by Joel Garreau
Jack Linville helped put it in perspective.
“What the architects and the planners, the trained professionals, all believe is that Edge City is wrong. It all goes back to the Costs of Sprawl report. The whole concept is—the suburbs growing is the wrong way to develop. That what you really want to do is protect the vitality of downtown. So everything you do is aimed at bringing people back to the CBD [central business district]. Get them back downtown. Get them back into the vibrant areas. Things happening after dark in the downtown. Make sure they have that wonderful city vibrancy.
“The forces at work in our society are much stronger than that. So the planners and architects got way out in left field trying to fight against a surge that is just overwhelming.”
Linville once headed the research foundation of the American Planning Association. He is now president and chief executive officer of a Houston-based design outfit called The Office of Pierce Goodwin Alexander and Linville. (When I talked to Linville, his company was performing the sorely needed redesign of Washington National Airport.)
Linville’s manner is chronically open, sunny, aw shucks, and down home, as befits his firm’s roots. The experience and opinions of Texans when it comes to civilization nonetheless are of considerable significance. Since most urban areas west of Kansas City are a function of history after 1915 and the emergence of the millionth Model T, these people have been thinking much longer than people in the East about life as we will know it in the twenty-first century.
“I came here, I was running this research program at Rice Center, teaching at Rice in the School of Architecture,” Linville said. “One of the things we did was this study for a group of developers out on—the Katy Prairie, it was called. It was the one that was probably the fastest created anywhere.” (This means Linville was a founding father of one of the quintessential Boomer Edge Cities: the West Houston Energy Corridor.)
“The other study was the study of the South Main Center area, which was an in-town area, Rice University, the Texas Medical Center. It was old; it had big trees. It was saving and revitalizing an in-town area.” (That is, it was an Uptown Edge City.)
“It was the same group of people—the same young architecture students, graduate students, early professional people working on both studies. And the perception in the architectural community was that what we did in South Main was really good. And what we were doing in West Houston was selling out. To the suburbs. Because you are so indoctrinated to believe that cities are the old downtown areas. You go to London, you go to Paris, they’re all tight, they’re close, you’re in. There’s a lot of vitality there. A lot of vibrancy. There are also a lot of problems. Far greater problems than we’re going to have to deal with in our new American cities. Like poverty, crime, sanitation, sewer systems falling apart.
“It is a totally different way of living. In Paris, you’ve got roughly six million people living on maybe a hundred square miles, an area that would fit inside Loop 610 here [the inner beltway]. We have about 200,000 living inside that area. We’ve got three million people on three thousand square miles. The people in the United States are not going to live the way the people in Paris live. They will not live in a thousand-square-foot apartment and raise a family and go out and get the loaf of bread and the jug of wine and walk down the street and live their whole lives within one square mile. That is not the way Americans live. They have a different level of freedom, a different level of expectations. There’s still a lot of Daniel Boone left in America.
“I don’t know what the people in Paris want. But what they have is a very very small amount of space that is theirs, and a lot of public amenities. What we have is a huge amount of space that is ours and that we control, and very little in public amenities. We have much more individual life styles. We have our own excellent interior spaces. We have our own park. It’s right out back. The yard.
“The architects and planners—the design community—has a lot of disdain for the kind of things that middle Americans want that lead to the development of our Edge Cities. You don’t create a Paris with them. You can’t even create a London this way. Just not going to happen. Not going to be.”
This is the trap that leads some designers to dismiss the value of the marketplace. The intellectual ambush works like this. Okay, say these architects and planners, let us assume for a moment that Americans are not fools. Nevertheless, they live in ways that fly in the face of everything we cherish—like the recreation of a traditional Paris or London.
How can this contradiction possibly be resolved? It must be that the reason the American people have followed this path is that they have been forced to live in such a terrible style. It can’t be that they like it. It must be that capitalism enslaves them, and the developers give them no choice.
The problem with this surmise, of course, is the evidence that there is no such thing as a mass market anymore in America. If anything, the economy’s entire thrust over the past four decades has been to offer paralyzing levels of choice. Ever more highly specialized, even individualized niche markets are the rule. This is especially true in housing. People with money can live in this country in just about any fashion imaginable—including, if they so choose, in yeasty, artsy, diverse, walkable, renovated neighborhoods in the center city.
Even more telling is the evidence that it is by no means merely American capitalism that is producing Edge City. You get the same result from Chinese communism.
Immensely different political, economic, and cultural systems—with vastly different attitudes toward government planning, home ownership, tax deductions, and freeways—are producing startlingly similar results. In the late twentieth century, urban areas worldwide are growing Edge Cities.
Canada is a particularly interesting place to watch Edge Cities flourish, because it is, in many ways, the control experiment for America. Despite draconian government controls that American planners only dream of, despite an emphasis on mass transit and a relative lack of freeways, despite vibrant and bustling and safe urban centers, despite a relative lack of racial problems, and despite there being no suburb-enhancing tax deductions for home mortgages, downtown Toronto has only 46 percent of its area’s market. Almost a dozen Edge Cities are growing up around it.
