Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  When you have to make a design decision, he says, for the color of a wall or the size of a parking lot, ask yourself a few simple questions. For that matter, debate it with other people who will be using the space. Of all the possible ways you could handle any given relationship between centers, which feels best? Which of these possibilities contributes the best feeling to the whole of which this center will be a part?

  If you phrase it that way, he claims, you’ll discover that humans have amazingly more in common than you may think. You’ll be struck by the unanimity of responses you get from a broad group of people. What’s more, you will have a basis for logical debate. It won’t be a matter of one person considering the mechanistic issue of a shade of red and saying, “I like this,” and another saying, “Well, I like that.” That conversation goes nowhere.

  The point is this: you are not debating whether one person or another likes this particular object—a door, say. You are debating the relative merits of relationships: which choice for the design of one center feels best in the service of another.

  You can then tack up models, splash on colors, pace off areas. You can experience how the alternatives feel and, he thinks, convince each other, as a fact, which answer works best relative to both the larger and smaller wholes.

  This goes back to the overwhelming responses his crew got to A Pattern Language from readers buying the notion that they had hit on underlying principles. Alexander writes:

  What are we to make of this? Since the prevailing canon of mechanistic science says these statements in the patterns cannot be true in any sense, we may consider two possible conclusions:

  1. Those people who believe or feel that the material in A Pattern Language is true, are deluding themselves. Only the cartesian [sic] idea of what can be true can be correct.

  2. There is some other way (not covered by mechanistic thought) in which statements can be true. The cartesian idea of what kind of statement can be true is too limited.

  The second of these conclusions is less arrogant than the first. It is also much more useful. It is the main philosophical assumption which underlies [these] arguments.

  The revolutionary aspect is that there is no limit to how high this process goes.

  In other words, if you get to the point where you’ve got a whole building on the design boards, but it does not help the Edge City in which it is located feel right, then the design is wrong and must be rejected. Unless the building helps Edge City feel right, it will not have life. People will not feel comfortable in it. They will not like it. They will refer to it as sterile, antiseptic, chaotic.

  Which, of course, is exactly the slam made at Edge Cities.

  Alexander’s focus on feelings is not necessarily as flaky as it sounds. The marketing and advertising industries, for example, are nothing but systems to perceive and alter feelings, yet they are recognized as about as hard-nosed as business gets.

  Everyday business language recognizes that instinctual facts exist beyond rigid Cartesian logic: “I feel comfortable with that decision”; “I have a gut feeling about that.” “Hunches,” “instincts,” and a “nose” for opportunities are ineffable but crucial keys to success.

  Alexander is not talking some loopy definition of feelings—“like hot tubs in the rain,” he says. “It’s a more rational process. The actual bedrock is what’s real out there. There is a wholeness in the material universe. Feeling happens to be a very accurate indicator of it.”

  Developers may have less of a problem than designers in dealing with “feelings” as a serious idea. Mall operators—who are rarely burdened with abstract theories of human behavior or political ideologies—deal with feelings all the time. That’s why they are constantly sticking skylights and trees and atria all over their buildings—to make people feel like staying longer.

  Prince Charles, meanwhile, has independently come to many of the same conclusions as Alexander. (Alexander was pleasantly stunned to get reinforcement from such an unexpected quarter. He was getting tired of people trying to label him a “communist” in zoning hearings because he believes people and designs have to work together.)

  In fact, the Prince of Wales, in his 1989 book A Vision of Britain, sounds like a bomb-throwing Louisiana populist, compared with Alexander.

  Charles writes:

  As a result of thirty years of … burning all the rule books and purveying the theory that man is a machine, we have ended up with Frankenstein monsters, devoid of character, alien and largely unloved, except by the professors who have been concocting these horrors in their laboratories—and even they find their creations a bit hard to take after a while. The rest of us are constantly obliged to endure the results of their experiments and … very few people are pleased with the situation.

  Charles rails against the wanton destruction which has taken place in this country in the name of progress; about the sheer, unadulterated ugliness and mediocrity of public and commercial buildings, not to mention the dreariness and heartlessness of so much urban planning.

  I believe that when a man loses contact with the past he loses his soul. Likewise, if we deny the architectural past—and the lessons to be learnt from our ancestors—then our buildings also lose their souls.

  Deep down in our subconscious an uneasy feeling persists that there is something missing if we sacrifice ourselves on the altar of progress, and live and work in buildings which only reflect the technology of the moment.

  One place that began to feel as if it were being sacrificed on the altar of progress in the 1980s was Pasadena, California. That is why it invited Alexander to rewrite its zoning code for multiple-family housing.

  Pasadena stands at the foot of the impressive San Gabriel Mountains east of downtown Los Angeles. Originally a haven for the wealthy, and later something of an artists’ colony, it has been marked by beautiful plantings and cottage-style architecture since the turn of the century.

