Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  Another innovation in the Village Commons is that it includes homes over the shops. But it turns out that mixed use does have its limits. Not everybody, as it happens, considers it swell to be paying premium rents to live over an emporium that attracts drunken undergraduates.

  Meanwhile, Paolo Soleri is still out there in the desert in Arizona building Arcosanti, last anybody checked. A disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, he has for decades been putting together a megastructure meant to be an environmentally benign architectural blueprint for the future. But he keeps talking about things like eschatology, the branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of mankind, and nobody can understand a bloody thing he says, so he has had little practical influence.

  The ideas of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk of Miami have achieved the greatest publicity. They lead a movement that claims the answer for twenty-first-century cities is—surprise!—a radical return to the nineteenth century. Their version, though, is more sophisticated and plausible than most. They are banking on the idea that Americans’ nostalgia for white-picket-fence small towns can be manipulated. They think if you give Americans a product that reminds them of what communities used to be, as opposed to cul-de-sac suburbia, you can slip into these places all sorts of things that planners view as highly desirable, like streets laid out on a grid, and walkable environments, and—most important—relatively high densities.

  The real contribution of Duany and Plater-Zyberk, however, may be that they recognize and manipulate market mechanisms. First, they studied small towns in the South built before the 1940s. They concluded that a community of genuine variety and authentic character could not be generated by a single designer. Therefore, if they wanted to produce something that was not just another subdivision, the key was in writing and administering a master plan and a zoning code, as often as not at the behest of a developer.

  Their conclusion is that they should control the overall patterns: the size of the lots, the narrowness of the streets, the relationship of houses to the street, the relationship of houses to one another, how and where the cars will be parked, the alignment of streets, the creation of a downtown-like center. If they get all this under control, they feel, imaginative people can be trusted to take care of producing the rest of the community themselves.

  Dozens of Duany-Plater-Zyberk projects are in the works, but so far only one of their places has a substantial number of buildings up—Seaside, Florida, which is an eighty-acre development on twenty-three hundred linear feet of the Gulf of Mexico due south of Alabama. It took Duany and Plater-Zyberk two years to write the code for that place. It mandates arcades and porches and walkways and alleys and, yes, white picket fences, all to encourage a lively street life. It invites skinny widow’s-watch towers so that everybody will have a view of the water. Outbuildings are favored on the back of the building lots, so that rentals will ensure a mix of ages and incomes. There is a premium put on how lively and innovative building plans can be while staying within the code.

  The ideas of Duany and Plater-Zyberk all sound marvelous and promising, especially when Seaside is compared with most of the Florida strip wilderness that surrounds it. But their concepts are tough to evaluate at this stage other than theoretically, since Seaside is possibly anomalous. It is a resort community that does not require much parking.

  The aspects of their ideas, however, that offer the most hope are, first, they understand why people like to live the way they do in suburbs. Second, they have codified a generic version of their new-old-town ideas into something they call the Traditional Neighborhood Development, or TND. It is packaged so that a Jurisdiction can easily vote the whole thing into law as a pattern that mandates mixed-use developments designed as small towns. And third, their ideas encourage flexibility; they attempt to strike a balance in which only the truly important things come under rigid control.

  In the days of the past century, when it was thought that the universe was a vast piece of clockwork, chaos was feared because it was the exact opposite of the machine, notes the urban designer Patricia L. Faux. Those were the days in which urban planning as we know it was born. It was expressed in the perfect street grids of the nineteenth-century downtowns.

  As we approach the twenty-first century, however, physicists view the world through the prism of relativity and quantum mechanics, and “chaos” is the name of a new paradigm. The workings of a babbling brook or a column of cigarette smoke or the weather cannot be expressed in mechanistic linear equations; the apparent chaos of these complex structures is actually expressive of a higher order, the kind of order from which springs that most nonlinear of all phenomena—life itself.

  Our methods of planning, however, are still in the old, mechanistic mode, in which people try to leave nothing to chance. Especially if they have to face bankers. “The world of Disney is the ultimate example of this sort,” Faux notes. “It is a vision of total safety, where every need is met. It is an egomaniac’s version of what a community would do to itself if it had the time. It’s spooky. It’s false. It is predictable, not real. It is not what a community builds. There are no little mom-and-pop stores. Parks are used as buffers. Their function has been changed. They are not places for people to congregate; they are places to keep people at bay.”

  In short, in this kind of planning, spontaneity is choked off at exactly the point in our lives when, in civilized places, looseness and flexibility seem to be the key. Edge Cities, after all, are places that can metamorphose so fast as to be almost unrecognizable from one year to the next. They are nothing if not monuments to change. And in this way they are reflective of the society that produced them. We live in a world in which people have difficulty forecasting wisely enough to park their retirement funds competently for two years. Pity the poor planner, then, when he figures that a rail line should go from here to there and by the time it is built his decision looks ludicrous; development has followed a wholly different pattern. “The very dynamism of our society produces these disjunctions and screw-ups, which are practically unavoidable,” muses Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution. Some planners have questioned whether it is possible to do urban planning in a society that reveres market forces. Others have asked, seriously, whether it is possible to do urban planning in a society that reveres the individual.

