Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  The difficulty arises when this civilization produces a landscape that purports to “have it all”—and there’s still something obviously and desperately missing. When it comes to “urbanity,” I think of the mark of this something-else as “urban mine canaries.”

  Small songbirds used to be carried down into nineteenth-century coal mines as safety devices. These canaries were very sensitive to poisonous gases. If one died, you knew quickly that there was something wrong with the atmosphere of the place.

  Just so, civilization has mine canaries in all the best urban places. They are small in themselves. But they test for something far larger. Everybody has his or her own list. Mine includes secondhand bookstores; cobbler shops with craftsmen who know how to take apart and carefully fix good boots; fine, cheap, authentic restaurants of exotic ethnicity, like Ethiopian; and bistros where you can nurse a glass, people-watch, and read all afternoon if you choose. None of these places makes any real money; none will ever become a mall cliché, like Victoria’s Secret or Banana Republic. They are so fragile, their existence so precarious, that if they fail to thrive, that tells you something ominous about the quality of an Edge City environment.

  This something-else quality, in turn, helps determine whether Edge City will ever join the ranks of history’s renowned and beloved urban places. Whether Edge City will ever be the place we take visitors to show off our shining new city on the hill. Whether Edge City will ever be inspiring. Whether it will be a place we cherish.

  To arrive at a short-hand for this something-else, I offered historians and designers this query: If Edge City is the future, will it ever turn out as well as Venice?

  Venice is venerated by American urban planners as a shrine to livability. But my question, as it happens, is not as outlandish as it may sound. The uproariousness of today’s Edge City is nothing new; wildness is pretty much standard for a metropolis in its early stages. All American cities looked like amorphous boom-towns at the beginning, reported the historian Siegfried Giedion. He described Chicago, “America’s boldest testing ground of the 1880s,” as “looking like a gold-rush town.”

  Nor is the apparent chaos of so many of our Edge Cities peculiar to our time and place.

  “Oh, yeah, Venice was bizarre. In more ways than one,” said Larry Gerkins, Ohio State professor of the history of city planning.

  “Out sitting in its lagoon. Highly unusual. There was no overall plan for Venice. There was nobody sitting down, saying this is the way it’ll be. It happened over hundreds of years. People were driven off their farms and found themselves on tidal flats, and had to live with it. At the time, the concept was that ownership of land equaled political power. Depending on what land you controlled, you had producing farms and serfs. In time of war, suddenly a group of people found themselves sitting out on the middle of a sand spit. Ain’t no land. Ain’t no serfs. So they were going to have to develop mercantile power. It changed Western Europe. Banking. Trading. They couldn’t be dependent on land. It opened the door into the Renaissance.

  “They built the firmaments one at a time. They were respecting the deep spots—that’s how the Grand Canal came about. That’s where the channel was deep enough. It just kind of grew with time. Delightful thing.

  “They were 100 percent mercantile, just as in Edge Cities. Had the only really sizable marine force when the Crusades started. Made a hell of a lot of money shipping people over to the East. The Piazza San Marco was not planned by anyone. It evolved over hundreds of years. Each doge made an addition that respected the one that came before. That is the essence of good urban design—respect for what came before. Over the years, you build something that you couldn’t build all at once.

  “But remember, it was dry landers forced out into a lagoon, looking for a place they could defend. They were forced to build a city unlike anything that had ever been built before.”

  Full disclosure: no matter how hard I tried to be fair, more than once, traveling around the country, I found myself in deep despair that the Edge Cities I was looking at would ever amount to anything physically uplifting or beautiful. But when that happened, there always seemed to be some thoughtful people around who would, in effect, repeat to me Gerkins’ advice: Calm down. Take deep breaths. These Edge Cities are only ten or twenty years old. It took Venice five hundred years to become what it is today. Our new Edge Cities are works in progress. It’s just beginning to dawn on us that they are cities. The reason you think places like London and Paris are so wonderful is that you don’t see all the mistakes. That’s because the people who built those places have had time to tear down all the miscalculations. Time is of the essence in city building. Give Edge Cities time before you lose your composure.

