Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  These two laws of space explain just about everything in the physical arrangement of Edge City. The developer’s rule of thumb is that in Edge City, there must be one parking space per every worker. Because one employee uses about 250 square feet of work space and each car requires four hundred square feet to be parked, there has to be about one and a half times as much space to park the cars as there is to nurture their drivers.

  If the developer does not provide that much parking, he will have grave difficulty getting bank financing. His project will not be judged commercially viable. In fact, in many Edge City jurisdictions, the developer is required by law to provide that much parking. The lawmakers don’t want people to park on streets and lawns, either. Their experience, too, has led them to believe that one worker will equal one car will equal one parking space.

  Parking has been a key determinant of human life since at least the seventh century B.C. That’s when the Assyrian king Sennacherib decreed that anyone parking a chariot so as to obstruct the royal road “should be put to death with his head impaled on a pole in front of his house.”

  Twenty-seven hundred years later, the pivot of urbanity and civilization at the approach of the twenty-first century is still, as it turns out, parking.

  It seems curious, of course. But the reason there is a relationship between civilization and parking is that there are only three ways to park cars. Each, compared with its predecessor, is more dense, more esthetically attractive, and vastly more expensive:

  • The first way is your basic asphalt parking lot—what developers call “surface” or “on-grade” parking. That costs about $2000 per space to build, not counting the price of the land. (If you find that figure surprisingly high, it’s because there is more to building a durable parking lot that drains rainwater well, and is maneuverable in ice and snow, than most people think.)

  • Next is aboveground, multilevel parking garages. Those cost about $5000 per space to build, again not counting the cost of the land.

  • Then there is underground parking. That costs about $20,000 per space to build—ten times the cost of surface parking.

  These facts of life, in turn, control what gets built where in Edge City, and, hence, how civilized it will be.

  A developer’s decision on what kind of office building he is going to construct is driven by three factors:

  • The cost of the land.

  • What he calculates to be the most profitable “footprint” for his building—the size and shape of the floor plan, given the land cost.

  • What he calculates is the most profitable number of stories he can build, given the footprint.

  Now remember. The developer needs one and a half times as much space for the cars as he does for the humans.*

  Given that, the cheapest option a developer has is this. Build a one-story building. Let it cover 40 percent of the ground. That leaves 60 percent of the land to be covered with a simple parking lot. No grass or trees or sidewalks. But the right ratios at the least expense. Which explains why an awful lot of cheap development looks the way it does.

  This kind of construction guarantees that all buildings and people will be about as far away from each other as physically possible, surrounded by fields of asphalt. This in turn guarantees that the area so built will be an esthetic and functional sump.

  However. That level of development is only the cheapest kind, not necessarily the most profitable. Buildings laid out like that do not command much rent. If the land in that Edge City is expensive, and the developer puts a small, cheap building on it, he will go bankrupt.

  So he may decide he needs to bring in more revenue. To do that, he would want to build more office space on the land. This would require him to make his building wider or taller or both.

  This sounds easy, but it presents a serious problem. More building kicks all his cost calculations into a new orbit. He needs more parking to match the increased amount of office space. But he has run out of land. Therefore, he must build a multilevel parking “structure.” That will cost more than twice as much per parking space as his initial calculations. That levitates his costs, which requires that he build his building larger still—in order to break even. This, in turn, requires more parking, and so the spiral goes.

  The developers have one of their totemic phrases for this. They chant: “The world moves at point-four FAR.”

  FAR, pronounced eff-eh-are, is short for Floor-to-Area Ratio. It is the developer’s fundamental calculation of urban density, hence traffic, hence parking, hence human behavior, hence civilization. It is the ratio of the amount of building on a piece of property relative to the amount of land. If you’ve got 100,000 square feet of office space on 100,000 square feet of land, you’ve got an FAR of 1.0—a one-to-one relationship. If you’ve got an FAR of 0.4, as in the mantra above, then you’ve got a ratio of, let us say, 40,000 square feet of office space to 100,000 square feet of land. That configuration succeeds in devoting one and a half times as much land to the parking of cars as you have space to put people to work. But that’s the highest building density you’re going to get with a flat parking lot. If you want more building than that on a given piece of land, you have to go to more expensive parking garages to accommodate it. That is why the earth moves. You find yourself in a position where you are forced by economics to build an expensive, dense, but potentially more urbane and civilized, Edge City.

  In principle, this need for more building requiring more expensive means of parking—which might require more building—would end when a developer has covered all the land he owns with his office building. At that point, the only place to put the parking is underground.

  If other developers in the same area came to the same conclusions about the cost-profit equations, and built to similar densities, what you would get, in principle, is an old downtown, with tall buildings shoulder to shoulder.