  But they go too far. Planning clearly has value. During the oil crash of the mid-1980s, the housing markets in Houston that prospered were those which were master-planned. In addition to The Woodlands, there are four primarily residential developments that are huge—each totaling thousands of acres, and each roughly twenty-five miles from downtown Houston. These five had 11 percent of the market for new homes in the early 1980s, and a 45 percent share by 1990. “In periods of uncertainty, there is a flight to quality,” noted Roger L. Galatas, president of The Woodlands Corporation. “Neighborhoods that are fraught with foreclosures don’t look too good. People want to see that the places were well planned. They look for a more manicured landscape, a more formal landscape. They want to see an existing presence in the marketplace, not signs saying ‘Coming in the Future.’ ”

  Cultures do evolve, as the AIA’s Chip Levy points out. “Thomas Jefferson said that we might as well expect a man to wear the coat that fit him as a child as to remain ever under the regimen of his barbarous ancestors. If cultures do not progress, they will die. And therefore, by extrapolation, the plan that is put in place which serves you well today may not be germane in the mid or distant future. And we ought not to expect it to.”

  It’s not as if turmoil is going away. Louis Sklar, the Galleria overseer, points out that retailing is up for grabs: chains are going bankrupt or are being acquired at a dizzying pace. Retail is a major ingredient in Edge City, yet it’s “hard to know who the players are anymore. Are we going to end up with only a few major department store companies that are both competent and solvent going into the latter part of this decade?”

  Sklar sees the turmoil in the oil
markets, and what that does to global stability, and thinks that “sooner or later, after all the political trading is done and some presidents don’t get reelected, we’re going to end up with a program that lessens dependence on foreign oil. People are still going to have their cars. Even if they are powered by ozone or who knows. But it’s going to cause some major changes.”

  Then—as an object lesson in never projecting the present into the future in a straight line—there are some people, like planner Jack Linville, who think that we may have built all the Edge Cities we are going to for a while.

  He looks at the building binge we’ve been on and sees little unmet demand for a whole lot more of anything—office space, industrial space, even homes. The baby boom, with its unprecedented creation of new households, after all, has crested. He thinks that our future may involve taking a pause, and a deep breath, and figuring out what we’ve gone and done. At that point the task would be to start filling it in and tinkering with it and making it work.

  That would be a blessing. As Sklar points out, one of the main reasons older cities may be more pleasing than our new ones is that in the older places “we don’t see any of those failed experiments. Because they’re gone. In any reasonably affluent society, as time has passed, all the eyesores have been spruced up, fixed up. The raw cut through the mountain is landscaped. The bare concrete wall gets a brick facing or vines. The billboards eventually come down.”

  Houston itself is a monument to that. “Houston is much funkier than people think,” says John Ashby Wilburn, editor of the Houston Press, the arts and entertainment weekly. “When I first came here, I just felt like I’d stepped off the edge of the world, that I’d made a horrible mistake. In New York, everything is so above the surface, you see so many things because everything is so squeezed together. It took me a year to realize that (a), there were interesting people here, and (b), I could find them. You do bump into them, but it takes longer, because they’re farther apart.”

  Jennifer Womack can testify to that. One spring morning in the Galleria, at all three levels of the rails above the ice rink, people were stopped, gazing at this arresting brunette in a loose orange Reese’s Pieces T-shirt and black Spandex tights. She would start at one end of the ice, dig in, and, at midpoint, she would achieve escape velocity and leap, spin, twirl, and then leap, and leap again, to spin to a stop in a bursting shower of ice flakes.

  Phew, you could hear spectators exhale, explosively.

  She would intently glide back to her precise starting point, eyes down, a study in concentration, and go through the same routine. Again and again. Two dark-skinned middle-aged gentlemen were among the spectators. They appeared to speak little English. They made hand gestures at the only other figure on the ice, a man who obviously was finding it all he could do simply to keep his rented skates under him. They twirled their index fingers as if mixing a drink. Go ahead, try a spin like that, they mimed. That gave everybody on the rails a good laugh.

  Jennifer Womack, it turns out, once skated with the Ice Follies. Then she fell in love with a man in the “awl bidness”—the Texas oil business—and followed him to Houston. There she found herself in culture shock. She emphasizes the word “shock” with her light hazel eyes open wide. Home to her was the cool, laid-back land just north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate, in Marin County. In Houston she was utterly lost. The different pace of life. How loud people spoke. The flat coastal plain. The Gulf heat. She is still able to recall in considerable detail sitting home for months, experimenting with air-conditioner settings.

  That has changed, though. She has begun to feel comfortable in Texas. “Did you know that armadillos can jump?” she asked. But she doesn’t think she could have made it if she hadn’t stumbled on the Galleria and its rink.

  She made friends there, on the ice. She found people with whom she had much in common.

  “I owe this place my sanity,” she says. “I found community here.”

