by Joel Garreau
“Density is something they would like to get away from,” says Kapoor, who is Rajasthani. He is from that tan, desert area between Gujarat and the Punjab, up against the border with Pakistan—not much farther from either China or Afghanistan than Houston is from Dallas.
“Yeah, sure. It’s like privacy. In India you don’t get a thing like privacy. There’s no such thing. Because you live in a house with thirty other members of the family. But here, you get your first taste of privacy. It becomes very precious all of a sudden. Oh, yes.”
The previous day I had chatted with Stephen Fox, who teaches at Rice, and who had just written the Houston Architectural Guide. We had been talking about what was wrong with Houston, and what had to be made right. And he, quite independently, mentioned that he had students from around the world, and the first thing he asked them to do was write a paper describing the architectural history of their home places.
He said he had been struck especially by the Malaysians, who described their place in terms that to him seemed idyllic. Tightly knit. Dense. Walkable. Surrounded by community that was generations thick and centuries deep. But it was they especially, he reported, who seemed most to love Houston. They were singularly articulate about the limits of where they came from. The stifling rigidity. The paternalism. Yes, Houston is nuts. But it’s so much fun. There is such individualism. You have so much freedom.
“I take that for granted,” Fox noted sheepishly.
I tell all this to Kapoor, who says, “The thing is that Americans—native-born Americans—I don’t know whether they understand it, but they probably undervalue the elbow room they have. That is commonly known as freedom.
“The liberty that we have over here. It’s not comparable with anything anywhere in the world. You cannot compare, not even Canada. Not England, not Germany. Not even close. The enjoyable thing over here is that you can express yourself. You can just be yourself. You can be left alone if you want to be left alone. Not so in even the more advanced or self-professed civilized countries of the world. And I have lived in ten or eleven of them.
“When I say Americans don’t understand it, people ask what I mean. The basic things are taken for granted over here because they are just given to you at birth, like a kid given a Cadillac on his sixteenth birthday. You know, simple things like ten people can get together and start a political party if you want to. You can deride anyone you want to. You can write a letter to the newspaper if you want to. You can just assemble on the street and start talking.
“You can start a business if you want to. You can quit a job if you want to and get another one if you want to. To an American these are everyday things. You can turn on the telly, turn on the radio, listen to any station you want to, read any newspaper you want to, adhere to any belief you want to. To Americans these are like, so what is the big deal?
“Well, the big deal is that you cannot do this in any other place in the world. In England you cannot just go and start a business. I could never have a restaurant this big. First of all the hindrance would be getting a lease. They would want references. Money in the bank. Need everything cash up front. You have to belong to a certain class of people over there.
“In New York, Houston, you can sell an idea and fructify the idea into something solid. Very, very different to do it any other place in the world.
“Civilization is not just physical attributes or the structure of buildings. It is the quality of life, the psychological impact. The evolution, I think, cannot be on the level of just the structure. It must be the people who live in the structure, too. How are we going to be thinking?
“What I think we must think now, about Edge City, is that this is screwed up. If this is evolution, then I’m happy. But if it is closer to the final product, then it is very scary.
“I am not saying that everything that is haphazard has to be controlled. It’s not what you do, it’s a state of the mind—being urbane. An urbane person, to me, is someone who, in a fire, can stand in line and wait to get out. Know which way things are going. Not just dress up and at the critical moment go bonkers. That is not very civil.
“Houston is already there. The one thing that impressed me about Houston when I came here twelve years ago was the basic friendliness. That ‘howdy’ attitude they had. That they still do. Even if they think my first name is Taj. If it comes from the goodness of their hearts, that is quite acceptable to me.
“It is a sense of community. You have to create the conditions. Create the environment, for someone to evolve to that final product.
“What are you wanting, eventually? A pretty structure? Or a pretty society?”
* For the complete list of Edge Cities in the Dallas and Houston areas, see Chapter 11.
8
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Community
Man is returning to the descendants of the wandering tribe—the adventurers, I hope.
—Frank Lloyd Wright, 1938
“MY BROTHER PETER has a wife and three children and he lives in a group of identical houses and I used to think it was very eerie. But then I remember going over there on Halloween,” says John Nielsen.
Nielsen, thirty-four, is talking about community and identity in the new American world built by developers like his father. The elder Nielsen, Tom, is a leading light behind a place in Southern California called Irvine. It is by far the largest Edge City landscape ever developed by a single company.
“Every place I’ve lived since I got out of college, Halloween is known as the nightmare movie. It’s not known as a holiday. Except here. Here were all these people who had just moved into this suburb at the same time, brand new. And no one knew what was going to happen—whether there was going to be a tradition in this place.
