Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  This haphazard connection between neighborhood and community reflects how legendary in America are the stifling, deformed, busybody tyrannies of small towns. There’s Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and the works of William Faulkner, and Peter Bogdanovich’s film The Last Picture Show. Not for nothing have young people fled the rigid burg for the big city every chance they’ve had. The city is kinder to the stranger and the free-thinker than the tight-knit community. Stadtluft macht frei is a proverb the Germans invented in the Middle Ages; “City air makes men free.” It does not choke them with community.

  To this day, it is not hard for humans to create physical community. Any peasant in the world knows how it works. Just compromise your liberty. Stay in one house in one village for several generations. The rest follows.

  The way we have built our Edge Cities, however, demonstrates once again that we have put an overwhelming value on individual freedom. Richard Louv, author of Childhood’s Future, points out that the goal of the liberation movements of the last three decades has been to unfetter the individual. Traditionally, the nuclear family was both the fundamental social unit and the fundamental economic unit. No longer. If parents wish to “do their own thing,” they may. A couple rarely has to stay together or face starvation.

  This loosening of ties has had positive effects. But there has been a price to pay. Louv notes the increased sales in homes marketed as “family-oriented.” That means a development with afterschool recreational facilities or day-care services. Parents feel guilty about not giving their kids enough time, so they pay tens of thousands more for a home in a subdivision that seems willing to share their childrearing burdens.

  Homes have become financial commodities more than emotional entities. This may change in the 1990s. But with the appreciation of the 1970s and 1980s, homes became people’s prime savings repository: their retirement nest eggs, kids’ inheritance, college savings plan, ticket to a European vacation. Christmas memories in the living room were no longer vital. Nor could doorjambs be treasured for recording the height of children as they grew. Nor could these homes be secure havens for succeeding generations. For what was important was how easily and efficiently these places—these financial instruments—could be turned over when the time came to cash in and move on. Any feelings of community they represented were held hostage to the ever-present need to trade up.

  Americans think nothing of moving. Families get larger, they move. Families get smaller, they move. Go to college, get a job, get married, get divorced, get remarried, get promoted, retire—each time, they move. Americans will leave behind houses that were the most emotion-filled places of their lives to move to a “retirement community.” When asked why, they tell interviewers it was because they got tired of mowing the lawn.

  No wonder Irvine looks the way it does, with the similar layouts and stucco façades that come only in colors that are variations on Caucasian skin tones from sand to tan, rarely broken even by a pastel.

  This is real estate that moves.

  When new, this real estate moves because it is the cheapest way to create new homes, given the way the market is now organized. Even if you use first-class materials, if you build two hundred of the same thing at a crack, there are considerable economies of scale. The alternative, says Raymond L. Watson, the Irvine Company’s vice chairman and first chief planner, is not the beautiful old Victorian house on ten acres near the Condor Refuge. It is the concrete apartment block. Those traditional urban forms, he maintains, with their empty lobbies and door-lined corridors, are even more sterile and dehumanizing than the dwellings he pioneered. Forget factory-built homes. The cheapest and most successful way to build homes under existing rules is to move the assembly line out to the subdivision with prebuilt trusses and prehung doorframes and nail guns, the way it is done now.

  Real estate built in such a fashion also moves when Americans do, which is, on average, once every six years. (In hot markets like Phoenix in the mid–1980s, the average turnover was every three years.) In a revealing handbook by Barbara Jane Hall, entitled 101 Easy Ways to Make Your Home Sell Faster, one of the first tips is: “Avoid eccentricities: Your chances of selling quickly will be greatly improved if you can make your home appeal to a broad spectrum of buyers. It may be tempting to say of your home, ‘But this is me!’ but this is not necessarily a wise home-selling policy … In the game of selling, you have to play the odds.”

  What a wonderful irony! In order to improve your individual choices, the best bet is to have a home with no individuality.

  It is in this context that forbidding walls around subdivisions make a kind of sense. In this analysis, it may not be important if those walls don’t deter crime. They are social boundaries. They define “community” and give it an entry point, financially and socially: only certain people can get in. The argument is as follows: When you move to a new place, you still want people like you around. You feel more secure knowing the neighbors must have incomes above $100,000 or whatever to live inside these walls. In a world that is in flux, that standard offers certainties about people’s values and education. Your fellow homeowners will have kids like yours—kids you could imagine yours marrying, if it came to that. The walls thus become a definer of social strata, a community recognizer.

  This analysis pushes back several notches the question: What do we mean by the word “community”? Okay. “Neighborhood” is not the same thing as “community.” It has not been for at least half a century. “Mobility,” however, is important; we want to be able to join communities as we choose. “Voluntary” is also important; we want to be able to leave. Community should not be stultifying nor should it interfere with our freedoms. It should be a social grouping that is readily available. So where does that leave the relationship between Edge City and community?

  Richard Sennett, a culture critic, offers this approach. “A community is more than a set of customs, behaviors, or attitudes about other people. A community is also a collective identity; it is a way of saying who ‘we’ are.”

  A city, to Sennett, is “a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet.” It is a “milieu of strangers whose lives touch.”

