Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  This means that whatever we experience in a place is both a serious environmental issue and a deeply personal one. Our relationship with the places we know is a close bond, intricate in nature, and not ab stract, not remote at all … The danger … is that whenever we make changes in our surroundings, we can all too easily shortchange ourselves …

  The way to avoid the danger is to start doing three things at once: Make sure that when we change a place, the change agreed upon nurtures our growth as capable and responsible people, while also protecting the natural environment, and developing jobs and homes enough for all.

  But how do we go about doing three things at once when we’re still having trouble finding ways to do two things at once—helping the economy prosper while at the same time preventing damage to the environment?

  Hiss, intriguingly, went on to spell out a logic with striking similarities to the thinking of Christopher Alexander. He saw a “science of place” arising, based on our built-in ability to experience our environs—and draw valid conclusions from how they make us feel. That, he believed, could yield commonsense approaches to replenishing the latitudes we love. The human animal has habitat needs. Not for nothing are academic and corporate campuses open and leafy. Since the 1850s, a “total environment” has been considered an indispensable aid to learning. In 1984 the journal Science reported, “View Through a Window May Influence Recovery From Surgery.” Over a nine-year period, it turned out, gallbladder patients who could see a cluster of trees instead of a brick wall “had shorter postoperative stays” and “took fewer moderate or strong” painkillers.

  Hiss also reported some practical approaches around the country that were meant to conserve our great good places without denying growth.

  First, he made useful distinctions about what is to be conserved. There are three kinds of landscapes, he posited:

  • Natural or primeval landscapes. Those which are perceived as not significantly altered or interfered with by humans—mountaintops and ocean vistas, for example.

  • Working landscapes. The feel of these have been shaped by human activities, but in cooperation with nature over a length of time that seems comparable to those of natural processes—for example, Pennsylvania Dutch farmland, a Maryland Eastern Shore fishing village.

  • Manufactured or urban landscapes. These are our old downtowns, our old suburbia, and our new Edge Cities.

  The point of these distinctions is to draw attention to the special qualities of each, to establish that each has a highest and best level at which it can and should be maintained, and that humans need ready access to each in order to feel whole. For example, a working landscape—which frequently translates into one devoted to farms—is a place where the “terrain and vegetation are molded, not dominated,” noted the landscape historian John Stilgoe, author of Borderland. It is a “fragile equilibrium between natural and human force.” The biologist René Dubos wrote about the “charm and elegance” and “soft luminosity” of one of his favorite places in the world, the landscape of his childhood, the farm country of the Île-de-France around Paris. Woods were cleared there, to be sure. But that gave rise to “an environmental diversity that provides nourishment for the senses and for the psyche … from the mosaics of cultivated fields, pastures, and woodlands, as well as from the alternation of sunlit surfaces and shaded areas.” The oldest such working landscapes in America, by virtue of first settlement, are those in the stewardship of New England, the product of ten or eleven generations.

  There are three ways that humans feel connected to the land around them that is worthy of preservation, reported Hiss:

  • The sense of kinship with all life;

  • The sense of partnership with working landscapes;

  • The sense of companionability that is traditionally fostered by villages and cherished urban neighborhoods.

  These, too, are valuable distinctions.

  I personally feel most pained when I see the land that for generations was a farm being ripped up for a subdivision or a shopping center. It usually would not occur to me to feel outraged at seeing fallow ground newly replanted with corn or wheat or cotton. I view that as one working use being replaced by another. Nor in the past has it broken my heart to see a strip shopping center being replaced by a high-rise. What is Mammon’s, I felt, was Mammon’s.

  But in the course of talking to people around the country, I came to realize that my sense of discontinuity was hardly the only kind. I had conversations with serious young people who found it wrenching to see even second-growth forest being leveled to create farmland for big-time operations that they found barely removed—either sociologically or technologically—from corporate chemical plants.

  Even more surprising to me, I found people who saw the end of their community—and thus the end of their world—in a transition from one kind of commercial landscape to another. They genuinely mourned the disappearance of what amounted to a 1950s strip shopping center. This place, where the hardware store full of judicious advisers on the mysteries of the mechanical had always been found, and where the luncheonette with its diagonal-to-the-curb parking had thrived for two generations, was their village. When it was replaced by the high-rise office towers and subway stops, they never returned. The soul of their world was gone.

  This led me to a meditation on the word “unspoiled.” What a ubiquitous word that has become! It is the word used to describe any variety of landscapes, immediately before the bulldozers rip through. Why is that? Why are the newest works of man held in such low regard?