  In Texas, however, it is easy to see how one might arrive at an acute ambivalence punctuated by active anxiety attacks. David Dillon, the art historian who writes on architecture for the Dallas Morning News, recalls driving the dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design out to one Edge City rising due north of downtown Dallas.* Dillon finds the area fascinating.

  He calls it the Blade Runner Landscape.

  Blade Runner is a cult-classic film in which the idea of what Los Angeles might be in the year 2019 collided with that cinematic genre best described as swirling hypercolored lovingly cybernetic punk. And, indeed, Dillon named well this North Dallas Blade Runner world. There is so much to it that the best way to absorb everything that’s going on is in a convertible with a completely unobstructed, wraparound, sixty-mile-per-hour view. At its heart, just above the LBJ Freeway, the North Dallas Tollway is quite high off the ground—three or four stories or more. It undulates sensuously—and then the barrage on the senses begins.

  California Spanish-tile-covered Asian postmodernist buildings. Pink bronze reflective glass. Unintended intimacies: town houses built right up next to the elevated speedway. A vaguely British office castle with an enormous archway cut right through the middle of it—a portcullis eight stories, count them, eight stories high. Blue reflective glass. The Marriott. Unfinished cement walls. A Mercedes symbol four stories high, right next to a place that calls itself Leather Land. Women in expensive silk shirts whipping by in jacked-up Ford Ranger 4 × 4 pickups. A starkly green field full of alfalfa. It’s all so close, so immediate, so reeling. The North Dallas Athletic Club with the American flag, the Texas flag, and the American flag again. Billboard: VANTAGE BEATS MARLBORO. A sign that says LAST FREE EXIT. It points to a flyover that is uplifted by highway sculptures in cruciform. They are so huge, they would be worshiped by the Toltecs. The toll plazas, by contrast, try to be cozy. They are made of wood and have shake roofs. Corporate America: Digital. The Hilton. An office building with both crinkled multiple corner offices and curved glass, with the word on the top—OXY—right up against the highway as it dips and churns. The Galleria with its Westin Hotel, featuring barrel tops centered on circular windows, and Marshall Field’s. And Macy’s. And parking garages matching the curve of a ramp as it swirls around like the frozen contrail of a jet fighter on the attack. Dark male brown marble façades, meant to connote not just wealth, but old European wealth. Stop and Go Fax Send and Receive Service. More homes right up against the elevated highway. Gold-bronze-pink windows. Something called the Grand Kempinski. With the Grand Kempi’s nightclub. Crystal Wood Town Center, Neiman Marcus, Lord & Taylor, J. C. Penney. Taiwan!—“A Chinese Restaurant in Dallas.” A roll of curved horizontal glass off an office slab in a series of waves exactly repeated by a roll of water falling beneath it. Atria. Steel pylons carrying the power, ah yes, the power. A billboard: MAKE YOUR NEXT DATE A TWO-BAGGER. Two people pictured, each with potato chip bag over head. Billboard: SO MANY MESSAGES, SUCH LITTLE TIME, METRO CELL CELLULAR. Billboard: PICK UP THE PHONE INSTEAD OF THE PIECES. FIRST STEP CRISIS PREVENTION CENTER.

  After a few miles, the landscape begins to recede. A man finds himself exhausted, having drunk deeply from the cup of astonishment, gasping for words beyond a simple bellow of “¡Yo, arriba!” The
word “surreal” has no juice left to it. It no longer has the power to punch up the workings of the unconscious mind as manifested in dreams: irrational, noncontextual arrangements. I want to put a bag over my head and pick up a cellular phone to call the 800 number that beckoned so seductively in that ten-foot-high script, to talk intensely to whoever answers—about crisis.