“Here were my nieces Emily and Sara; one was dressed up as a crayon. They kind of poked their heads out the door. It was just at dusk and here comes a crayon looking out this door. They gathered in their cul-de-sac, this herd of kids, and they had a herd of parents behind them. It was the first time I realized that everybody was the same age and there was that kind of community, I guess. They came out not knowing what’s going to happen and they turned the corner and there was this army of children. They all just went back and forth, door to door, and I thought, That’s neat. That’s a tradition that has died elsewhere that’s being sustained here. I remember my mother following me with a staple gun because I was a mummy. I would unravel, she’d come up and snip me back together while I was collecting Sugar Babies. There is something historical about that.
“Then Emily and Sara came home. I was helping one trade with her sister for the right kind of treats. You want the Milk Duds, and you want the red Life Savers. You don’t want the green ones.
“I just felt I was passing on some sort of higher knowledge.”
John Nielsen grew up in a family where the food was put on the table by his father’s converting thousands of acres of orange groves and pastureland into the Southern California that exists today. John wound up an environmental writer for National Public Radio. He is the kind of person who, no matter in what region he finds himself, lives in the most Dickensian neighborhood available. He has thus spent much of his life considering where his world intersects with that of his father’s, and where both connect to personality and character.
“People ask me where I’m from and I don’t know what to say. ‘I’m from the suburbs,’ is what I usually say. And they say, ‘Oh, me too.’ It doesn’t matter where they’re from, we’ll exchange some stories about Gilligan’s Island and then we’re friends.” He pounded on his chest: “Tarzan of the ’Burbs. Raised by developers.” He gave a soft, ironic version of a jungle yell: “Aiiieyaeyaeyaea.”
Flashing back twenty years, he recalls, “Me and my brother, we had this Allan Sherman record: ‘My Son the Nut.’ Ever hear that record?” John sings:
Here’s to the crabgrass
Here’s to the mortgage,
And here’s to sah-BURR-bee-yah.
> Lay down your briefcase,
Far from the rat race,
For nothing can dis-TURR-bee yah.
“My brother and I had that memorized. They’d bring us out and we’d sing it.”
Nielsen loves neighborhoods that “seethe.” He loves places where you can walk to work and if you regularly stop at a little joint on the way to pick up a carton of coffee, soon everybody in the neighborhood knows you. He likes to talk to people in different strata of society. He likes urban areas that are full of sur prises. He thinks the whole point of cities is to bring diverse people together.
That is why it troubles him that he feels personally excluded from Edge Cities like the one built by his father, vice chairman of the Irvine Company. His dilemma is sharpened because each such development emphasizes the idea of community. As in “master-planned community.”
“I feel locked out in the financial sense,” says Nielsen of the Irvine that has been such a market success that the median home prices in its region are the third highest in America.
“But I don’t mean to imply that if I had enough money that is where I’d go. The things I am interested in are not part of a place like Irvine. There’s that whole notion: We’re going to build this thing that is perfect for you. We haven’t met you but we know what you’re like and we know you’re going to like it here. That is a repulsive idea, and I wouldn’t trust the person who tried to tell me that. You’re in the artist’s conception. You wake up and you’re one of those lanky people walking around evenly spaced. I can’t see that. My experience has been that in places like that you have a lot of people who think they have it figured out. You just have the coffee-bean machine here and …” Nielsen’s voice descends to a whisper. He is almost talking to himself. Then he hurtles back.
“That kind of ordered circumstance is scary to me. Maybe the world is divided into people who love to hum ‘Is that all there is?’ and take random walks and people who don’t. It’s a hard thing for me.”
What Nielsen is struggling with is the extent to which Edge Cities weave or unravel the American social fabric. For this reason, his conflicts are historic. Ever since the rise of what used to be called “bedroom communities”—that is, classic residential suburbs—scholars have been trying to define where these places fit into a larger social scheme. Especially in the 1950s, when the floodtide of homes moved out past our old conception of city, the outpouring of journalism, fiction, and sociology on these issues was prodigious. It had a distinct tone. Herbert J. Gans, in his landmark 1967 work, The Levittowners, pungently described the shots that were taken. If you believed the critics, he wrote, the “myth of suburbia” would have you surmise:
“The suburbs were breeding a new set of Americans, as massproduced as the houses they lived in … incapable of real friendships; they were bored and lonely, alienated, atomized, and depersonalized …
“In unison,” Gans wrote of that time, “the authors chanted that individualism was dying, suburbanites were miserable, and the fault lay with the homogeneous suburban landscape and its population.” Gans described John Keats, author of The Crack in the Picture Window, as “perhaps the most hysterical of the mythmakers.”
Keats’s book began: “For literally nothing down … you too can find a box of your own in one of the fresh-air slums we’re building around the edges of American cities … inhabited by people whose age, income, number of children, problems, habits, conversation, dress, possessions, and perhaps even blood type are also precisely like yours.” They were, Keats claimed, “developments conceived in error, nurtured by greed, corroding everything they touch. They … actually drive mad myriads of housewives shut up in them.”