  Twenty years ago, it began to become an Edge City when downtown Los Angeles corporations started moving their back-shop clerical workers out to Pasadena’s less expensive environs. As a result, there was a tremendous demand for apartment buildings to house these workers. Unfortunately, the apartments have often obliterated or disfigured the charming single-family neighborhoods in which they were placed.

  That, Alexander said, did not have to be. As is demonstrated in every older village in the world, you can fit hundreds of people together into very small land areas and still have a warm, inviting place. What you can’t do, he says, is what had been going on in Pasadena: plunking down outsized, cookie-cutter apartment cubes in a nice neighborhood, hoping the result will have life and feel whole.

  Alexander’s approach in Pasadena was instructive. In his proposed zoning ordinance, for example, he started by describing the key to Pasadena’s grace as its gardens; after all, this is the home of the Rose Bowl. He then proposed to write into law the following: any Pasadena apartment builder, when figuring out where on his lot to locate his building, would first have to determine where he was going to put the apartment’s garden of such-and-such a specified size. Then his building could take its shape from whatever space was left.

  The garden had to come first.

  The developers did not know whether to laugh or lose lunch. This man must be mad! He is not in touch with how the world works.

  But how far away from common sense was this? A successful garden is a lot harder to site than a building. With enough reinforced concrete, you can locate a building just about anywhere. But a garden has to pay attention to the slope of the land, the direction of the sun, the existence of old-growth trees that can be adapted to use—the dictates of the earth itself. Moreover, when the garden is planned first, the building that is placed on whatever land is left tends to be less boxy. It almost has to be more narrow and long. Which automatically floods its interior with sunlight. Which would seem to be a gift.

  But that wasn’t the end for Alexander. He then said, Okay, this is your maximum
FAR—the floor-to-area ratio, the total amount of building that would be allowed on a given piece of land. That is, you can bring this many units in, with this many square feet, and this many people.

  There was much groaning, but since the density was not vastly different from that achieved in current practice, it was not the end of the world.

  The end of the world came when Alexander said, There’s one more thing. When you are surrounded by beautiful two-story cottages, you are not going to put all that density into depressing three-story monsters, jutting up above the bungalow roofs. Your apartment buildings also must be no more than two stories to preserve the feeling of the landscape.

  That was, as Alexander remembers it, the precise moment when the developers “split their gut.”

  “They said, ‘You cretin, we can’t build that FAR with that height. It’s impossible.’ So I said, ‘Well, here are some drawings to show exactly how it can be done in a million and six ways.’ I swear, to this day, they think that I’m a cretin for having pointed this out. But, I mean, if you’re working at two stories in a situation where they would typically have been working with three, same FAR, here’s how it goes:

  “When you’re at three you can place a bunch of identical boxes. You don’t have to fuck around with the plan. You just put them in there, box, box, box, box, box. Finish drawing. Take to planning department. End of story.

  “In order to do it at two stories, what happens is you end up with one apartment a little bit squeezed, and longer than the others, and thinner. And another one has an odd situation because it’s on a corner or it’s in the middle. It becomes slightly funkier, right.

  “Now to me that’s a plus because that of course is what happens when you pay attention to life. That’s what always happens. Things tend to get more complex.

  “The developers don’t want it to be like that. They want it to be like a grid. Here is the plan. Finish operation.”

  The builders don’t want to hear that in order to conserve ground, they might have to construct the apartment building’s driveway at something other than interstate standards. Maybe they would not have room for two lanes of asphalt. Perhaps the drive might be one lane, with a cut-out to let another car pass. Or two separately owned apartment buildings might have to share one driveway! (That proposal was the one that had people trying to brand Alexander a communist.)

  “I’m talking about the trivial stuff,” says Alexander. “You know, the parking aisle has to be twenty-six feet wide. Really and truly, limit yourself to major safety questions. You can certainly make do with twenty-two. You can in fact make do with eighteen. All kinds of stuff like this. It just mounts and mounts and mounts. I mean, if you’re going to fuck up hundreds of square miles of land just to deal with that kind of thing, you’re well on the road to insanity. It’s just silly.”

  In other words, in order to get life, you, the builder, might have to be careful not to waste space, waste land. You might have to bring more sophistication to your design and manufacturing processes. You might not be able to crank your product out in Soviet tractor-factory bulk.

  But it can be done, Alexander claimed, on time and within budget. And, he claims, there is a huge penalty if this condition is not met. If the development does not have life, people will hate it; they will not take care of it; there will be high turnover. It will not help the property values in the neighborhood. It will not best serve the purposes of the investor or the owner. And if you don’t do it right, somebody else, someday soon, will, and you will be driven out of business.

  Ah, yes.

  Well, in Pasadena, Alexander did not prevail.

  The developers organized politically. They made the case that Alexander’s zoning law would attack their methods of construction, financing, and design so radically as to make it impossible to do business in the fashion to which they were accustomed. The zoning law as adopted has perhaps 60 percent of Alexander’s ideas incorporated into it, but in such a legalistic and sterile fashion that he views it as a defeat.