  Dillon, nonetheless, seemed surprised to report that the Harvard dean, whom he described as “probably an eight or nine in terms of enlightenment,” did not join him in the spirit of inquiry and the rolling back of intellectual frontiers when confronted by the Blade Runner Landscape. Instead, the dean went into the intellectual equivalent of the fetal position. And he apparently did not emerge from brainlock until he was taken off the plane back East.

  The dean’s reaction is instructive. It explains a lot about how our Edge Cities have ended up the way they have.

  When I started reporting on Edge Cities, one of my first genuine surprises was to discover just how little architects usually have to do with the appearance of these places. The height, shape, size, density, orientation, and materials of most buildings are largely determined by the formulaic economics of the Deal. It was stunning how completely it was the developers who turned out to be our master city builders. The developers were the ones who envisioned the projects, acquired the land, exercised the planning, got the money, hired the architects if there were any, lined up the builders, and managed the project to completion. Often, it was the developers who continued to manage and maintain the buildings afterward. The works of the design professions were very much ancillary. Even officials of the American Institute of Architects ruefully conceded the point. Architects were lucky if they got to choose the skin of the building.

  Oddly enough, this turn of events seemed to suit a lot of designers and planners just fine. Their hearts were not in Edge City. They were elsewhere—usually in elegant projects to rejuvenate the old downtowns to aristocratic days that were so long ago that the designers could only have read about them in books. One of the reasons that the benefits of their design prowess were so frequently missing in Edge City, I discovered, was that an astounding number of these design professionals, especially the older ones, were themselves missing from Edge City. They not only regarded the suburbs as sprawl gone morally wrong. They considered these places and the people in them so banal as to be utterly remote from their experience and interests. They viewed themselves as having a higher calling—trying to find someone to pay them to define space in ways that relate man to his environment with fresh insight and artistic vision, perhaps. It was not so much that these designers had been banished from playing a role in the major decisions about Edge City. As often as not, they had exiled themselves.

  In the midst of reporting this chapter I was asked to address the American Institute of Architects, which was holding its convention in Houston. After the talk, one architect came up and basically said, Okay, fine. I want to examine an Edge City; how do I get there. Well, I said, you get into your car and head straight out Westheimer until you see more big buildings than in downtown Copenhagen, at which point you start cruising around. And he got this stricken look on his face. Car? he asked. Car? My God, he said. Can you get a cab in this town?

  Now I do not mean to derogate this man’s sincerity in any way. But a building designer who comes to Houston for a convention and does not rent a car is not part of the solution; he is part of the problem. In a culture like America’s, in which more households have a car than have a water heater, he is not being morally pure. He is being willfully and aggressively ignorant of the stone-cold realities of the late twentieth century. Going to Houston and not renting a car is like going to Venice and not hiring a boat. It is missing the point.

  Nonetheless, this man is not alone among his peers. In the late 1980s, when I wanted to find out what was going on in Edge City, I could rarely turn to architects and planners for insight. They often were not even curious about the place. Instead, I had to turn to the people who were actually bulldozing the landscape to get any straight answers.

  Why did you think this project was a good idea? I’d ask the banker. Why did you put that building there and there and there? I’d ask the developer. Why didn’t we build a railroad over there? I’d ask the engineer. Excuse me, sir, would you explain just what, exactly, you thought you were doing?

  Their answers were startling; they seldom had anything to do with lofty urbanologists’ theories about the ways people “should” live, and cities “should” be arranged. But this was not because they had no answers. Quite the contrary. Edge City, as it turned out, had an exquisitely fine-tuned logic. Indeed, as soon as one saw Edge City the way the people who were building it did, a magnificent panoply emerged. The developers had spent lifetimes laboring to uncover what they regarded as the verifiable, nontheoretical realities that govern human behavior. They had then gone out and built an entire world around their understanding of what Americans demonstrably and reliably valued. Their unshakable observation was this: if they gave the people what they wanted, the people would give them money. The crazy quilt of Edge City made perfect sense if you understood the place as the manifest pattern of millions of individual American desires over seventy-five years.