  Therefore, he reasons, Edge City must create community in the sense of being a place where strangers—people who used to be “them”—are transformed. They join “us.” For Edge City to be a community, it must be a place that creates “us-ness” out of our separate and anonymous lives.

  Mark Pisano worries about whether this is in fact happening in Edge City. Pisano is executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments—SCAG, as it is known. SCAG is the nation’s largest regional-planning agency.

  At one level, it seems astonishing that Pisano has any worries at all. After all, more strangers have been thrown together in the Los Angeles area in the last few decades with more manifest success than anywhere else in the world.

  The future of greater Los Angeles would appear radiant. If you were to draw a circle with a sixty-mile radius around Los Angeles, and declare the domain an independent nation, it would be the eleventh richest realm on earth. That Sixty-Mile Circle would be the third richest country in the western hemisphere, after Canada. It would be the third richest in the Pacific Rim, after China. It would be richer than most of the twelve members of the European Economic Community. It would have the second highest gross national product per person in the world—ahead of Japan, ahead of all Europe, ahead of the United States, trailing only the United Arab Emirates. In fact, if the Sixty-Mile Circle were a state of the Union, it would be the fourth largest in population and total personal income—behind only Texas, New York, and California itself.

  As the great-granddaddy of twentieth-century-style urban areas, the Los Angeles Basin sports twenty-six full-blown or rapidly growing Edge Cities in five counties—the largest number of any urban area in the world.* If we count only those trips made by workers to their jobs, its transportation network moves th
e equivalent of the entire population of Massachusetts daily. Downtown has prospered, having undergone sparkling change in the 1980s, including even a subway. Of course, it still is not the center of very much, accounting for no more than 4 percent of the region’s jobs.

  The region’s jobs, however, belie the image of Tinseltown or La-La Land. Los Angeles is the world capital of nonprint media, from movies to television to music. But it is also one of the most dynamic and diverse manufacturing centers in the world. The Sixty-Mile Circle produces more than 10 percent of the American total of everything from nuts, bolts, rivets, and washers, to pens, games, toys, women’s fashions, welding equipment, radio and TV communication equipment, aircraft, space vehicles, and rockets. It rivals Northern California’s Silicon Valley in its computer industry. It created 1.5 million jobs in the 1980s alone—double that of the New York area. The world capitals of Pacific Rim import-export and finance are Tokyo, Hong Kong, and the Sixty-Mile Circle. Greater Los Angeles is served by five major commercial airports.

  At the same time, within the Sixty-Mile Circle one can find a stunning diversity of environments—ocean surf, rolling hills, canyons, mountains, lakes, deserts, and some of the most productive farmland on earth, as well as 139 colleges and universities and so many wealthy museums and lavishly endowed arts centers as to challenge the primacy of those in the East. The Edge Cities of the Los Angeles Basin contain a vibrant ethnic mix. America is going through the greatest wave of immigration since the turn of the century. It is absorbing more legal immigrants than the rest of the world combined. Los Angeles is its premiere entrepôt. The Sixty-Mile Circle is the second largest urban economy in the western hemisphere, after the New York area. It is the second largest Mexican city in the world, the second largest Guatemalan city, the second largest Salvadoran city, the second largest Cambodian city, the second largest Laotian city … the list seems endless. It has the largest concentration of Koreans in North America, the most Filipinos, the most Vietnamese, the most Iranians, the most Thais …

  Marc Wilder, an urban planner and former Long Beach City Council member, sees this exotic mix as a geography of hope—a unique opportunity to build a bracing, multiracial, multicultural urban civilization. “We are going to be different from anywhere,” he says, “and we are going to do things differently because a Cambodian, a Hispanic, and a Jew share the same space … We will see new kinds of institutions made by new kinds of people.”

  But Mark Pisano of SCAG is worried. “We’re grasping for a new community,” he says, “and we don’t know yet what that new community is. The individual, I feel, is very disenchanted and distanced from his sovereignty, whether that’s a country, a state, or a city. It is the most significant challenge facing the United States without exception; after all, there is no more international hydrogen bomb. The historical example is the Tower of Babel. We all have our single interests, and you can’t talk to one another, relate to one another. There’s no way to develop commonality.”

  What Pisano dares to worry about is a Blade Runner future. He doesn’t mean that in the Dallas architectural sense. He means armed insurrection.

  That image is raised even in LA 2000: The Final Report of the Los Angeles 2000 Committee. The report is a sweeping survey of the area’s possible destinies sponsored by some of its most prestigious elders. In its conclusions, it asks:

  “Where will Los Angeles 2000 find its community, its city in common, its civic unity? There is, of course, the Blade Runner scenario: the fusion of individual cultures into a demotic polyglottism ominous with unresolved hostilities. There is also the possible continuation of armed camps occasionally sortieing out in attack or negotiated truce.”