  There turn out to be a multiplicity of landscapes over which people are willing to die. Thus, Hiss suggested that the first step in establishing rationality about what we value is making a regional inventory of what we love. After all, we are now at the stage where it’s possible to have an Edge City fifty miles or more from the old downtowns, our homes a forty-five-minute commute beyond that, and our “country place” a three- or five-hour drive beyond that. By this arithmetic it is clear there is almost no jurisdiction in America that shouldn’t right now tap into its people’s hidden expertise in the locale. Ask them: What places are there in the region whose change would cause a deep sense of melancholy? Albert F. Appleton, New York City’s Environmental Protection Commissioner, suggested, “The first 5 percent of development in a countryside region generally does 50 percent of the damage, in terms of altering people’s mental geography of an area. And the second 5 percent of development enlarges this damage by another 50 percent.”

  This inventory, however, is not as antigrowth a measure as it may sound. “Conservation,” after all, is merely “a state of harmony between men and land,” Leopold pointed out. Identifying where the emotional flashpoints are in the population is a surprise-reducing measure for everybody. This is especially useful to businesspeople. They hate surprises. By establishing which places people are willing to die for, they can turn their attention toward those other landscapes—hardly rare in this country—where there is plenty of room for improvement; where change and growth would be a blessing. There is a lot of land in this country. The issue is whether we can come to any agreement on what we do with it, where, and in what harmony.

  Such an inventory is also useful in that it educates those who compile it. For one thing, it gives them a crash course in a line of reasoning they may not be familiar with: thinking like a developer. Given that the developers have obviously had far more success in shaping the landscape than those who are not students of the marketplace, this exercise is of no small use. How secure are these beloved places? Who is in charge of them? A study of the regional landscape will soon make it clear even to the novice that development is not random or arbitrary or smoothly distributed. It is closely tied to such public investments as roads, sewers, and schools, as well as proximity to the same natural beauty that people wish to preserve.

  The inventory also establishes the limits of any assessment that measures the worth of a piece of land only as a commodity; by its monet
ary exchange value. It establishes the importance of supplementing such a look.

  “One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value,” Leopold noted half a century ago. “Wildflower and songbirds are examples … When one of those noneconomic categories is threatened, and if we happen to love it, we invent subterfuges to give it economic importance. At the beginning of the century songbirds were supposed to be disappearing. Ornithologists jumped to the rescue with some distinctly shaky evidence to the effect that insects would eat us up if birds failed to control them. The evidence had to be economic in order to be valid.”

  The good news is that if the region examined is sufficiently large, the inventory will point to the soul-satisfying value not merely of large wild tracks but of the cherished less obvious landscapes, especially those within areas thought to be built up. Hiss used as an example the valley of the Blackstone River, the very first place in North America—in 1790, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island—to get a factory. The falls of the Blackstone powered textile mills for more than a century, and as recently as twenty years ago, the river was a paragon of pollution. Running through such gritty cities as Woonsocket and Central Falls, its waters were a stunning study of iridescent slicks. The skies above were frequently flocked with mysterious foam floating on the breeze.

  Now, $150 million later, the river runs so clean that glass-bottomed tour boats ply the waters below Pawtucket’s falls; the original factory, the Slater Mill, is a museum; the air smells sweet; it stays cool all summer; many of the river’s banks are heavily wooded and feel almost remote. This restoration is an example of the partnership landscape that is possible even in an anciently built-up area. The proximity of such an amenity even encouraged gainful new development in the 1980s.

  Finally, if preservationists started looking around at landscapes that they value and tried to figure out how to save them before they became embattled, they would probably discover what the developers have always known: that the most ironclad way to control the future of a piece of land is to own it. There is nothing like having a deed—or, almost as good, conservation covenants embedded in a deed—to ensure that land is used in ways you see fit. A trust like the Nature Conservancy, which operates on the same playing field as developers, is vastly more effective than any kind of regulatory measure such as zoning. The police powers of the state over land use have repeatedly been exposed for the flimsy, legally bendable reeds that they are. Most Edge Cities, no matter how many land-use restrictions and zoning codes have been written, do not look substantially different from Houston. And Houston historically has had no zoning laws at all.

  The whole idea is to harness the apparently antithetical forces of the developers and the preservationists. Such a partnership would aim to recognize the human ecology as well as the natural one. The alliance would demonstrate a respect for the people who love the land as it is and the needs of people in the future. If it is easier for builders to find places where the value of their offices and shopping centers and homes are seen to fit, it will be easier to take the development pressure off the land that we wish to preserve.

  The odds are high that we will not bother to search for such a peace. We will probably prefer our current course, beating at each other with clubs. There is little reason to expect that to avail; neither side will fold its tent any time soon. But conflict has almost become our ritual.

  No small portion of the problem is that a partnership that would reckon with all the land would put an express burden on the people who wish to preserve the wild and working territory. Those who want to see such landscapes taken out of the cycle of the manufactured would have a new obligation: they would have to turn their attention back to the land on which man has already built. Holding their nose if they must, they would have to immerse themselves in Edge City, understanding why man built there, and why he built the way he did. That’s what it would take to participate in realistic conversations about future building. An inviolate law of the land is this: only if life is perceived as pleasant and affordable by the real human beings living farther in, will there be any hope of relieving pressure on the land farther out.

