtowns of Detroit and Los Angeles—two urban areas famous for their early understanding of the automobile—were among the last nineteenth-century-style centers of their kind.

  Americans never much liked living at the densities typical of those old
downtowns, either. They were not swell places. Diphtheria and typhoid were common. We lived that way only for as long as it was necessary to get jobs. As soon as we had a choice—the moment the Industrial Age produced a machine that would allow us to live a respectable distance from the poisonous environs we associated with our toil—we jumped at the opportunity. We have been driving our automobiles to work ever since. In some ways, the main astonishment is that it has taken us this long to accommodate the logic of our lives and—seventy-five years after the millionth Model T—reach the point where Edge City has become our new standard American urban form.

  All cities, throughout history, have been shaped by the state-of-the-art transportation device of the time. In the early 1800s, Detroit was but a wide place in the wilderness, beloved by few save some French-Canadian trappers. Often as not, you got there by canoe, and in French détroit means “the straits”—as in those where the land comes close together between the broad expanses of Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie, where settlement began. It was prohibitive to try to ship export goods like salted fish or flour to the East; it took two months to get to the coast from what was then the frontier. In 1825, however, all that changed. The Erie Canal was finished, linking the Great Lakes to the port of New York. Travel time and freight costs dropped to a tenth of what they’d been. The cities at both ends of the trade, New York and Detroit, boomed. Detroit became the staging area for the settlement of what was then the great Northwest. In 1848, a railroad cut the travel time between Detroit and Chicago by two-thirds. By midcentury, Detroit was closer in time to Liverpool than it had been in 1800 to Cincinnati.

  Two things accumulated in Detroit as a result: money and skilled labor. The first belonged especially to the Michigan timber barons of the late 1800s, who were casting about for produc tive new investments as the state’s pine forests dwindled. The second belonged to those mechanically inclined yeoman who had flocked to Detroit as it became a wood-forming and metal-bashing center of the stove and carriage industries. All this entrepreneurial money and those clever hands were the critical ingredients that made Detroit fertile ground for some curious tinkerers when they started experimenting, at the turn of the twentieth century, with something called the automobile.

  As we trace the impact of this transportation revolution—the car—on our newest urban form—Edge City—two themes emerge. First, the upheaval illuminates our values; it tells us about our lives and casts into sharp relief those aspects of our world for which we are willing to sacrifice much. Second, it explains why Edge City looks and functions the way it does, and what we can do to shape it to meet our goals.

  The most important aspect of the automobile is that it shifted the balance of power from centralized modes of organization toward the individual.

  Before the automobile, mass transit was about the only serious transit there was. There were three go-anywhere land transportation technologies: the foot, the horse, and the bicycle. Each was a seriously limited means of moving large quantities of people and goods around and between cities. Therefore, the heavy hauling of passengers and freight in the 1800s went to the railroad companies and the steamship lines—those robber baron institutions which moved people where, when, with what frequency, and at what price the corporations chose.

  The automobile changed that. Not for nothing is that most American hymn to individual freedom, Jack Kerouac’s magnum opus, entitled On the Road. Not for nothing did we build transcontinental railroads for only thirty-five years. We drove the golden spike for the first one in 1869. The last one ever to be built—the Milwaukee Road, from Chicago to Seattle—was finished in 1904. Those railroads were soon eclipsed by the only individual form of motorized go-anywhere transportation until the helicopter—the automobile.

  It turns out that if each person in America wants to “have it all,” the most efficient way to organize her affairs is in a spiderweb. The home is at the center, and everything else—work, play, shopping, school—surrounds her in dozens of directions. If we multiply the number of combinations this may entail by a quarter of a billion Americans, then at the very least what is required technologically is a system of individual transportation to offer the maximum choices, with the least waste of time.

  The system of individual transportation we Americans have devised, of course, is the finest method of moving the most people and freight in the most directions at the most times ever devised by the mind of man. At its center is the automobile and the hard-surfaced, all-weather road.

  Place these dreams in a market system that is responsive to what people feel is rational to trade off in time and money, and what you get is Edge City.

  This was foreseen by H. G. Wells as long ago as 1900, when the old downtowns were still headed for the peak of their glory. Wells is so well known for his futurist fiction, such as The War of the Worlds, that many people do not know he was a historian. What he vividly grasped in his essay “The Probable Diffusion of Great Cities,” however, was the social significance of the amazing new networks of electricity, telephones, and transportation.

  Wells saw that “the electrical system gave every point in a region the same access to power as any other; the advantage of a central location was accordingly diminished,” reports the historian Robert Fishman in Bourgeois Utopias.

  “In an analogous way, the telephone provided instant communication from any point,” says Fishman. “Not only could industry produce its goods more cheaply and more efficiently away from the core; but businessmen would invariably choose to live in quiet country towns.”