Paris has that awesome concept, an Edge City designed by de Gaulle-era French bureaucrats. It is called La Défense, and has been described as so inhuman as to be the only stop on the Paris Métro system where it is more inviting to stay underground. Still, it, more than downtown, is the corporate and economic capital of France. It bristles with more than forty office towers occupied by the likes of Elf, British Petroleum, IBM Europe, IBM France, NEC, Colgate Palmolive, Hitachi Metals, Fiat, Peugeot, Crédit Lyonnais, and Le Figaro.
In addition, the Paris area has five Greenfield Edge City sites on its fringes: Cergy Pontoise, Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines, Evry, Melun-Senart, and Marne-la-Vallée. Only the first two have gone much of anywhere, and, just as in America, they are west of downtown, where the rich people live. The French have figured out what it takes, though. They are building the La Francilienne outer beltway (Route A87) to assist Edge City development. And in the master stroke, thirty-two kilometers from downtown, just east of Marne-la-Vallée they have located—Euro Disneyland! Sure. If it worked for Orlando, no reason it shouldn’t work for Les Grenouilles.
Sydney, Australia, even without a beltway, is seeing Edge Cities emerge. The largest is North Sydney, the fourth-largest office market in Australia, marked by Amdahl, Arthur Andersen, Mobil Australia, and Qantas. It is across the Harbour Bridge from downtown.
Land-ownership patterns in London are influenced by the legacies of both feudalism and socialism in ways that are unimaginable to Americans. London’s physical plan dates back more than two thousand years. Its environmentally protected Green Belt, which runs from twelve to twenty miles wide, was specifically created by planners to limit the dispersion of urban functions. The London area has a well-developed, fully integrated rail s
ystem. The Underground is the oldest subway system in the world.
But it also has the M25 beltway, and thus Edge Cities have leapfrogged the Green Belt to rise twenty and thirty miles from the center of London along the M4 motorway heading west, with good access to Heathrow Airport and tony residential areas, the M11 heading toward the technology magnet of Cambridge University, and the M1. The M20 is coming on strong because it is the main road link to the Eurotunnel entrance in Kent. As a result, the greater London area is now more than a hundred miles across, reaching out toward Bristol and Dover. It sprawls across as much land as does greater Los Angeles. London’s outer Edge Cities, meanwhile, have the same share of their market as do Chicago’s.
The Canary Wharf area on the Isle of Dogs in the Docklands has demonstrated once again that Europeans can produce new urban environments that are every bit as hard, sterile, and contrived as Americans’. Not only that, but they do it in a place where they don’t even try to move cars! Quite an accomplishment.
In fact, there is that group of perverse American design professionals who have labored in the Edge City vineyards. They are watching the evolution of European urban areas with small smirks. They, of course, have been lectured at their entire lives about how great European cities are. But they have a sneaking suspicion that these European sites are living off the leftovers of their soul—the stockpile of ambiance they built up before the twentieth century. They note with interest that when Europeans build new, they don’t build more charming places reminiscent of old Paris, old Rome, old London. Their modern stuff is frequently worse than our urban landscapes. Check out the main land side of Venice. Many of the high-rise apartments ringing Paris and London have all the Stalinist charm of the Cross Bronx Expressway. In Amsterdam, in 1989, they were still holding symposia at which one of the key questions was: “Should architects take consumer preference into consideration in the design of housing?”
Edge Cities are a function of growth, these Americans point out. It is their conjecture that the major “advantage” European urban planners have had up to now is a relative absence of it. What happens to these places, they wonder, when it becomes clear that computers and telecommunications mean heavy cables and heavy heating, ventilation, and air conditioning? In North America, which has always had a harsher climate than almost all of Europe, this was not a big adjustment. In old European buildings, in which central heating was until recently considered optional, this is a challenge.
What happens when it becomes clear that would-be world financial centers need office floorplates of at least twenty thousand square feet? A full-service trading floor needs at least that much space to produce the all-important eye-to-eye contact. That space is standard in American Edge Cities. There is no such space in old European downtowns.
What happens when it becomes clear that there is a connection between more affluent populations and a desire for more individual transportation, despite every imaginable disincentive? say the designers.
Oh. Not had much luck handling those problems in your old city before?
Pity.
These professionals basically believe that if American urban areas have problems, one of the foremost is that they have had the dubious privilege of wrestling with the future first. Their sneaking suspicion is that Americans are doing as well as anybody when it comes to struggling with these forces.
