Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  “I don’t buy into the theory that we’ll just have more police force and we’ll just keep them out. I have been part of the receiving end of the Chicano community. I am part of that generation, forty to forty-six—when the airport needed to expand? They bulldozed down all the Chicano neighborhoods. And we’re saying that ain’t gonna happen again. You may have done that one time, but you ain’t gonna do it again.”

  Espinoza clearly feels he is helping forge new ways of uniting disparate people for the creation of a common good. He feels he is breaking down barriers to bring together business interests and the community, the public sector and the private. There is plenty of reason to applaud people seeking new avenues for cooperation, to be sure. Confrontation certainly doesn’t have that great a track record.

  Yet there is tremendous reason historically to think that the cooperation inherent in shadow governments is akin to foxes telling chickens they should unite to pursue common goals. Not for nothing was the Constitution written to protect the isolated and the helpless from the authorities and even the majority. After all, these shadow governments are making open and clear-cut distinctions between the weak and the strong, between people with property and people without. To this day nobody has refuted Karl Marx’s observation that the revolutionary basis of the great divide in power among humans is class. It is no small irony that as democracy flourishes in formerly communist worlds, in the United States it seems far less popular than corporatism.

  It is hard to know, listening to Espinoza, whether he is a stirring example of the American Dream gone right, or a massively delusional pawn of monied interests. Nor is this a small matter. The central issue in the phenomenal rise of shadow governments is whether they are on an enlightened track. If such institutions become powerful and efficient enough to solve our abundant problems, will they also become strong enough to ignore our desires?

  To be sure, if shadow governments are attempts to form a more perfect Union, there is a case to be made for that. “Two forms of government—democracy and socialism—grew directly from city life,” James E. Vance, Jr., notes in This Scene of Man. “Democracy was devised while the tolerance of strangers, innovation, and change was greatly increased over the levels characteristic of the rural clan era. It was in the cities in the industrial districts of Britain, the United States, and northwestern Europe that socialism—the acceptance of the view that society had rights along with individuals and that social objectives stood above economic ones—was nurtured.”

  So perhaps it is only natural that our revolution in creating Edge Cities is also causing an upheaval in our forms of governance. Like all other collective works of man, Edge Cities can be seen as living organisms, fighting disorganization, willing order out of chaos. Traditional means of distributing power—from organizing labor to voting for president—are declining in popularity. Perhaps this depreciation should be viewed as sensible people telling us old ways are no longer working and new ones need to be born.

  After all, this argument goes, this is not the 1960s, much less the 1930s. Nobody is naïve anymore. Lots of people are educated enough to read zoning codes for themselves. Even the poor have access to organizing powers and the media, and a complex understanding of where the levers of power really are. In the last thirty years, United States citizens of Mexican ancestry have never voted in percentages anywhere near their representation in the population. Yet they have a track record of organizing in sufficient numbers in front of television cameras to get plenty of attention from powerful interests. So why shouldn’t we applaud individuals coming together to create shadow governments? In this cosmology, if people feel they can defend their rights themselves, and at the same time view electing their representatives as a distasteful sideshow, what’s the harm? Alexis de Tocqueville remarked, in Democracy in America in the 1830s, that we are an extravagantly creative people, we Americans, in the way we generate new social forms. When we push our homes and jobs out past our old-fashioned sense of what a city and its government should be, perhaps it is only natural that we not get hung up on the problems that causes. We go out there and we solve our new problems, filling power vacuums with whatever seems to do the job. Which, of course, always causes new problems, not that that stops us. If even the homeless now have a voice, this argument goes, it is not the death of liberty and the road to tyranny. It simply means we are replacing the old New Deal-era reliance on big government with a new “informed pragmatic idealism.”

  So this argument goes.

  Linda Nadolski casts the idea differently. Nadolski originally was the proverbial housewife turned grass-roots activist. She parlayed her opposition to developers running roughshod over established neighborhoods into a regular election victory that gave her a seat on the Phoenix City Council. She now represents the district that includes the Edge City in the Camelback-Arizona Biltmore area. But she is still a partisan of grass-roots involvement and participatory democracy. As a result, she champions the village planning committees. These were purposefully created by Phoenix’s aboveground government as a kind of mini-town council in each urban village. Appointed by elected officials, the committees are charged with clarifying at the most local possible level the merits of proposed changes affecting the quality of life in each Edge City. They are an embryonic form of genuine, constitutional Edge City government. But even more important, they attempt to give some real level of control to that nebulous notion, the community.

  Councilwoman and activist Nadolski has given considerable thought to where the concepts of “government” and “community” meet.

  “Communities,” Nadolski feels, “are exercises in doing the things that are important to people. Like getting in touch with each other. Where are you going to leave your kids when you go to work? Who’s the person I can actually call to find out if my son went out drinking last night? Who do you talk to if your grandmother is getting older and you’ve got to find a place for her? The stuff that really counts. Let the government do the other stuff. These things don’t sound important. But the whole sense of how you find the real information that counts is what drives the sense of community. Who do you invite around your table so that you’re safe.

