Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  The places that first understood the automobile underscore the key element that both personal transportation and Edge City are designed to conserve. That is the most precious element any human has, the very measure of his individuality—time. Both the automobile and Edge City are time machines.

  Everything we value, from love to lucre, takes time. Time is the measure of the conflicting demands put upon us, and as such is the measure of our very selves. It is the one commodity that turns out, for each individual, irrevocably, to be finite. It is the one thing for which we will readily trade just about anything—especially money. The evidence of this surrounds us, in everything we’ve built.

  Developers don’t always use the word “time” to describe the central concern of our lives and their work. They usually use the word “convenience.” Interesting word, “convenience.” In everyday use it lacks punch. It sounds optional, frivolous. It connotes something we could easily do without. It has no sense of urgency, no aura of importance. “Convenience” especially does not suggest a power to shape worlds.

  But that is exactly what it has done. Edge Cities are not created in units of distance, but in units of time. For example, Edge Cities doubtless would not exist the way they do were it not for one of the truly great employment and demographic shifts in American history: the empowerment of women.

  By the 1950s suburbanization had exploded, but it was still not common for families to have more than one car. At that time, the stereotypical female role of wife and mother was not only home-based, but home-shackled. William H. Whyte, in The Organization Man, referred in 1956 to the world of cul-de-sacs as “sororities with kids.” Even if employment and social opportunities had been open to women, those opportunities were scattered, and the family’s only car was typically transporting the breadwinning man. Many women did not even know how to drive. For every woman who drove her husband to the train—hence the “station” wagon—far more took the bus downtown to shop. The husband had the car.

  It is no coincidence that Edge Cities began to flourish nationwide in the 1970s, simultaneous with the rise of women’s liberation. When I started asking developers when, exactly, they first thought it plausible to build quarter-of-a-million-square-foot office monoliths out in some cow pasture, far from the old downtowns, I found it eerie how often the year 1978 came up. In casting about to discover what else happened in 1978 that could explain that, I did not find a whole lot. In computers, it was a big year only in the sense that the first Apple went on sale. The IBM PC was not launched until 1981. Economically and automotively, it was merely the year that the economy most staggered toward a recovery from the first oil shock of 1973, before being clobbered by the second one in 1979.

  The only thing I’ve discovered that begins to account for that nationwide pattern is that 1978 was the peak year in all of American history for women entering the work force. In the second half of the 1970s, unprecedentedly, more than eight million hitherto non-wage-earning women went out and found jobs. The spike year was 1978.

  That same year, a multitude of developers independently decided to start putting up big office buildings out beyond the traditional male-dominated downtown. Land was more abundant and more automobile-accessible in the residential suburbs that had once been condescendingly referred to as “the realm of women.” And the new advantage was proximity to the emerging work force. These Edge City work centers were convenient for women. It saved them time. This discovery was potent. A decade later, developers viewed it as a truism that office buildings had an indisputable advantage if they were located near the best-educated, most conscientious, most stable workers—underemployed females living in middle-class communities on the fringes of the old urban areas.

  Through all of history, revolutions are made of upheavals much smaller than that.

  The further evidence that Edge Cities would never have flourished the way they have, had it not been for women entering the work force, is that from 1970 to 1987 the number of cars in America more than doubled. Population growth in America at exactly the same time was not great—a trifle over 1 percent per year. That’s a growth rate for cars more than five times the growth rate for population. Most of the automotive surge came from women who were entering the work force. Liberation, indeed. Women were asserting their right to have the same unlimited choices as men. As a result, Edge Cities—convenient to their homes and far more convenient to their chosen form of individual transportation—boomed. In this fashion did the conservation of time and individualism form Edge Cities. Automobile technology, like telephone, electrical, and personal computer technology, empowers the busy individual.

  The pivotal role of individual transportation in turn drives the way Edge Cities take various shapes. The three most important are:

  • Uptowns,

  • Boomers, and

  • Greenfields.

  Uptowns are Edge Cities built on top of pre-automobile settlements. An example is the former arts colony of Pasadena, California. Its old shopping district survived the 1960s and 1970s without being utterly “urban renewed” or “mailed” to oblivion. Now Pasadena is becoming an Edge City office center. A similar example of a former bedroom community turned Uptown Edge City is Stamford, Connecticut. Other Uptowns have been superimposed on crossroads dating to the 1800s, like Buckhead in the Atlanta region. The form has even been adapted to a Colonial port village of the 1700s such as Alexandria, Virginia, in the Washington area. What they all have in common is vestiges of an older settlement built when the most common way of getting around was walking. Because foot traffic was primary at the time these places were laid out, and climate control had not yet been invented, the sidewalks were in the open air, next to the streets. Shops faced outward to display their wares to people passing as they walked, which made them visually interesting. Ownership of the land was usually highly fragmented, because nobody needed much space for their small-scale uses.