  The developers viewed Edge City the same way they viewed America itself: as problem-driven, not ideology-driven. In this way, their perspective was quite the opposite of the designers’. The planners seemed to think that human behavior was malleable, and that nobody was better equipped by dint of intelligence and education than they to do the malleting. They believed that the physical environment they wanted to shape could and would shape society. The places they would like to plan would lead, they believed, to fundamental, welcome, and long-overdue changes in human mores and human attitudes.

  The developers saw it just the other way. They saw Edge City as very much the product of society. They viewed themselves as utterly egalitarian observers, giving people what they repeatedly demonstrated they desired, as measured by that most reliable of gauges: their willingness to pay for it.

  Edge City, of course, is that land of such apparently contradictory postmodernist future visions that both realities are probably accurate. After all, Winston Churchill once wrote, “We shape our houses, then they shape us.”

  But of the two camps, it is clear that the developers with the common touch, who thought they were merely responding to the people’s will, are the ones who have had far and away more influence on the world that now surrounds us than have the theoreticians and designers. For this they all may take both the credit and the blame.

  Forget commodity, firmness, and delight. Those are the three qualities that were thought to embody excellence in city building according to Vitruvius, the Roman architect of the early imperial period who wrote the only text on architecture to survive from Greece or Rome.

  Forget zoning. “There is no zoning, only deals,” Sam Lefrak once said. He ought to know. Lefrak was such a savvy developer that he got the University of Maryland geography building named after him.

  Those are sideshows. Edge City is built the way cities always have been built. It is shaped by the most powerful forces unleashed at the time. If the Pope shaped Rome and the doge Venice and Baron Haussmann the grands boulevards of the Champs-ÉEalysées, the marketplace rules Edge City. Its most devoted acolytes are the developers. “They are the Medici of the twentieth century,” agreed one Houston planner.

  Well, then, who are these guys? Again, I found the answer surprising. Development is very much a participatory sport in this country. Giant national firms like Trammell Crow are the exception. The typical story of a developer is that he—it is almost always a he—was something else first: a lawyer, a broker, an engineer, a contractor. The more developers this person dealt with, the more he realized that there was nothing that they were doing that he couldn’t do, too. Except that they were making far more money. So he joined the party.

  The most important thing to understand a
bout developers is this: these guys are not rocket scientists. If you devote a lot of energy to conspiracy theories about them, you may be missing the point. It’s not that they aren’t into greed. The stuff developers do all day, like talking to bankers, is debilitating and degrading; it would make no sense unless there were abundant money in it. It’s not that they can’t be devious. Some have proven capable of felonious quantities of guile. And it’s not as if they are self-effacing. Everybody in the building trades, including the architects and planners, is an egotist. They aspire, after all, to change the world.

  Still, developers are the kind of people who carry around brochures of their projects as if they were baby pictures. They love the places they build. The first thing they do when they start talking about their efforts is to start chopping the space in front of them with their arms, building castles in the air. By and large, this is not an introspective collection of people. A very few in this brotherhood are genuinely brilliant. But a gathering of the clan—including their cohorts the bankers, builders, and brokers—resembles nothing so much as a fraternity fervently committed to varsity athletics.

  The more I talked to these people, the more I became convinced that there are not that many legal, technical, or practical reasons that almost anyone with the brains to read this far into a thick book couldn’t get into a partnership and go out and build a quarter-of-a-million-square-foot office building tomorrow, if he was willing to devote his life to that. It is not as challenging as subatomic physics.

  The ease with which the development game is entered does not by any means suggest that it is trivial to succeed as a developer. The number of ways that our hypothetical quarter-of-a-million-square-foot building could erupt into fiasco are limited only by imagination. One hotshot, musing about three people he knew who were big-time developers before the economic downturn of the 1970s, swore this was true: one of them is selling newly manufactured Brazilian “antiques” to Europeans; another is pushing Vietnam-era airplanes to developing countries; and a third is peddling Malaysian oil futures.