  Not the first or the last, Alexander notes. For the one point on which he agrees with the builders is that his ideas, if adopted, would explode their current methods of operating.

  That’s the point. Alexander is not trying to shore up or tinker with our existing ways of building our cities. Alexander feels that the goal of every building today should be to “heal” the neigh borhood in which it is located. And that, he feels, is the revolution.

  What would a Bishop Ranch 8-style 200,000-square-foot office center look like if it were built to Alexander’s standards?

  Well, for one thing, it might not be one building. Alexander believes it is perfectly possible to build a good building that huge. But in this case, he points out, distributing the office space might be less of a headache than trying to figure out how to park the cars around the edges of such an immense cube and still end up with a place that felt human. The structure might also wind up with more or fewer than 200,000 square feet. If the structure ended up with life, a lot of space and money might be saved by not having to tack on atria and indoor trees and ivy. The space and money thus saved might go into making people’s actual work space larger—more like the kind of workplace they’ve always imagined building for themselves someday. Or it could simply mean that the building never had to be so many square feet at all.

  Also, is it not possible that some of the 250 square feet per worker is wasted because of the rigid way it is now allocated? The major corporate furniture design firm of Herman Miller, Incorporated, thinks so. It has retained Alexander to design a line of office furniture.

  Suppose that line of furniture included as many as fifty components, in many sizes. Suppose those shapes could be configured and reconfigured by the office workers themselves in tens of thousands of different ways. Might be tricky. Might cost a little more up front. But suppose people no longer felt trapped in a slick and image-ridden workplace full of industrial gray and burnt orange. Suppose, instead, that office felt normal—felt as comfortable as home. Suppose that it also avoided wasting a few square feet of office space worth dozens of dollars each. Might that not be worth it?

  The building also might not look like it came off a Henry Ford-era assembly line. If you posit that the only way you can create a building cheaply is with identical precast-concrete wall pieces and identical curtain windows and identical steel beams and a building site bulldozed flat … Well, then, Alexander points out, you’ve got a problem. You’re going to end up, like the Modernist architects of the early twentieth century, with endless cubes; with things that look and feel like boxes, like machines.

  Building a building that feels whole—that relates down to the land on which it sits, and up to the neighborhood in which it resides—requires thousands of individual decisions, Alexander feels. It could be that if you have an assembly-line building technology that cannot adapt to that reality, you will be at a competitive disadvantage.

  Alexander does not think this makes him antitechnology. Quite the opposite. The systems he’s talking about require considerable innovation. “The answer is not to go back to silly things like brickwork and stonework, which are completely impossible from the point of view of labor costs, but to use highly advanced, more flexible technologies and production.”

  Of course, the entire trend in world manufacturing today is headed toward increased customization, extremely short product runs, computer-aided design, and quick turnaround. Therefore, if the building trades insist on an inflexibility that even an American automobile manufacturer would no longer put up with, they might be threatening their own survival.

  But what about the costs? Won’t all this drive up the cost of your design? The cost of construction? Isn’t this elitist? Won’t you price yourself out of the market?

  That line of attack makes Alexander crazy. He is devoted to the idea of budgets. He has no idea how you make rational trade-offs without them. He has built housing in Mexico and Colombia for under $10,000 a unit. He knows fro
m cheap. Beautiful buildings of traditional societies are not all Notre-Dame and Chartres, he points out. They were built by ordinary people, using ordinary tools and ordinary design standards. Architects did not exist as a licensed, certified species until the late nineteenth century. Which, come to think of it, is about the time things started going wrong.

  Okay, he says. Suppose that we were to pay more money for constructing walls with interesting nooks and crannies rather than sheer blank planes. Could we not make that up somewhere else? Suppose we make the driveway out of crushed stone. Doesn’t take much. A couple of dump trucks with their tailgates cracked open can lay it down in a morning.

  Would you have to rake the stones to get them flat? Sure. Would you have to add more stones every few years as these sank into the ground? Of course. Will that force people to drive more slowly than they might on asphalt? Yes. Will it be cheap? You bet. Will it have a nice crunch that announces cars as they arrive? Yes. Will grass grow up in the crown between the wheels? Yes. Will that look interesting over time? Yes. Is it possible under the zoning laws of most jurisdictions today?

  Absolutely not.

  Instead, a driveway is required to have so much excavation and concrete that it will not crack under any foreseeable earthquake.

  Was that well intentioned?

  Perhaps. But, Alexander says, don’t tell him he is the one being irrational about costs. Not when zoning requirements force people to spend $30,000 on an impregnable driveway that gets an occasional five-mile-per-hour use.

  “We’re talking about real life here. We’re not talking about some fantasy. Something that’s going to be in a magazine. Real life has linoleum. It has cracks. It has diapers. Real life is just different from Architectural Digest. If you try to create an environment that’s not like real life, you’re in deep trouble.”

  Here is the issue. Here is where the rubber hits the road on Alexander’s theories, politically and economically.