  “Safety. Today, that’s the operative word. You like to feel safe. I used the word ‘control’ for a while. I decided that control was the thing that everybody was looking for. But I’ve left that word behind. I decided that the reason they wanted or felt like they had control was so they could feel safe. As long as they felt safe, they would have been willing to give up their control.

  “People feel abused. They feel raped. That’s the kind of intensity they feel in terms of ‘out of control’ and ‘violated.’ By government, yeah—because those are the guys who are in the paper, those are the guys who are supposed to be in charge. But it comes down to economics, too. People’s ability to protect their future. Economic power to provide safety. People are sensing that they are out of control—the stock market’s in trouble, Charlie Keating, the S & Ls, and we’re pretending it isn’t happening. They’re afraid we’re going to run out of money. Our children will never have what we have.

  “When people get backed against the wall, they get angry, and anger is not rational. They look around after their anger happens to figure out what excited it. And that’s how you get those homeowners’ groups that dictate where they will allow your dog to poop. The reason they feel anger in the first place is that they feel attacked—out of control—not safe. They translate their anger into control. They try to create their world so they can feel they are in control so they can feel safe. They go home to their back yard and they fence it in and they feel safe. And when you violate that, you’re in trouble.”

  This gets her back to the Edge City protogovernments, the neighborhood advisory committees. One of their charges is to encourage density in the middle of their urban village so that the Edge City will be walkable and urbane and easily serviced by mass transit and all these other wonderful things that planners drool over. As a
practical matter, though, Nadolski has found, the real communities in her district hate a lot of this stuff. They hate the idea of high-rises invading their space.

  “It’s instinctual. We don’t have a tree that we can hug, and we don’t see a river. The only thing we see day after day that reminds us that God and nature exist is the sky. We go everywhere and we do this,” she says, saluting the spirit of the place by raising her arm in a sweep toward the cloud-flecked, Christmastime-warm, desert-blue heavens. “Every once in a while we see this short little stump we call a mountain and we think it’s wonderful, because its against our sky. And those things [the office and hotel towers] intrude on our sky. They penetrate our sky. Even when I say it my blood boils. In theory, they are better, because they provide all this open space down here and all that other stuff. All that great theory. Right. Yeah.

  “No. This is our world. These people in their back yards came here from somewhere else. We are creatures of our back yard. It’s an extension of our living room. We’ve got the highest per capita number of swimming pools in the world. And then when this high-rise comes here and looks down in our back yard and pool and barbecue and takes away our piece of that, it’s, it’s—‘If I wanted to live in New York, I wouldn’t have left.’

  “ ‘How dare you take this away from me. Again. And P.S., you can take your light-rail system and shove it.’

  “Yeah!”

  In short, the community deep in its guts knows what’s important to the people in the neighborhoods.

  So, increasingly, the committee that represents their values in the Edge City scheme of things is not parading in lock step with the city’s elders and betters and the planners and the development interests. Instead, it is questioning density and height and mass transit. It is willing to hear from the individual. It is giving voice to the inarticulate, the amateur, the cranky, even the ill-informed. It is giving a focus and a sense of identity to its Edge City. And it is doing so out in the open, not in the gray, not surrounded by shadows.

  In fact, this committee is ornery and recalcitrant. It is unpredictable, inefficient, time-consuming, and frustrating. It is stubborn and perverse—marching to the beat of its own drummer.

  It is, in short, displaying every full-blown, time-honored, and fought-for safeguard of that standard of justice, domestic tranquillity, common defense, general welfare, and the blessings of liberty that we shaped in Philadelphia in 1788 and sealed with the words “We the people …”

  It looks as if it might be becoming a democracy.

  7

  TEXAS

  Civilization

  What happened to you living in England—what exactly did you see?

  I saw how much more in tune I am with a forceful society like our own, fueled by immigration, where the ambition is naked and the animus is undisguised and the energy is relentless and expended openly, without embarrassment or apology. I’m speaking of intellectual and literary intensity no less than the intensity behind all the American trash, the intensity that’s generated by the American historical drama of movement and massive displacement, of class overspreading class, region overtaking region, minority encroaching on minority, and the media cannibalizing the works. Try to imagine England inviting, on the scale that the U.S. does, the cultural and political clash.

  —Philip Roth, 1988

  THE HOTEL CLOCK read 7:34 A.M. Headlights were glaring through the room’s windows. This is no small deal, a half-awake brain reported; we’re on the twelfth floor.

  The guest wrapped a towel around himself, gingerly parted the drapes, and peered out the floor-to-ceiling glass. The searing high beams were just hanging there, slung beneath the belly of a yellow-and-white helicopter, floating at eye level across the way. The chopper had loomed out of a gray morning, bringing a commuter in to a pad on top of a ten-story parking deck. On closer examination, it turned out the parking structure onto which the helicopter was settling sported concrete accent spikes, like castle battlements. It also flew two orange wind socks, like knights’ standards.

  This was before the guest’s first cup of coffee.