  With astounding prescience Wells wrote, “Indeed, it is not too much to say that the London citizen of the year 2000 A.D. may have a choice of all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter.”

  He was dead on. The metropolitan area of London today—the most America-like urban center in Europe—sprawls more than a hundred miles across. Now the size of the Los Angeles Basin, it has leapfrogged its greenbelts. It is spawning Edge Cities more than thirty miles from the center. As it burgeoned in the nineteenth century from an area of 860,000 people to one of five million, greater London was nothing but a “smeared mass of humanity,” noted Richard Sennett, the social historian, with “no neat demographic, administrative, or social borders.” But as new Edge Cities form around it, London has taken a familiar shape. The London area today functions a great deal more like Los Angeles than sentimentalists care to acknowledge.

  All it took to fulfill Wells’s vision, finally, was a transportation network that met people’s needs as freely and individually as electricity and telephones moved power and messages.

  That network was provided by the system whose virtues we so take for granted that we give them short shrift, rarely stopping to enumerate just how many they are. As a result, we grossly underestimate exactly how difficult they would be to match by other means. It is the mechanization of man’s most primitive activity, walking on his hind legs. It is that marvelously effective compressor of time and distance, that self-driven, self-owned, self-maintained bubble of familiar, personal space—the aptly named “auto-mobile.”

  Just as with the power and phone systems, the internal logic of individualized transportation led to high-capacity transmission devices—eventually, the freeway. This new transportation system was soon knit into a grid, just like electricity and communications. Predictably enough, the powerhouses and switching systems of our economies—the market and job centers—ended up at the most frequented intersections, to which the most people could easily gain access.

  At exactly those points rose our Edge Cities.

  This new system of dispersing wealth and labor was vastly more efficient than the centralized model of the nineteenth-century city. It soon became obvious that the old idea of pumping gigantic numbers of workers into downtown in the morning, only to see them gush out at night, was grossly unsustainable.

  The story of Detroit is instructive in this regard. The first American ruler of the newly organized Michigan territory, Ju
dge Augustus Woodward, in 1805 had a plan surveyed for “the Paris of the West” that was strongly influenced by Pierre L’Enfant’s design for the city of Washington. Roads so wide that today they accommodate nine lanes of traffic were laid out to radiate from the hub like spokes. In addition, Detroit wound up with two ring roads that functioned as prototypes for beltways. The inner one, built in 1884, is Grand Boulevard. It once defined the limits of Detroit’s urban expansion, and today sweeps around the center like a horseshoe, with its open end facing the Detroit River. The second loop is called, appropriately enough, Outer Drive, although that name seems curious today, since it now traverses an area that has been thoroughly urbanized for half a century. Always keeping a distance of eight to ten miles from downtown, it arcs for forty-two miles from just beyond Dearborn to the west, through parkland and pleasant neighborhoods of middle-class detached homes, until it ends in Grosse Pointe Park to the east.

  The intersection of a beltway with a hub-and-spoke lateral road is the pattern that yields the location of so many of today’s Edge Cities. What’s interesting about Detroit, however, is that this pattern emerged almost the moment that the automobile was mass-produced. In 1919, General Motors started building what was to be the world’s largest office building—its new headquarters. But did this industrial colossus locate its white-collar executive center downtown? Of course not. Only four years after the millionth Ford, GM broke the mold of nineteenth-century thinking about cities. GM distanced its headquarters from downtown in a place grandly called New Center. It was near the intersection of the first beltway, Grand Boulevard, and the premiere radial road, Woodward Avenue. It was accessible to downtown—by car. But it was also close to GM’s factories—some of which were purposely located outside the city and its taxing power. It was very close to swanky neighborhoods like the Boston-Edison area where the executives lived. And it offered far more land than the old downtown both for expansion—and parking. Right there in New Center, immediately after World War I, Edge City was probably born. Henry Ford’s company followed suit. When he switched production from the Model T to the Model A in 1928, he also switched his factory location from Highland Park, a community within the boundaries of Detroit, to the plains of Dearborn. Dearborn was his home town and the location of his Fairlane estate, just inside the Outer Drive today. It was also where he had built his enormous River Rouge plant in 1917 and where he finally moved his corporate headquarters. Today, not surprisingly, the area around the Ford world headquarters, Ford’s old mansion, and the Henry Ford Museum is a burgeoning Edge City. It has more office spires than downtown Indianapolis. Two thousand, three hundred, and sixty acres of that land are being developed by the Ford Motor Land Development Corporation. This Edge City contains massive hotels, a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, and over a thousand homes, as well as high-rise offices. Unsurprisingly, it is centered on one of the largest malls in Michigan. That mall has taken the name of Henry Ford’s estate. It is called Fairlane Town Center.