Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  Such a need to get out and pollinate your thinking is the significance of such powerful urban social institutions as lunch. Lunch, in turn, is a function of cities, Edge or otherwise. This is why bright people will continue to need physical proximity to one another and to Edge City.

  The clearest proof that there is substantial life left in the idea of cities comes, ironically, from Dr. Thomas A. Furness and Dr. Robert Jacobson of the University of Washington, in Seattle.

  Furness and Jacobson run the Human Interface Technology Laboratory. The Human Interface Lab is regarded by many as the hottest computer lab in the world. Its specialty: inventing virtual reality.

  Virtual reality is the ne plus ultra dematerializing technology. It is the generating of a computer-created apparition or simulacrum, long distance, that is so startlingly similar to what a hu man would normally perceive as everyday, concrete, physical reality as to be almost indistinguishable from it.

  I reasoned that if dematerializing technologies would be shaping cities in the future, and their limit was our need for face-to-face contact, then virtual reality might be the key to the future of our cities.

  Little did I know.

  Furness and Jacobson view it as certain that, within ten years, a human being will be able to generate a three-dimensional representation of himself. That simulacrum will be able to sit at a conference table in a distant city and participate in a meeting. The instant the real, remote human moves, speaks, or rubs his eye, this apparition could faithfully transmit the gesture and inflection. In other words, the lab leaders believe, it would go a long way toward transmitting ambiguous information.

  One limit to this now is the vast amount of computer firepower required. Another is devising the machines that convincingly deliver the illusion directly to your eye. But equally important is how much transmission capability would be required to make the apparition seem real. Not until regular telephone wires are widely replaced by fiber optics will that kind of virtual reality become real.

  Furness and Jacobson—who are serious middle-aged academics—do not see that as a limit. They see the day when people will combine their simulacra with other virtual realities. Two architects might be collaborating, one in Detroit, the other in Seattle. The computers would create not only their personal simulacra in virtual reality, but the unbuilt building they are working on. Their simulacra could then walk through the hypothetical building, experience it in virtual reality, and relay the experience back to the actual humans. If the architects decided they didn’t like a wall, their simulacra could point at it with a finger. And it would fly away.

  As much as this sounds like science fiction, virtual reality is a research field heavily funded both by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Japanese industrial consortia. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration now has a virtual reality generator in its Silicon Valley Ames Research Center; it translates Viking orbiter probes into an experience that makes users feel they are immersing themselves in the Valles Marineris of Mars.

  Nor is that all. The Human Interface Lab’s researchers look forward to adding the sense of touch. They can imagine a distant human wearing a sensing device, some sort of glove, perhaps. When he reaches out his hand, his simulacrum will be able to pat someone on the shoulder and say well done, and both the real human present and the remote human operating through his simulacrum would feel the warmth.

  Not a trivial piece of technology, Furness reports. Not easy to create equipment that realistically reacts to distant pressure and temperature signals and relays those instantly in a way that can be humanly sensed. Again, one of the major headaches is transmission. A good personal computer today transmits 2400 bits of information per second. It is referred to as having a 2400-baud modem. Touch would require tens of thousands of times that. Quite a feat.

  As Furness and Jacobson soberly made predictions of one mind-blowing miracle after another—this one in ten years, that one in twenty years—I sat, dazzled. As they spoke, I racked my brain. Surely, I thought, there must be some aspect of human life that will be the one challenge their technologies will never be able to handle.

  And that is how we wound up with Dr. Furness breaking the following bulletin: Satisfactory sex—transmitted long distance, via computer—will require a 3,000,000,000-baud modem.

  Furness had already given the question some thought, it turned out. Not only had he considered what “satisfactory” might amount to; he’d sat down and done the arithmetic. He’d figured out how many polygons of information would be required to re-create the tactile sensations and the visual images and the aroma and so forth, and multiplied how many bits of information that would represent, and calculated how many times per second that information would have to be refreshed in order for the experience to seem realistic. He had then calculated, in effect, what diameter the electronic pipe would have to be to carry that much information.

  Three billion baud, he thinks.

  More than a million times greater than today’s personal computers.

  It’s going to take a while before such technology is available, he believes. Maybe the year 2050 or so. But he was not kidding. This was his best estimate of the future of his revolutionary research.

  Who knows if he is right? But after talking to him, I felt I could confidently make a prediction: I knew at least one good reason why cities won’t be obsolete for at least another half century. And is this a great country or what—that there are people out there worrying about these things.

  But more to the point, perhaps, I was left with a certain ambiguous, unquantifiable feeling.

  Why did I have this fleeting thought that Dr. Furness’ calculations of a revolution next century just might underestimate the complexity and usefulness of both sex—and cities?

  * These and other Laws of Human Behavior as perceived by developers are codified in Chapter 13.

  * For further information, see Chapters 12, “The Words,” and 13, “The Laws.”

  * For more such rules of thumb on trains and transportation, see Chapter 13, “The Laws.”