Subsequently, Gans observed, “literary and social critics chimed in … Suburbia was intellectually debilitating, culturally oppressive, and politically dangerous, breeding bland mass men without respect for the arts or democracy.”
Gans bought a house and lived in New Jersey’s Levittown for two years to study what processes turned a group of strangers into a true community in the waning days of the Eisenhower era. Of course, the sociologist and city planner could uncover little evidence that there was much change in people when they moved to the suburbs, or that the change that took place could be traced to the new environment: “If suburban life was as undesirable and unhealthy as the critics charged, the suburbanites themselves were blissfully unaware of it. They were happy in their new homes and communities, much happier than they had been in the city.”
This has not, however, prevented Edge City from giving people the creeps. When I first started reporting on these places, an art critic of my acquaintance pulled up a chair, pushed his face toward mine closer than was really comfortable, and proceeded to get agitated about my project. “Those are not cities!” he exploded.
When I systematically questioned him as to why he felt this way, given all the job numbers and market numbers and population numbers, what I found was intriguing. His real beef was that he refused to believe these places brought people together in any larger social sense. He was saying these were not “cities,” but what he really meant was that he could not believe they were “communities.” It was very specific. To him, Edge Cities were hollow because, among other things, there were not, as in the neighborhoods he loved, front stoops for people to sit on to watch the human drama.
Here we were, more than thirty years after David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and the stories of John Cheever. And he was still proclaiming the landscape out past the old downtowns as having no ties that bind, no sense of identity, no way of making people believe they were part of something larger than themselves. He felt people had no personal stake in these places. Nobody cared about them. Therefore, these places could not be regarded as cities.
I had come to believe that it was not particularly useful to insist that a place was not urban merely because it contained few front stoops or political boundaries. But that didn’t mean my friend the art critic had it all wrong. After all, for a place to have an identity, people really must feel they are stakeholders in it. They must feel that it is, at gut level, theirs; that they are willing to fight over it and for it. They must see it as having an importance relative to their personal interests. They must see it, at some level, as community.
Yet the forces that bring about Edge City pull strongly in different directions. Edge City arose as a result of individuals seeking out the best combinations of how and where to live, work, and play. Maybe Edge City isn’t the puddle of atomization and anomie that 1950s critics of American society wished to believe. But it is less than clear where it connects with ideas like community—the hunger for human contact and the yearning to belong to a larger whole.
This is why Irvine is interesting. It is part of the Los Angeles Basin, the birthplace of the American landscapes and life styles that are the models for Edge Cities worldwide. Moreover, Irvine, thirty-five miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, is at the center of a development of staggering proportions. Originally a Spanish land-grant ranch, the hundred-square-mile holdings of the Irvine Company span Orange County, that vast jurisdiction between San Diego and Los Angeles that in the 1980s was the fastest-growing part of Southern California. The Irvine Company controls sixty-four thousand acres of land, much of which stretches past the incorporated city of Irvine. Some of those acres sell for $1 million apiece. Irvine is not just another Levittown, a suburb from which people can find work only by commuting somewhere else. The stages of Edge City growth that took two generations elsewhere was collapsed into a third of a lifetime here. The Irvine area is now so big that it can be described as encompassing all or part of three job-rich Edge Cities.
The two middle-sized ones are known as Irvine Spectrum and Newport Center-Fashion Island. But the third, the size of downtown Seattle, is named after—it had to happen—John Wayne. Actually, the area’s continental-connection airport is named after John Wayne.
And the Edge City, which includes the Costa Mesa-South Coast Plaza complex, has become known after the name of the airport. But it was only a matter of time before it came to something like this. Orange County, the birthplace of Richard Nixon, has such a reputation for conservatism that a politician once only half kidded about joining the John Birch Society in order to capture the middle-of-the-road vote. The Irvine area’s rapidly growing population, meanwhile, already approaches 200,000, with a high-technology job base of 150,000. The Irvine Company’s spread is so big—stretching from the Pacific Ocean to as much as twenty miles inland—that its tentacles ensnare an entire University of California campus and two Marine bases.
Irvine, moreover, is the latest version of the Southern California dream. This makes it a prototype of great importance. Irvine is only ten miles from Disneyland in Anaheim. Disney produced such resonant dreams that people carry them around in their heads all over the globe. His Main Street is a more real crystallization of idealized community for more people than any actual nineteenth-century small American town. And Irvine is deep kin to this ideal. It is full of newcomers who are still reaching out to find why they came, what they lost, and who they are.
In fact, a travel guide called The Californias, published by the California Office of Tourism, describes Orange County this way:
It’s a theme park—a seven hundred and eighty-six square mile theme park—and the theme is “you can have anything you want.”
It’s the most California-looking of all the Californias: the most like the movies, the most like the stories, the most like the dream.
Orange County is Tomorrowland and Frontierland, merged and inseparable …
The temperature today will be in the low 80s. There is a slight offshore breeze. Another just-like-yesterday day in paradise.