  But as a practical matter, in Edge City that would never happen. At some point—no one knows exactly where, but the numbers twenty to thirty million square feet of office space have been suggested, which is a range on the order of from downtown Minneapolis to downtown Dallas—the hassles of congestion start outweighing the virtues of urbanity. Remember, Edge Cities are competitive with one another. At some point, a newer Edge City that is easier to get around will start stealing market share from a more congested one. That is the time at which the older Edge City has started to become as dense as it is likely to get.

  The maximum density thus reached is self-evidently less than the crowding of an old downtown. If we thought downtown levels of density were functional, we’d build more downtowns, and we haven’t and we don’t and presumably we won’t. At those densities, it’s hard to use a car.

  Nonetheless, long before issues like that come up, civilization can begin to flower in an Edge City. If the location becomes viewed as attractive enough, it starts making economic sense to put up enough structured parking to get the tall buildings within the magic six hundred feet of each other.

  When that occurs, a largely unintended consequence comes about—the buildings, no longer separated by impassable moats of parking lot, are miraculously perceived by the people inside them as being within walking distance of one another! And when that happens, all sorts of secondary explosions occur. Real, cloth-napkin restaurants start augmenting those tacky little sandwich shops in the lobby of individual buildings. Bars with character and personality and idiosyncrasy start complementing the fern-strewn pickup joints. An art gallery or a bookstore might even sprout up amid the dry cleaners, branch banks, and travel agencies in the strip shopping centers. Soon—be still my heart—a deadly serious deli devoted to home-made corned beef and face-puckering pickles may arrive. In short, it becomes economically possible for highly specialized places to survive. They may be of interest only to a small portion of the population, but they are of passionate concern to those who are their devotees. They now work because the density of the Edge City surroundings is sufficiently high. The
re are enough total people within easy access of these places to allow them to survive even with only a small percentage of the market. The result of this density is the diversity, the complexity, that is the singular distinction of both the urban and the urbane. It is a bellwether of livability, of civilization.

  If the buildings finally get really close together because of the economics of parking, parking itself becomes less important. Remember, in a thinly built Edge City, the only way to get around is by car, so you have to find yet another parking space every time you move from your office to the shopping center to the restaurant. In a well-developed Edge City—one that is so successful as to justify dense parking—it is possible to create large oases that are both easy to get to by car and easy to get around in once you get out of the car. At the far end of this evolution, the economics of public transit—including Disney-style people-movers and light rail—become less frustrating. It is then feasible to take the pressure off highways and parking needs by employing transportation demand-management techniques. Walking around outdoors can even be attractive if shops are clustered. Cars are shunted to the edges. The result is a place that can deal with both automobiles and humans, even though the first is about twenty-five times more massive than the second. And life is made more pleasant because people are given lots of choices of means to get around.

  The lesson of this recitation may seem a little perverse to people sitting in an Edge City traffic jam, fuming at the sea of humanity and exhaust gases around them, thinking that the developers—having totally lost their minds to greed—have built far more than can sensibly be dealt with.

  But the moral, nonetheless, is not that Edge Cities are too big. It is that they are not dense enough. Done right, the more dense they get, the better they work, because people have more choices, which equals more convenience, which saves time. With a little more density, people are not utterly at the mercy of their cars, because they can get around by foot or people-mover. This actually lessens automobile congestion, because short-haul car trips are fewer. At the same time, with enough people close by, the small amenities of civilization can flourish, such as bistros of exotic ethnicity. You can support diversity.

  Mature Edge City realms prove this. “The urbanized portion of Los Angeles County is actually the second most densely settled area of the country, ahead of places like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit,” writes Robert Cervero, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of California at Berkeley.

  Ironically, he points out, the automobile, like so many other technologies that formed Edge City, simultaneously yields apparently opposite results. Of course it allows the city to spread out. But it also helps achieve overall density, compared with other transportation technologies. It allows density to filter into every nook and cranny of the region. In a railroad-era city you got density only within walking distance of the tracks. That is how Philadelphia’s Main Line got to be the way it is. With the automobile, though, you get density both near the freeways and in every place that a road or alley can reach.

  Moderately high density, in fact, is more typical of maturing Edge Cities than most people think. The twelve fastest growing metro areas in America with populations of over a million—most of which are in the South and West—typically have growth rates in their Edge City environs five times higher than in their old downtowns, Cervero calculates.

  At the same time, these urban areas typically have densities higher than those in the North and East. This gives them better potential for developing urbanity. Because Edge Cities are almost always economically healthy—that is their major reason for existence—they feature few bombed-out areas compared with the old downtowns. Because they usually have a young population, they have large average households. Because they can be expensive to live in, a lot more people live in apartments than is commonly perceived—especially the young, without children, and the elderly. Yet because those apartments are scattered, and frequently low-rise, they do not overwhelm the landscape.

