Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  Come to Orange County. It’s no place like home.

  The danger of a dream, however, is that a place that reminds people of Eden can also taunt them. People’s fears and anxieties may be heightened when the dream does not turn out to be as boundless as it first seems; when it quickly hits limits. In fact, Irvine has been compared with the Stepford Wives—perfect, in a horrifying sort of way. The development’s newest residential section, Westpark, is an unbroken field of identical Mediterranean red-clay roof tile, covering homes of indistinguishable earth-tone stucco. Homes in Irvine are far more repetitive than those in the old Levittowns. The old Levittowns are now interesting to look at; people have made additions to their houses and planted their grounds with variety and imagination. Unlike these older subdivisions, Irvine has deed restrictions that forbid people from customizing their places with so much as a skylight. This is a place that is enforced, not just planned. Owners of expensive homes in Irvine commonly volunteer stories of not realizing that they had pulled into the driveway of the wrong house until their garage-door opener failed to work. Driving around, what one mainly sees is high blank walls. The shopping center near the University of California at Irvine struggled for years, unsuccessfully, to support a bookstore. And this is the place that bills itself as America’s premiere master-planned community. It underlines the “community” symbolism with a ten-minute sound-and-light show called Roots and Wings.

  Roots and Wings is a singular production. It is a twenty-thousand-slide, sixteen-projector extravaganza housed in its own little theater, and it culminates with the rotation of a hydraulically controlled model of some 150 square miles of the area. The model weighs half a ton. It is so exactly detailed, with 385,000 separate structures, that people living in Irvine can identify their own houses. This show is so lavish that the Irvine Company refuses to divulge its cost.

  Intriguingly, this hymn to community is not used to sell homes. People who are in the market merely for quarter-million-dollar residences never get the red-carpet treatment that includes Roots and Wings. The people who see this pageant are those thinking of moving their companies to Irvine. Roots and Wings is reserved for customers looking for massive amounts of Edge City research-and-development or office space. Yet in this pitch, the customers never hear a word about dollars per square foot. The Irvine Company believes that the following approach is what sells commercial real estate in their Edge City.

  The lights go down, the sea gulls start flashing on the screens, the music comes up, and the deep male voiceover booms from multiple concealed speakers:

  “How long since you watched the new day lean down upon the shore? No one about but you and your thoughts. And time, sliding by on its spiral glide.

  “Here, along the sea, far from the crowds, one can see how perfectly Nature casts her characters and places them upon her stage. Each living thing is drawn to that habitat most ideally suited to the development of its full potential. It is a law of Nature. Instinct, we are told.

  “But, we wonder, what of that wandering species called man? Called woman? Called child? Are we not also embraced by Nature’s laws? Shaped by our habitat, just as the sea bird’s flight is shaped by the wind for that special place on earth to hold and nourish our lives?

  “It is said there are only two lasting things we can give our children; one is roots, the other is wings. This then is the dream. To find a place where we can put down roots; to find a place where our lives can take wing.”

  The Irvine show proceeds to extol the development’s “beauty,” “work style,” “life style,” and its “critical mass of finance, knowledge, and resource to rival any major city in America.” But then it swings right back and starts hammering at that community theme some more:

  “If the human community is to work, there must be a lively interplay between the commerce and the arts, between nature and technology, between work and leisure, between private interest and the public good. In a sense it’s like planning and creating a living mosaic … The design of this living mosaic is especially refreshing because of the rare relationship between where one works and where one lives, in communities where planning brings the workplace closer. It is a gift of time. More time to enjoy another gift. The gift of family …”

  Then the wind-up:

  “Here is a place where life is lived with a grand and glorious sense of quality and style. Here is a place providing opportunities for the full range of human experience … Here is a place where individuals are free to shape their own future, as a sculptor shapes clay.”

  A daddy is shown lifting his child. Freeze frame. He lifts the child higher. Freeze frame. The child is lifted all the way up. Freeze frame.

  Then the pitch:

  “We have the dream. We have the plan. We have the people. We have the patterns of a vision firmly in our minds and in our hearts.”

  The child’s image melds into that of a sea gull, which, in multiple-image long-lens slow-mo, explodes into flight.

  “We have the place where we can put down roots.

  “And our lives can take wing.”

  Music swells, image fades, screen lifts, gauze curtain rises, dramatic lights flare, and the half-ton model of Irvine, turning on its gimbles, rotates into view, beckoning.

  One is left in awe, speechless.

  Heavy freight being loaded here. Loaded on ideas and values that are elemental: Roots. Wings. Community. This is the place that Tom Nielsen built, that John Nielsen can’t handle. Irvine thus demands that these words—and what they mean to us in the late twentieth century—be probed.