  These historical usages yield architectural diversity that is often worth preserving. They also afford an opportunity to locate charming boutiques, craftsmen’s shops, eateries, and entrepreneurial immigrants in these small spaces—especially those shops which are too idiosyncratic or insufficiently profitable to find a location in a mall. There is frequently a grid layout, which means that buildings are forced to have a relationship to one another; they often have walls in common. And the people who live around this kind of Edge City have a close historical relationship to the old power centers downtown. This means that there are definite limits to what can be done to these Edge Cities in the course of blowing them out to deal with the automobile and the gigantic office complex. They are always surrounded by entrenched neighborhoods whose well-heeled residents share vociferous and educated opinions about the future. If and when new transit systems are built, they come to Uptowns first. That is both because of their traditional density and because of their history; they’ve been around long enough as centers that planners are conscious of their existence. What’s more, the residential constituency of an Uptown with a hearty distrust of change often transfers its anger to support of trains, even though most of the workers who come to the office buildings laid on these Uptowns do so by automobile, anyway.

  These “limitations,” of course, are a blessing. Because of them, developers must, to some degree, adapt their product to the Uptown, rather than the other way around. The very fact that they have a history gives Uptowns a leg up on the issues of “livability,” “civilization,” and “soul” over newer forms of Edge City. It means that they have layers of development; they don’t look all the same.

  Boomers, by contrast, are the classic kind of Edge City; just about all the ones in the Detroit region fit into this category. Filled with cantilevers, ziggurats, soaring columns, and fields of glass, they are usually located at the intersection of the freeways, and are almost always centered on a mall. Few buildings are designed to relate to each other, because Boomers began to break for glory long before their builders looked around
and realized that the sum of their efforts was an Edge City. A Boomer is like poison ivy. If you have reason to wonder whether that’s what you’re in the middle of, chances are that’s what it is. The classic tip-off: a car dealership being bulldozed to be replaced by an office building taller than the trees. That represents such an extravagant increase in the value of the land that somebody is no longer thinking of it in acres but in square feet.

  Boomers have grown so lavishly that the academically fastidious have even noted that there are three subcategories:

  • the Strip,

  • the Node, and

  • the Pig in the Python.

  The Strip, of course, is that esteemed urban form which goes on forever, miles long and only hundreds of yards wide, on either side of a freeway. The classic ones include the Route 1 corridor near Princeton, Route 128 near the Mass Pike outside Boston, and the I-270, in Montgomery County, Maryland, in the Washington region. It is striking how often the Strip in its most pure form occurs in those areas in which it is the biggest political embarrassment. It is difficult to mass enough density in a Strip to yield the benefits of civilization, and its attenuation guarantees traffic congestion. Yet the three instances above are places where highly educated people thought they had invested hugely and learnedly in public planning. These places ended up the way they did because thoughtful public planners genuinely believed they had a good idea at the time. Ah, well. Not for nothing is the theme of Edge Cities the Law of Unintended Consequences.

  Compared to a Strip, a Node is relatively dense and contained. The Galleria area in the Houston region and Tysons Corner in Virginia are two examples. There is enough of a center to them that it is possible to imagine someday adding Disney-style rail transit to these Nodes, simply because it is possible to imagine drawing a circle around each.

  The Pig in the Python is a cross between the two. It is a Strip that has begun to develop one or several Nodes along it; for example, the Lodge Freeway in Southfield, northwest of downtown Detroit, which now has three Pig-like Edge City Nodes in its Strip-like Python. Or it is a Node that has begun to grow a tail like a comet as it Strips down one or more of its approaching highways. King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, is an example of that.

  The final major form of Edge City, and the most ambitious, is the Greenfield. It is increasingly the state of the art, in response to the perceived chaos of the Boomer. It is also the most awesome. A Greenfield occurs at the intersection of several thousand acres of farmland and one developer’s monumental ego. It embraces amazingly grand master-planned visions of human nature and rigid control of vast areas by private corporations. A Greenfield is what happens when a builder who decides he wants to “do it right” finds himself in possession of an enormous amount of acreage that he invariably calls “a blank slate.” Greenfields are meant to show nothing less than that all of man’s needs and desires can be met by the glories of the marketplace if one developer is willing to aim sufficiently high. Examples are Las Colinas, near the Dallas-Fort Worth airport; Irvine, on the southern fringe of the Los Angeles Basin, the Bishop Ranch, east of San Francisco, and, predictably, a Disney entry near Orlando beyond Epcot Center. What is remarkable about these Greenfields is not that there are very many of them. (Because they require so much land, they are more common in the West.) What is astounding is how many are on the drawing boards, and at what projected cost.