  5

  ATLANTA

  The Color of Money

  I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

  —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963

  IN A CLEARING surrounded by dogwood and pine north of Atlanta’s Perimeter beltway, George and Patricia Lottier have carved out a classic little American success story.

  A few years ago, George left his job with a Fortune 500 corporation to launch his own company selling durable souvenir drinking cups—like those with the team’s emblem which you take home from a Hawks game. His enterprise, Plastic Impressions, is based in an office-condo tastefully clad in stucco and gray clapboard offset by dark green canopies and doors. It grosses about $12 million a year. He believes it will be doing $30 million to $40 million worth of business in three years. He drives a two-year-old Lincoln.

  Patricia Lottier, meanwhile, is publisher of The Atlanta Tribune, a monthly that focuses on affluent, entrepreneurial business people. The Tribune’s offices, adjacent to George’s, are marked by blond furniture housing the IBM PS 80 computer driving the makeup screen, the NEC Silent Writer 890 laser printer that sets the type, and a light table. Camera-ready ads from Coors, Benson and Hedges, First Atlanta, and Warner Books are temporarily pasted on the walls.

  George Lottier is an avid golfer. He shoots in the low eighties. The Lottiers live in a home that boasts a Jacuzzi next to a built-in gas barbecue, and a lighted sports court for tennis and basketball. It backs up to a fragrant forest in a subdivision built around the Willow Springs Country Club. George said that when they moved, getting a house with a golf course attached to it was not a high priority for him. It was the first priority, “and there was no two, three, or four.”

  The Lottiers’ two sons are Christopher and Shawn. The elder is
already in college; the younger recently was trying to choose between the University of Virginia or Georgetown.

  The Lottiers’ story is so typical of Atlanta today that in their office foyer is a painting of the fabled Fox Theater that actually has Gone With the Wind on the marquee. In fact, the Lottiers’ story would be utterly unremarkable in America—right down to the fact that it is occurring off Georgia Route 400, north of the booming Atlanta Edge City of Perimeter Center. Except possibly for one thing: the Lottiers are black.

  So is everybody profiled in The Atlanta Tribune.

  For the Lottiers and people like them are part of one of the biggest changes in black affairs in American history. The Lottiers are not some kind of superachievers. They are part of a new black middle class without precedent in size and accomplishment in the more than four hundred years blacks have been in the New World. This black middle class is succeeding by the standards of the majority white culture in mainstream American careers. What’s more, this new black middle class is burgeoning in the suburbs surrounding Edge Cities.

  The rise of Edge Cities contained a nightmare possibility for America: that because so many jobs were moving out to the fringe, frequently into what had been lily-white suburbs, an entire race would be left behind, trapped, in the inner city, jobless, beyond reach of the means of creating wealth.

  Such fears, however, have not been confirmed, despite the plight of the black underclass. A black suburban middle class is booming, statistics show. And it is emerging at the same time and in the same places as Edge Cities.

  In fact, by the second decade of the next century, this new American black middle class could be as large in percentage terms for blacks as the white middle class will be for whites, predicts Bart Landry, the University of Maryland sociologist who wrote The New Black Middle Class.

  Already, in the Atlanta area, of the 19 percent of all families that are black:

  • Almost a third make more money than the typical white family in America.

  • Forty percent are suburbanites.

  • A third live in predominantly white areas. Psychological barriers long thought to separate Atlanta into the “white” Northside and the “black” Southside—such as Ponce de Leon Avenue—are not as impregnable as myth credits them with being.

  • Middle-class black families living in middle-class neighborhoods have virtually the same income as their white neighbors.*

  Nor is Atlanta an aberration. In the Oakland area, 36 percent of all black families are more prosperous than the typical white family in America. On Long Island, it’s 49 percent. In the Chicago area, it’s 30 percent. In the Miami area, it’s 24 percent. In the Los Angeles area, 33 percent. In the Detroit area, 31 percent. In the Washington area, it’s 46 percent. This means blacks are now significantly represented in some of the most expensive neighborhoods in America. To the extent that income is a measure of class, those numbers reflect the size of the black middle class in America.

  “There is a story there to be told. And it is a story of the success of the revolution of the last twenty years,” acknowledges Milton D. Morris. Morris is the director of research at the Joint Center for Political Studies in Washington. The Joint Center is America’s pre-eminent black think tank.

  “It’s almost as if we would rather not focus on that side of the picture, because, after all, the glass is half empty. Many people still perceive the results as very, very tenuous. It’s like ‘Yes, there are these things, but we really don’t believe it’s for real; we can’t take it too seriously because it could disappear any minute.’ But those successes, they’re there. They’re real. They ought to inspire us.”