  The meaning to developers of the word “community” has evolved over the last half century. In the case of the New Jersey Levittown in the 1950s, for example, it was not enough that there were three basic house types costing from $11,500 to $14,500. A collection of such houses would have been merely a “subdivision.” What made it a “community” was that for each cluster of twelve hundred units or so, there was an elementary school, a playground, and a swimming pool. Not only that, but a complex of ten or twelve such “neighborhoods” was complemented by a large shopping center, some smaller ones, high schools, a library, and parks, some of which were provided by the builder himself. This was considered real breakthrough stuff. It was no less than an attempt to create from scratch what the builder honestly and open-mindedly thought was the entire range of local institutions and facilities found in the old communities people were enthusiastically leaving.

  The venerable Gans—who was one hopping sociologist in the late 1950s—came to his Levittown project still whirling from having spent two years living in that part of Boston outsiders regarded as your basic Italian slum. In his book The Urban Villagers, he established that the West End was not a slum at all. What it was, he found, was an archetype of the even-then rapidly disappearing working-class ethnic “traditional” community. Marked by exotic shops and fragrant restaurants and narrow streets and high densities, it was exactly the kind of place that developers are now using as models when they try to breathe life into their new places today.

  To be sure, the West End did not look like any architect’s rendering of community. It had garbage in the alleys, rubble in the vacant lots, tenements with poorly maintained exteriors and rudimentary heating arrangements. So, soon after Gans studied the place, the West End was bulldozed. In the name of progress and on the order of the best and the brightest planners of the day, urban renewal rolled through. The population of the community was scattered.

  The West End’s influence lives on, though. The very phrase “urban village” is now used as it is in Phoenix, a hopeful synonym for Edge City. Developers still strive to create places that also “have it all.” In Irvine, that includes not only executive-level housing and stupendously high-end malls, but transcontinental airport connections and, most important, the high-flying white-collar jobs that lift this place out of bedroom suburbia and into Edge City.

  But some things do not change. Edge City is similar to what Gans found t
o be community in the West End three decades ago.

  Sociologists in the 1950s were still working with the classic definition of “community”: “an aggregate of people who occupy a common and bounded territory within which they establish and participate in common institutions.”

  What Gans found, however, was that community and neighborhood were not the same thing. “The West End as a neighborhood was not important to West Enders,” he discovered. “I expected emotional statements about their attachment to the area. I was always surprised when they talked merely about its convenience to work and to downtown shopping. After I had lived in the area a few weeks, one of my neighbors remarked that I knew a lot more about the West End than they did.”

  Gans discovered that “life for the West Ender was defined in terms of his relationship to the group,” not geography. What West Enders meant by the “group” was divided into three levels: the peer group, those local institutions which supported the peer group, and “the outside world.” The “outside world” covered all other aspects of Boston, New England, and America that “impinge on life—often unhappily, to the West Ender’s way of thinking.”

  An awful lot of people in Edge City organize their lives the same way today. In America the main idea behind community now is voluntary association, not geography. And the people of Southern California have sophisticated technology to cast wide their search for that bond with others we call community.

  Take Evan and Ann Maxwell of Laguna Niguel. They moved to the hills just above the Pacific Coast past Irvine in 1970. The place was then mostly rural. They paid $39,000, with a $212-a-month mortgage and a less-than-$600-a-year tax burden. The location was considered breathtaking for two reasons: its natural beauty and its long commute to downtown Los Angeles.

  Times changed, and so did the Maxwells. They are co-authors of the Fiddler series of mysteries set in Orange County. These and other books they produced were so successful that the Maxwells ended up relying less and less on Evan’s Los Angeles paycheck. It was the half-yearly royalty statements from their publishers in New York that would shape their lives—and loosen their ties to the area.

  In 1984, the Maxwells “cut the umbilical cord to corporate socialism,” as Evan puts it. His final assignment for the L.A. Times was one he views as the ultimate for a “cops-and-robbers reporter.” He covered security for the Olympics. “I figured, it doesn’t get better than this. I’d done as much as I could in daily journalism. So I left.” He does not regret it. He and his wife “have elements of freedom you cannot purchase, my friend,” he said.

  But, he observes keenly, the price was giving up an aching amount of community. “The newsroom fills up your life. Twelve or fourteen hours of your day. It is just as consuming and controlling as the small town in Minnesota where I’m from. When I left, I found myself absolutely liberated—and adrift. The paper gives you a sense of who you are. The first time I tried to sneak into a courtroom past a guard and I didn’t have a press card of the L.A. Times, it was like I didn’t have a last name.”

  Like any small, close community, “the social setting of the newsroom is supporting and constipating. I never realized how much my mindset would change. I have a close friend with whom I can’t talk about the newspaper anymore. He takes it absolutely seriously. We can’t kid about it the way we did when I worked there. I am an outsider now.”

  Soon, the Maxwells began to note that they had lost more than the community where Evan worked. They’d lost any sense of community where they lived.

  “The last five years, all hell has broken loose. The last two years especially, there has been astonishing development. Runaway growth with remarkable similarity. The Alpha Beta, the Lucky supermarkets, all surrounded by video outlets, and an Italian or Japanese restaurant with carry-out, and a bagel and doughnut shop.”