  And, of course, there is one more thing to keep in mind about the two laws of physical space that created this new world: it is not that Americans won’t walk more than six hundred feet because they are lazy. After all, they will drive a quarter of a mile from their office to a health club for the opportunity to run ten miles. What these laws really do once again is translate distance into our most treasured commodity—time.

  The developers who are erecting our new Edge Cities know time’s precise measure in dollars and square feet. They look at you strangely if you question them about it. They can’t believe any thinking person isn’t already aware of this, or might somehow doubt it. The measure of time, individualism, and civilization, they repeat, is parking.

  All this talk about how Edge City is shaped poses the riddle: Is there any future to individual transportation? Is the automobile not facing attacks from all quarters—from those who revile traffic jams, to those who threaten its oil supply, to those who fear the destruction of the atmosphere of the planet? And if so, don’t these threats to the automobile sound the death knell of Edge City?

  The answer involves breaking out two completely different issues:

  • One is the gasoline-fired internal-combustion engine.

  • The other is the actual automobile itself, that privately owned shell of individual transportation in which the main passenger is also the driver. That shell—the actual car—can be pushed around by lots of fuels besides gasoline.

  People who view the automobile as a pathology usually take comfort in the view that American and world society somehow “can’t” go on as it has. Unfortunately, despite the obvious case to be made that Americans “shouldn’t” go on like this, there is little evidence that we “can’t.”

  Put aside the holes in the ozone and craziness in the Middle East for one moment, for the sake of argument. For better or for worse, there are no geological reasons that plenty of oil should not be available throughout the twenty-first century. There is no petrochemical analyst around who thinks there is any supply-and-demand reason—other than war—that the price of oil should go higher than $30 a barrel in constant dollars in this generation. That is, of course, less than the unsustainable $40 peak that accompanied the second oil shock, of 1979. It is also less than the $41 peak hit after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait doubled the usual market price of about $18.

  Even after that invasion, David E. Cole, director of the Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation at the Transportation Research Institute of the University of Michigan, was making the following case:

  The decade’s most significant change in oil equations was not Saddam Hussein. It was the collapse of Soviet communism. Cole’s reasoning: the Soviet Union is the world’s largest producer of oil—greater than Saudi Arabia. The major limit on that exploitation is lack of sophisticated Western technology. Therefore, the easiest way for the Soviets to gain hard currency quickly is to allow Western wildcatters to enhance the efficiency of Siberian oil fields.

  There really are few shortages of petrochemicals on the horizon throughout the twenty-first century and even into the twenty-second—if we are ready to pay the price. If we choose to accept the political and environmental and military and economic consequences, we can find enough oil on this planet.

  Of course, there are good reasons not to do that. Gasoline helps cause the air in places like Southern California to be characterized as “unhealthful” 232 days a year. This is the basis of an important idea: that the liberation the automobile offers is a false one; that it sows the seeds of its own destruction. Individual transportation, in this view, is the Machine that will destroy the Garden.

  There’s a challenge inherent in that observation. Plenty of more environmentally benign fuels could move our automobiles—natural gas, alcohol from renewable plant life, solar-generated hydrogen, solar-generated electricity. They are not as cheap as gasoline. They might cost the equivalent of as much as $4.00 a gallon, which was the price of gaso
line in 1990 in Milan, Stockholm, Paris, and Dublin.

  But here’s the point. Suppose we as a society decide to turn against gasoline for environmental and political reasons, the way we appear to have turned against nuclear power. There is still little if any reason to think that it would lead to the demise of individual transportation—the car.

  Fans of the nineteenth-century cities have a tough argument to make if they think they can ignore the challenge of Edge City, hoping that OPEC or California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District will bring about the end of the automobile. They value highly what they perceive as the ancillary benefits: the end of low-density suburbs, the re-emergence of the railroad as the primary mode of transportation, the return of middle-class homes to the old downtowns, and a newly found pleasure in the walk to work.

  There is no reason, however, to think that the end to the gasoline engine would produce these results. Many alternatives would become more attractive, and $4.00-a-gallon fuel would doubtless lead to more efficient automobiles. But it would not change this verity: in an affluent America, the dominant mode of transportation for generations is likely to be something with four tires and a steering wheel. In the Depression, the last thing to go was the car. It’s simply a question of what we value.

  This, then, brings us to the other big problem of cars, their bodies. They are so physically big, and must be spread so far apart when they move fast, that it is impossible to get hundreds of thousands of them into one location at one time without spreading our built world all over the landscape and/or creating traffic jams.

  Now that is a genuinely limiting factor. Traffic jams are a horrifying waste of that vital commodity, time. Americans tell pollsters that traffic congestion is among the most maddening problems they face.