Actually, what they deep down believe is that they are doing orders of magnitude better. For when they look around, they see that it’s not just European urban areas that are displaying these patterns. Bangkok is throwing the classic Edge City motif east of downtown in the Pathoylotah Road area. The Central Plaza Edge City on the expressway that runs northward to the airport is going tech—home to Toshiba and Hitachi. The hotel? The Hyatt Central Plaza. Djakarta is seeing the same sort of thing out the long straight arterial to Menteng called Tamarind, as well as to the east in an area called Tibet. Even in desperately poor Karachi, the action is between downtown and the airport. In Mexico, on the west side of Guadalajara, in the Plaza Del Sol, the first mall in Latin America, you hear people say they never go downtown anymore. In Puebla, east of Mexico City, and Morelia, to the west, you see white-collar office towers around malls equipped with fast food so that you don’t have to go home for lunch. Seoul is trying to force Edge Cities at two locations: Bundang, about twenty-five miles south of downtown, and Ilsan, about twenty-five miles northwest. Even in China, in Tianjin, Beijing’s port, all the development is moving out to the ring road. “I see a lot of similarities in terms of physical development between Asia and the United States,” reports David Dowall of the University of California at Berkeley. “There’s a lot of copying going on in terms of architecture and land use. Incomes are going up so fast, auto ownership is increasing at breakneck speed even though they have these punishing tariffs. In Bangkok a stripped-down BMW may cost you $50,000. People still buy.”
Nevertheless, there is tremendous resistance among design professionals. Few appear interested in seeing whether there may be something intriguing to be made of this new pattern.
“An Edge City, as I see it, doesn’t have enough people of diverse interests and variety and sufficient concentration of talent to make a particular civilization sparkle, to produce great centers of excellence like the Manhattans or Parises or Londons, Romes or Moscows or whatever,” Jonathan Smulian insisted. “Sad, sad.”
Smulian is British both by birth and manner. He is an architect and urban planner who has practiced from Bogotá to Lahore to Cairo. He is now where the action’s at, in the belly of the Beast, the Houston Galleria area. Yet he is hardly a convert to the place.
“Most people do not appreciate the compactness and the high densities of cities,” Smulian admitted. “I do buy that. Yes. I can tell you that every Frenchman would like to have his little villa outside Paris. Every Londoner I can think of would be only too delighted to have his little house out in the countryside. It’s not an American characteristic by any means. It’s a people characteristic.
“People went to cities for one reason only. Survival. Survival in terms of opportunity to find work. Survival in terms of opportunity to get better education and health care and because they perceived that in farming, manpower is becoming less and less important.
“The move to the cities wasn’t because of greater diversity and interest and fascination with urban life. To this day the people in the slums of these cities—however poor and miserable you may think them—have a better chance at survival than somebody living out in a rural area farming his own little patch. That’s why they’re there in the city. Not because of any other reason. Even those people would rather be out in the countryside.”
Okay, I said, since you understand that, then what would you do for Houston if you were handed a magic wand? You have just been named God. Go for it. What do you do to create a great place, a civilized place?
“Well, straight off the top,” he replied, “I would increase dramatically the real residential population, the people who are dependent on that area if not for their employment then certainly for their everyday social and recreational activities. There would have to be sufficient demand for smaller, less individual residences. But give me 100,000 people and I’ll make your Edge City into a place that’s worth being in. And not 100,000 suburban dwellers living within a mile or two miles. I want them living right here. I’d raise the gasoline tax by 300 percent. I’d raise the price of automobiles enormously. I mean I would just limit movement. I’d limit movement completely and there would be a massive rush to live near your work, your social or commercial activity. And then I would put enormous costs on parking. I think just take transportation alone, you could change these places dramatically.”
Fascinating. What Smulian would do, given vast powers, is force Americans to live in a world that few now seem to value. His prescriptions may or may not have merit. But meanwhile, there have been some developments in the marketplace that may be related. From 1978 to 1985, enrollment
in college planning programs dropped 20 percent. Doctors and lawyers enjoy near monopolies in their professions; architects control a mere 30 percent of their market—the market for the design and execution of buildings. Contractors and engineers are viewed as far more sane.
Why is that? I ask Donald R. (Chip) Levy. He is the senior director for professional development of the American Institute of Architects. Why is it that architects and planners cling so tenaciously to their traditional solutions, no matter how often they get their teeth kicked in?
He says, You want me to go into that on the record? Are you out of your mind?
After negotiation, he says, “Well, I just want it to be really clear that I’m speaking about a very ancient and noble profession, that architects are well intentioned and, in large part, beleaguered keepers of the flame. Some of the holes in the feet of the profession have been put there by the hands of architects, but most of them have not.”
Okay, Chip. So where did we go astray?
“We are finally admitting that the era of the architect as large-scale functional sculptor may no longer be a viable career path.
That was the ideal?
“Yes. That was the ideal. You expand a city to be an exhibit of sculptures, if you will. A crown made of many jewels. The strain between the academic community and the architectural practitioners runs to the effect that practitioners say, I don’t know what you’re doing but these kids can’t architect to save their necks. They can’t design buildings that can be built. They don’t want to spend lots of time on the boards doing the drudgery of architecture—window details. They have no field experience. They don’t know how to boss around construction crews and perform site inspections and lots of the real honest-to-God workaday stuff that architects do. They know the economics only in the most cursory and academic kind of way. They got into the business to design the big beautiful buildings and to solve social ills. Solving social ills is still very much part of the game, yes. They see social planning, city planning, building planning, all being one large kind of integrated process. It’s ‘architect as visionary.’