  Evan does not believe that he is reflexively against this growth. He has noticed, for example, the seeds of civilization being planted first in the dry-cleaning establishments. “That is where diversity begins. Places that were first run by former USC athletes and then by South Americans were replaced. In came the Asian families, and they remember your name. The others couldn’t remember your name after ten years. The new people are eager to do business, and the stuff is always there when they say they’ll have it. You can’t fault that.”

  He expects this pattern to expand. “It takes time to do diversity. The Chinese restaurant must fail and be replaced by an aggressive soft-taco place that is part of a local chain of three or four.” There is now a secondhand bookstore called Mr. Goodbooks, in Mission Viejo, onto which, Evan reports, he has just unloaded a portion of his library. He views this retail development as a hopeful sign.

  Nevertheless, the Maxwells are leaving Orange County. Leaving the place that has been their roots for twenty years, the place where their two kids were raised, the place that was the inspiration for the books that have given them the independence to take wing.

  “We are no longer comfortable here physically. There is too much traffic. Our community is not our neighbors here. We don’t interact with Roz across the street except once a year, when her dog gets loose. Our community is really much broader.”

  They put their four-bedroom Laguna Niguel home on the market because they believe that, for them, community is voluntary and hence portable. They hoped to get $370,000 for their place on an eighty-by-hundred-foot lot. That would pay for a “fifth-wheel”—a big, articulated pickup truck-mobile home combination—plus a large home on 260 acres of southwestern Colorado. The Maxwells would spend part of their year on the road, visiting friends. The rest would be spent in their Colorado retreat four or five hours over the mountains from the nearest interstate, seven to nine hours from an international airport. “We can live out there in Colorado without being a part of the local economy,” Evan figures. “Money to us is the basis of our freedom.”

  Their community includes writers in Seattle and Indiana, agents and editors in New York, a computer junk man in the Silicon Valley who buys and sells overstock equipment, and a refugee from the Massachusetts Route 128 computer realm who now reconditions covered wagons. “We’re in touch with them on a weekly basis by telephone, by fax, by UPS.

  “Our daughter, Heather, loves to travel. Her role model is a friend of ours who works in the Canadian embassy in London. She met her husband here when he was working for the Border Patrol and she was working with Asian refugees. We speak to them regularly and visit [in England] once a year. The world is now a place where it is possible to achieve a sense of community that would have seemed idealistic or idiotic only ten years ago.”

  In fact, a semiretired Seattle physician who raises big draft Paso Fino horses is the friend who brought to their attention the Four Corners region of Colorado, where they are planning to move. There, Evan says, “the West still lives. Real Louis L’Amour country. We like open landscape, an outdoor life. Looking at the San Juan and La Plata Mountains.”

  In the old days in Laguna Niguel, “the hills were absolutely glowing. They were green in spring, turning to gold in summer. The prettiest landscape in the coastal West. There were red-tail hawks and golden eagles. We became particularly fond of raptors. This was the best place in the world to watch raptors conduct their daily lives. They are now living off the freeway margins, but it’s not the same.” The Maxwells expect soon that their neighborhood will hold 150,000 to 200,000 humans, instead.

  There are considerable ironies to all this. The Maxwells are thinking about moving to that part of Colorado where old ideas of connections between humans and community still live. The reason they can do so is that their personal sense of community is dependent on microchip connections.

  They recognize the incongruity. In fact, they plan to use it as material in their next book. They will be looking at the West as a two-tiered place with the old-line landowners and ranchers and café owners on one level and Third Wave people like them—semiretired doctors from Seattle and writers from California—on another
.

  To be sure, the Maxwells’ portable definition of “community” is more advanced than most. And it is not without its flaws. Evan acknowledges that his son harbors some anger that the place he has always thought of as home is somewhere he will not be able to return. But the Maxwells illuminate a key aspect of any discussion of “community” in Edge City.

  “Community” today is different from “government,” “shadow government,” or “neighborhood.” It is entirely voluntary and thus fragile. If you don’t like the ties that bind you to others—for even the most ephemeral or transitory or stupid reasons—you can and may leave. You are no longer forced to proclaim your identity as part of any inexorable membership in a larger whole. You must find in yourself the reason to create a bond with other humans. In America, the most highly mobile society in history, people reach out in a myriad of directions for work and play—and now they search in varied directions for society and friendship, even family. It is rare to the point of being bizarre to have the bulk of one’s peers living in one neighborhood today. Even if you are “in the neighborhood,” you do not just “drop in.” You call first.

  Peer groups—community—are defined by job, avocation, church, or some other institution, far more than by location. Oddly, government bureaucrats for once have used a word accurately. It may seem silly to see Washington news stories with references to “the intelligence community,” or “the arms control community,” or even “the journalism community.” But these turn out to be real bands of brothers. All the people within them know each other. Often, they went to school together. When they were young and single, they dated the same people, many of whom are now spouses of somebody else in the group. They turn to their tribe for jobs when they’re fired. Even when they toil for rival countries, when the chips are down they can be counted on to respond to their community. That’s more than you can say for many neighborhood blocks.