  None of this is to suggest that the problems of race and poverty in America are solved: the problems of poor black people both in the inner cities and in rural areas are daunting. Some of the highest birth rates in America are recorded in neighborhoods where a third of the population is unemployed half the year. The virulence and toxicity of new drugs such as crack are awesome in their effects. The murder rate in inner-city neighborhoods exceeds one a day. During the sharp recession of the early 1980s, the size of the black middle class shrank. Black college enrollment for males has declined from the 1970s. One in four young black males in America is in jail, on probation, or dead before the age of thirty. There is only one black-owned corporation in the Black Enterprise 100 that would compare with any corporation in the Fortune 500. Many people, both black and white, firmly believe there is a resurgent white racism. The Reagan and Bush administrations’ civil rights and affirmative action record is hardly viewed as benign. And even the growth of the new black middle class does not necessarily yield racial integration; it sometimes means the rise of affluent suburban enclaves that are still almost all black.

  What can be said with a fair amount of confidence, however, is that the rise of Edge City has not had an evil effect on the aspirations of all black people. It has been at least matched by the rise of a large, churchgoing, home-owning, childrearing, back-yard-barbecuing, traffic-jam-cursing black middle class remarkable only for the very ordinariness with which its members go about their classically American suburban affairs.

  “Successful blacks are the most forgotten group of Americans there are, and the most interesting,” says George Sternlieb of Rutgers. “The focus has been so much on the losers that the very people who have been able to come through have been ignored.” *

  Broadly sketched, there have been three black elites in American history, and to understand the previous two is to grasp just how different in scale is the new one.

  The first black elite emerged after the Civil War. Among blacks of that era, status was determined largely by proximity to whites. Those who had once been “house” slaves enjoyed a higher status among their liberated brethren than did those who had once been “field” slaves. A black barber could be regarded in the black community as having relatively high status if he had a large number of prominent white businessmen as clients. The inarguable demonstration of proximity to whites, of course, was to have relatively light skin. That is where the equation got started among blacks—which persists to this day—that the darker one’s skin, the lower one’s status, according to historians and sociologists such as E. Franklin Frazier, author of Black Bourgeoisie, the 1957 study universally regarded as a benchmark.

  The second black middle class appeared around the turn of the century. This was the preachers-and-teachers middle class, the pinnacle of segregated society. Its core was black professionals serving a black clientele—a small band of doctors, lawyers, restaurateurs, and undertakers, for example. It was particularly well represented in Atlanta because of the clustering there of the five black colleges and universities that now come under the umbrella of the Atlanta University Center, the nation’s largest private black institution of higher learning, crowned by Morehouse College, “the black Harvard,” and its sister school, Spelman.

  The legacy of this second middle class can still be seen in the markers put up by the U.S. Park Service in front of the Victorian and Queen Anne-style homes on Auburn Avenue, near Ebenezer Baptist Church. This is the neighborhood where Martin Luther King, Jr., grew up; it is now a National Historic Site and Preservation District.

  In front of 522 Auburn, used as National Park offices, is a sign labeling it the “Bryant-Graves Home, circa 1894.” It reads: “In its prime, the ‘Sweet Auburn’ neighborhood of King’s boyhood housed a diverse mixture of people—some poor, some wealthy, some obscure, some prominent. This house reflects the life style of two community leaders. Reverend Peter James Bryant, Associate Editor, Voice of the Negro, and a leader of the fight against the 1908 Negro disenfranchisement law, resided here from 1912 to 1925. Later, Antoine Graves, a highly successful Black realtor and contractor, occupied the home through the 1940s.”

  Members of the second black middle class still did not necessarily equate status with money. Status was measured more in the manner of the British elite, by refinement of manner and education. Be
ing “in trade” was considered déclassé, even though this black middle class owed its position to a captive market. Thus, as integration opened whole new worlds in the 1960s, this middle class declined in influence. But it had always been tiny. In 1950, less than 1 percent of all black people had a median income equal to that of white people with white-collar jobs. Right after World War II, an income of $5000 a year was upper middle class for whites. Perhaps seventy-five thousand black people in the whole country made that kind of money then, out of a total black population of fifteen million. That seventy-five thousand is not much larger than the circulation of the Lottiers’ publication aimed at black enterprise in one urban area today. In fact, as recently as twenty-five years ago, it was almost specious to make class distinctions among black people. For the overwhelming reality was—to be black was to be poor.

  That is no longer the case. This era’s third black middle class is the one that rose with the legal end of American apartheid in the mid-1960s. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened up access to public accommodations and most workplaces. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed blacks the ballot in the South and attacked the system of terrorism that had been set up to keep them from gaining power at the polls.

  This new black middle class was the first to find its circumstances approximating that which white people took for granted for themselves. Not too surprisingly, this middle class promptly became the first to measure status primarily the way most whites do—by the amount of money it could command from society. It was the first middle class to include a serious share of all blacks. And it is a middle class that is still relatively young. If you were eighteen in 1964, in 1990 you were just entering your peak earning years, at the age of forty-four. For that baby boom generation of black people it really is a different world from the one their parents come from.