  Trolling around within sight of the Galleria area’s office towers, seeking out civilization—hunting for mine canaries, if you will—you discover that the 1980s’ oil bust had interesting side effects on Houston. There was an explosion of intriguing ethnic neighborhoods—Vietnamese, Hong Kong Chinese, Salvadoran, Honduran, Iranian, subcontinent Indian. Houston was a bargain for immigrants in the 1980s. Cheap place to buy a house, buy an office building, start a business. Now that the place has bottomed out and is turning around, you find a plethora of diverse shops. Peel off the Southwest Freeway at Hillcroft, outside Loop 610, and there’s a discount warehouse sari emporium.

  Didn’t used to always be this way in Texas.

  Some things never change, though. The Texas Monthly crowd is especially high on a restaurant called the Bombay Grill, so that is where the crowd ends up for dinner. Those who know absolutely nothing about Indian cuisine let those who do order lamb shahi korma, chicken tikka masala, peas pullao, and a sauce called raita.

  Mickey Kapoor, the owner of the place, then asks if the table would like “bray-yad.” Eager to learn as much as possible about the exotic customs of colorful lands, the stranger in the crowd goes up for the bait like a marlin.

  Certainly. Great idea. Now what, exactly, is “bray-yad”?

  You know. Bray-yad. The stuff on either side of the meat in a sandwich? Slices of bray-yad? Pronounced in Texas the same as in southern India?

  The next evening, somewhat more seriously, Kapoor talks about the countries he has lived in, and the cultures he has encountered, and what led a nice Hindu boy like him to try to bring civilization to an Edge City in Texas.

  Bringing cosmopolitan, authentic, high-end Indian cuisine to Houston has provided him with more than his share of adventures, he acknowledges. There were all the people who wanted to know what kind of Indian restaurant his was. Navajo? Comanche? Then, when he was running the place called the Taj Mahal, there were the people who wanted to talk to Mr. Mahal, the short guy with the glasses. All the waiters learned to say, Oh yeah, you mean Taj, and sent Kapoor out front.

  For reasons that are inexplicable even now, the location of his first place was on the southeast side of Houston, on the way to the Edge City of Clear Lake-NASA, three miles from a saloon and dance hall called Gilley’s. Remember the movie Urban Cowboy? Remember the mechanical bull? Remember the pickups and the shotgun racks? That was Gilley’s. Real “Bubba and Skeeter country,” Kapoor recalls, in his clipped Empire singsong.

  Yeah, I’ve really done my bit for civilizing this market, he deadpans. There was this redneck who sauntered up to Kapoor once as he was shopping for a car. Jabbing a middle finger in Kapoor’s chest, he bellowed that he believed he’d located a “stupid Iranian.” That indictment was a real hazard to your health in Texas at the time. No, sir, Kapoor explained, sir. “I am a stupid Indian, sir.” Reincarnation or no, passing for a Persian was the last way Kapoor figured he needed to die.

  But getting more serious, Kapoor notes there is a difference between a beautiful city and a beautiful society. Kapoor really hoped that this strip-shopping-center world he found himself in at the Bombay Grill was a transitory phase for Houston and for America. That it was part of an evolution toward a finer structure. “Things do happen by accident, but they do evolve to a higher form of perfection, which lends credence to the concept of God,” he notes. “Because, you know, whatever we do, we are propelled forward by some natural forces beyond our comprehension and our immediate senses.”

  As far as he could tell, though, “we haven’t changed much from the village concept except that these Edge Cities are self-contained little villages intertwined and interconnected and compacted into a larger thing called the metropolis. Eventually, in my mind, a perfect form of this would be that in a particular neighborhood everything should be so accessible that a final form will develop; even, I think, where you won’t have to drive that much. You will work closer to home; you will have shopping closer to home; and it is only in cases of extreme necessity that you will do th
e traveling and commuting. The ecology, the air—taking all this in consideration, the sooner we go with this into areas where people work where they reside, or reside where they work, people can stay closer to home; it eventually will resolve some of the more troubling issues.”

  Right now, Kapoor feels, the reason his restaurant’s neighborhood is interesting is that it is on a border between the fancy environs of the Galleria area and “the large and very sizable Indian community that lives within a five-mile radius. There are Indian grocery stores, Indian clothing stores, Indian appliance stores.”

  Indeed, you talk about cosmopolitan climes. No more than two miles from the Galleria there is something called the Fiesta Market. The simplest way to describe it is as a kind of Third World village market run by a sophisticated, knowledgeable, sympathetic, and sensitive American outfit with an organizational firepower reminiscent of Safeway.

  The sign over the entrance to the Fiesta says WELCOME, then BIENVENUDO, and then goes on in five more languages in which not even the script, much less the alphabet, is familiar. This place is so international, so sophisticated, so diverse, that all the important signs are in English. Just English. The multilingual possibilities and combinations are just too hard. Nobody has enough else in common. Makes your head hurt.

  Yet the prices are right, the selection stunning; and Fiesta has become a chain that is carving up market share left and right in Houston, even in Anglo neighborhoods.

  Why is the Indian community out here? I ask Kapoor. Out past the Loop? Out past 610? Not in the older, denser areas? I thought Indians were accustomed to density.