  The LA 2000 report proceeds from there to end on an upbeat note, seeing the future as bright—but wait a minute. Wait a minute, I say to Pisano. “Continuation of armed camps”? I know about the southcentral and eastern flatlands of the basin. That is an industrial landscape away from the upper-middle-class “nice” areas near the beaches to the south and west and the mountains to the north and east. That East L.A. and southcentral area is full of people who are struggling. Many of them are black and Mexican. I know they have more than their share of drive-by assault-rifle shootings perpetrated by the Crips and Bloods gangs. But I mean, seriously, how bad can this get?

  Says Pisano: “Lebanon.”

  He means it.

  “I don’t think we know what the limit is. When things that are important for the whole aren’t tended to, then you start having deterioration in a society. I think that’s where we are. Southern California has just one luxury now. This deterioration is masked by incredible wealth-creating capacity. If that wealth-creating capacity starts deteriorating, I think we’re in for one hell of a lulu. The gangs, for all practical purposes, are organizing units for the underworld economy. Hazing grounds for the labor force for the drug industry. That’s a pretty well-known fact.”

  Pisano is not panicked by traditional Edge City problems. Traffic and air quality, he points out, have been a concern for decades. There are solutions, if we have the will. He is not even alarmed about crime as such; that too has been around for a long time. What he is specifically worried about is a breakdown in political stability. He is worried about a rupture in what everyone feels they are a part of; what everyone feels they belong to. He is worried about a breakdown in community between those who have achieved the Southern California dream and those who have not. He is worried about “those who’ve been disenfranchised; they may just go outside the political process. You have real anger, and you can have real terrorism. Now, I don’t want to paint a bleak picture. But you asked me, If you were to push this line of reasoning, where does it go? It could be pretty grim.”

  When I talked to Pisano, the air was still heavy with the smoke from brushfires that had just destroyed more than six hundred luxurious homes and killed at least one person.

  “A good percentage of the fires that we had in the last couple of days were arson,” Pisano noted. “In the morning paper, the caption read, ‘Angry and Alienated Individuals Characteristic of the Arsonist.’ Well, isn’t that Lebanon?

  “That’s why I think there’s a real yearning for something—that individuals can no longer be every man for himself. They have to be responsible individuals. Until we find a way that special interests can exist with commonality, we’ll build some nice individual communities but won’t be able to deal with the needs of the full or the broader community.”

  Pisano’s definition of “community” is one of the broadest. When he worries about a lack of community, he’s talking about a perceived absence of civic virtue. Pundits have repeatedly measured it in the declining number of people who vote, the declining number of nonprofessional politicians who run for office, the declining number of people who are even willing to answer a Census questionnaire. And Pisano has a right to worry about privilege without responsibility. In Los Angeles, white Anglos are down to 12 percent of the population of the public schools, and Orange County is becoming a bastion of the affluent. The middle class is being pushed out to the inland desert realms of Riverside and San Bernardino counties in search of affordable homes.

  But this idea of “community,” and the perception of its decline, is intertwined with Pisano’s belief in conventional government—especially a regional one.

  What Pisano is really worried about, thus, is a loss of the sense of citizenship, what he refers to by the Latin word civitas. He yearns for a mayor and a city council. This is precisely the kind of ruling structure Edge Cities rarely have.

  The distinction between community and citizenship is not a small one. After all, one of the things Pisano hates is the power of the special-interest groups. Yet who are these groups that so frequently block projects of large social worth? In many cases they are real communities that feel threatened by change. This is why destruction of a wetland or the building of a dump can spark so astoundingly loud a battle. The argument is not about asphalt and concrete; it is about end
angered community. You can see it in Irvine when strangers band together to fight the developer’s plan for new growth in a beloved canyon or along a special shore.

  Developers are first and foremost agents of change. In Edge City, change is a constant that people can get mighty sick of. Voluntary community takes time; instability is its enemy. Change causes people to feel like strangers in their own place. Community and identity then retaliate. They become the enemy of change—and the growth of Edge City.

  And this is true not just in the Anglo sense of community. There is, in addition—especially in a place as diversified as Los Angeles—the vastly powerful ethnic sense. For many first-generation Vietnamese, Afghans, Bolivians, or Ethiopians, the knowledge that they are part of a clan, a band of blood brothers, is still their strongest identity. It is the primary way that they describe who they think they are.

  So, exactly to the extent that community brings people together as “us,” it also separates people. It creates “them,” too. If “them” is Pisano’s regional government imposing decisions from above, then the community may easily find itself in opposition to citizenship in his sense. In fact, in a highly pluralistic society, it may be dangerous to bring disparate groups together too closely. A certain distance might be healthy.

  The lack of allegiance to civitas—the lack of conviction that most conventional government really is of, by, and for the people—is of no small concern. New York City in 1990, for example, was coming so unglued that the majority of residents told pollsters they would rather be someplace else.

  But this sense of “us” and “them” is not peculiar to the twentieth century. History’s keenest observer of American culture, Alexis de Tocqueville, pointed out in 1840, in Democracy in America, that when the common good was faced with narrow but intensely felt interests, there was much to worry about:

  “Individualism” is a word recently coined. Our fathers only knew about egoism. Egoism is a passionate and exaggerated love of self which leads a man to think of all things in terms of himself and to prefer himself to all.