  But the rest of the vista was no less extraordinary. Just below, outdoors, on what was the fifth level relative to the ground, twelve canopies the shape of mushrooms, boldly striped in red and white and yellow and green, spanned spa tables. They clustered in pods around a heated pool giving off wisps of white steam. A man sat down and stripped to his bathing trunks for a dip. He took off one of his cowboy boots. Then he took off one of his legs. He plunged in and smoothly started the breast stroke. Sure enough. One of his flippers ended at the knee.

  Just beyond the primary blue water through which he knifed was an alfalfa-green padded track. On it jogged a solitary blond, in black-and-fuchsia aerobic tights and gold jewelry. The track circled a faceted smoked-onyx barrel vault. The skylight was over an ice rink. Four levels below. Which turned out to be actually in the middle of a mall.

  Up on this roof, an unadorned tan cube behind the green jogging track housed ten air-conditioned University Club tennis courts. The tennis courts were on the same level as the sixth tier of that parking structure with the helicopter still on it, its blades turning languidly. To the left, soaring out of sight, was the handsome black glass of the sixty-four-story Transco Tower, the tallest building in the world outside a traditional downtown.

  New noise interrupted the guest’s reverie, noise from behind, to the north. A second helicopter, with red and white blades, burst into sound straight overhead. Skids up, it lighted next to the first, directly opposite this twelfth-floor room. A crowd gathered around it. The guest’s dazzled stare was broken.

  How did it get to be 8:04?

  Room service, please? Coffee. Lots of coffee.

  The stunning juxtapositions of this panorama are all part of a place called the Houston Galleria. It is a megastructure surrounded by one of the largest Edge Cities in the country—now, appropriately enough, simply known as the Galleria area—west of Houston’s downtown. But more important, the Galleria raises questions that will resound across America well into the twenty-first century.

  If Edge City is our new standard form of American metropolis—if Edge City is the agglomeration of all we feel we want and need—will these places ever be diverse, urbane, and livable? Will our Edge Cities ever be full of agreeable surprises? Will they ever come together gracefully?

  Will they ever be sociable places found by struggling students to be spirited? Will they ever yield memories treasured forever by the traveled? Will they ever be delightful places about which love songs are written?

  If the future is Out There, will we ever get good at it?

  The answers to these questions are of no small moment, for as we push our lives into the uncharted territory of Edge Cities, places like them are becoming the laboratories for how civilized urban America will be for the rest of our lifetime. Therefore, the battles that swirl to form these places are battles being waged over all our futures.

  Texas is a wonderful place to ponder where the ancient con cept of civilization intersects with that of Edge City, because so much of Texas is utterly new: history is being made there every day.

  It’s a wonder the Texas Historical Commission can keep up. But it does. In the middle of one Edge City in burgeoning North Dallas one can find a formal bronze historical marker dedicated in 1988. It reads, in part, “Jack St. Clair Kilby, an engineer at Texas Instruments (TI) … on September 12, 1958, demonstrated the first working integrated circuit to TI personnel in the semiconductor building on this site. This conceptual breakthrough … led to the development of the microchip.”

  If the very world that we now view as standard, tied together by wafers of silicon, was invented in an Edge City—in Texas—there’s no reason there shouldn’t be more bronze plaques waiting to be laid out there in the future. Perhaps the new ones will mark breakthrough efforts to create an innovative, humane, livable, and brand-new kind of city. Perhaps someday there will be a historic marker out i
n front of the Houston Galleria. Here, future chroniclers may say, a social revolution was pioneered in high-density mixed use. The Galleria, which started to evolve in the late 1960s, was the first place to bolt hotels to the sides of a mall, the first place to have office towers rise from the middle of a mall, the first place to put a darkly wooded prestigious club on top of a mall. And this was in addition to the skating rink at the bottom of the mall. These hotels and pools and skyscrapers and courts and shopping areas and promenades and multilevel parking and helicopter pads connect intricately, in dense combinations never before achieved in America outside a downtown. Ages and occupations mix in a fashion approaching that Holy Grail for urban planners: the twenty-four-hour city. Sleepy-eyed skaters arrive for their before-work lessons at 5:30 A.M. As youngsters twirl and glide in colorful tights on the ice at midday, people on three levels stop to watch. “It’s a human mobile,” one observer notes. At night, from the rooftop bar with the hot jazz-rock band that attracts a suit-and-tie crowd that is 70 percent black, you can watch a gigantic spotlight revolve on top of the Transco Tower. It’s a scene straight out of Batman. All this, of course, in addition to a view from a hotel room that can compel a visitor to stare out the window for half an hour, transfixed by the variety and drama of the human enterprise.

  How many urban areas are there in the world that can claim all that?

  The truth, however, is that the Galleria is uncommon. When it comes to hopes for civilization evolving in Edge City, there are many reasons for deep caution. At least one of these caveats is our definition of words like “urbane.” The dictionary is not of much help, referring to areas that possess civilities, courtesies, and amenities. But what does “amenities” mean? Edge Cities are terrific at delivering amenities—when amenities can be measured numerically and flowed to the bottom line. Safety. Jogging trails. Day care. Fountains.