  Speaking of “doing it right,” this is probably as good a place as any to bring up another issue. For all the moaning about the plight of the cities, there is really only one major American downtown that has gone to hell in a handbasket, and that is Detroit. In the 1980s, most American downtowns did as well or better than they ever had in any decade of the twentieth century. This was true from Boston to Seattle to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Atlanta to Washington to Philadelphia. The squalor of core Detroit was far and away the exception, not the rule. American Demographics magazine demonstrated in 1990 that there were basically only two states that faced both slow growth and high crime in the late 1980s—Michigan and New York. In general, it is places that have been destabilized by high growth, like Florida, Texas, and Arizona, where one finds a striking increase in crime. Similarly, places that have seen little change, such as West Virginia, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania, as a rule also saw low crime rates in the 1980s. Focusing on downtown Detroit as an abyss, moreover, was less than fair to the rest of the Detroit region. In 1990 the Population Crisis Center (PCC), a Washington think tank that advocates family planning, ranked urban regions worldwide in terms of livability. They were examining the relationship between rapid urbanization and population growth and the quality of life. Urban regions were defined as comprising not just the old downtown but the surrounding jurisdictions of the metropolitan areas. By this standard, the Detroit-Windsor area came in sixth highest in quality of life out of a hundred metros examined. It ranked just behind Essen-Dortmund-Duisburg in Germany, and ahead of places like Sydney, Toronto, San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, and Washington. The Detroit region scored especially well in housing standards, large amounts of living space per person, low infant mortality rates, low high school dropout rates, low cost of food compared to the local wage, and the lack of traffic jams. “The main point to keep in mind is that we looked at the entire metro area, not just the city of Detroit,” says Dr. Joseph Speidel, president of the PCC. “Detroit downtown may be in trouble, but it’s a much rosier picture when you look at the whole area.”

  If most of civilization’s amenities are located in Detroit’s Edge Cities, and one of them, Southfield, is bigger than downtown, one still may be left wondering: Why do these Edge Cities look so unlike anything we are used to? How did they end up transformed into Boomers and Greenfields?

  The developers know quite a bit about the answers. Developers gossip. Their code is an almost impenetrable thicket of abbreviations and numbers: FARs, DUs, dollars. But gossips they are, for they are trying to discover the Laws of Human Behavior. Developers are religious devotees of these laws. They don’t much care how humans should operate; their concerns are not that ethereal. All they want to know is how they will operate so that they can respond to those clues to make money.

  Here are two of these laws. They both govern physical space, and together they control what an Edge City ends up looking like, how it functions, and what will or will not be there—from subway stations to parks to used-book stores to five-star restaurants.

  The developer’s first law, to which he adheres tenaciously—for the excellent reason that there appears to be no reason to think it is not true—is:

  An American Will Not Walk More than Six Hundred Feet Before Getting into Her Car.

  Two football fields. If whatever this American desires is farther away than that, she will, if she possibly can, get into her car and drive the distance rather than walk it. She really will.

  The developer’s second law is even more world-shaping than the first. It is:

  To Park an Automobile Takes Four Hundred Square Feet.

  That’s the actual parking spot, per car, plus its share of the required driveways.*

  To be sure, there are exceptions to these laws. But they tend to prove the rule. For example, there are a few places where Americans will walk more than six hundred feet:

  • Inside a big airport. There is no choice. Everybody hates that.

  • Inside an old downtown. Not much choice. Automobiles are a chore to use at those densities. William H. Whyte, in City, grieves over but does not dispute the Six Hundred Foot Law. He thinks, however, that in an old downtown, it is sometimes possible to get the number up to eight hundred, perhaps even a thousand feet. Especially if the weather is nice, and the walk is full of interesting shop windows and faces. Not coincidentally, the distances he’s talking about are usually those between anchor stores in a mall.

  • Inside a mall. There, a person has plenty of choices. In fact, designers are positive that if it were clear to people just how big a regional mall really is, shop
pers would go out to their cars and drive to the other end of the complex before they’d walk it. Actually, that is the merchants’ nightmare. It’s not that they are particularly bothered by the idea of people driving the short distance. It’s the thought that once the customers got into their cars, half of them might decide to leave the mall entirely. That is viewed as a catastrophe. So designers of Edge City malls fight with everything they’ve got to deflect our urge to dive for the drive. They make the environment inside as interesting and comfortable and entertaining for pedestrians as possible. They stack the stores two and three and even four levels high to make them easier to walk to. They make the exits to the parking lot extremely difficult to find. But most important, they break the shoppers’ lines of sight. They make Herculean efforts never, ever, to let us see just exactly how far away the next anchor store is.