  “The fate of the American landscape, its ponds and hollows, its creeks and forests, its prairies, wet glades, and canyons, cannot be addressed solely in terms of ‘wilderness’ or be solved by ‘wilderness preservation,’ ” wrote Barry Lopez. “What we face now in North America—and of course, elsewhere—is a crisis in land use, in how we regard the land.

  “We need to rethink our relationship to the entire landscape. To have this fundamental problem of land ethics defined, or understood, as mainly ‘a fight for the wilderness’ hurts us … It preserves a misleading and artificial distinction between ‘holy’ and ‘profane’ land.

  “If we have a decision to ponder now, it is how to (re)incorporate the lands we occupy, after millennia of neglect, into our moral universe. We must incorporate not only our farmsteads and the retreats of the wolverine but the land upon which our houses, our stores, and our buildings stand. Our behavior, from planting a garden to mining iron ore, must begin to reflect the same principles …

  “Wild landscapes are necessary to our being. We require them as we require air and water. But we need to create a landscape in which wilderness makes deep and eminent sense as part of the whole, a landscape in which wilderness is not an orphan.”

  This “moral universe” must include the developers. But in this there is hope. For most builders share a distinct moral code: they genuinely believe they are providing a service to mankind. And they have a very quick, firm, and direct feedback mechanism on whether needs are met. If they fail correctly to guess what people want and need, they go bankrupt. Therefore, if those who are most sensitive to the future of the earth can direct some of their attention back toward the portion of it on which we have already built, the outline of a deal may appear.

  We may find that this weird and incongruous new Edge City form is working with us as much as against us. For one thing, the landscape it represents is enormously malleable. It frequently changes almost beyond recognition from year to year. There is usually vastly more land tied up in an Edge City landscape than there are pressing uses. The parking lots alone represent a land bank of enormous size, waiting for a higher and smarter and more economic use. The buildings themselves are often regarded as having a life span of no more than twelve to twenty-five years. By then, the original logic of their use, or their electronic, mechanical, energy, ventilation, communications, or internal transport systems have been overrun by events. They are no longer competitive with the rest of the market. At that point, their owners become highly interested in new ways to retrofit or replace them. If at that point they can be convinced that there are cheaper or more effective methods of making their places useful and attractive than the usual routine of refitting a marble façade with a granite façade, there is a golden opportunity for those who wish to offer change.

  Remember: Edge City has already done the cause of livability a great service. It has made a direct contribution to the environment in that it has smashed the very idea behind suburbia in ways that the old downtowns never did. Suburbia always was meant to be green, which is hard to argue with. But that was not its most important characteristic. It was originally meant to be a place specifically designed to get away from the environmental and social dislocations—the factories and slums—of the first hundred years of the Industrial Revolution. At least since William Blake first placed the “dark Satanic mills” in opposition to his beloved “green and pleasant land,” Americans have been carrying around in their heads the despairing baggage that the price of growth was bad smells, foul water, deteriorated neighborhoods, and debased landscapes. That was why suburbs were invented. They were supposed to be places separate from the world of commerce and manufacture, places to which we could flee as soon as we could afford the move.

  Edge City has ended all that. It ref
lects our passing from the Industrial Age to our current one. By moving the world of work and commerce out near the homes of the middle and upper-middle class, it has knocked the pins out from under suburbia as a place apart. It has started the reintegration of all our functions—including the urban ones of working, marketing, learning, and creating—into those once-suburban landscapes that, after all, are among the most affable we have built this century.

  The challenge, then, is to get actively involved in improving Edge City so as to make it contribute once again to the environment, to take development pressure off the natural and working landscapes. “Man takes a positive hand in creation whenever he puts a building upon the earth beneath the sun,” Frank Lloyd Wright believed. “If he has birthright at all, it must consist in this: that he, too, is no less a feature of the landscape than the rock, trees, bears, or bees of that nature to which he owes his being.”

  That Edge City is inherently decentralized may even make an ironic contribution to new partnerships. It may mean that we can forge them without dawdling around, waiting for some mystical “regional solution” to be arrived at by “experts” and executed by vast bureaucracies. It may simply involve, at a local level, highly diverse individuals having the guts to recognize that their lives are of limited duration, and their antagonists will be with them all their days. The next step is to reach out, no matter how hateful that may seem. If these ancient enemies insist on complications, let them hire a mediator. If that doesn’t work, they can talk to a younger generation of the opposition. You may not be able to count on people to change, but you can count on them to die, and be replaced by a generation with a different life. By definition that means a distinct view.

  Our civilization, in short, may be viewed as halfway home. With help from those who care most deeply about the land, and about quality of life, we may make some real progress toward that Garden. It would put environmentalists in the position of making the built environment in which we live one of their foremost concerns. An effort at cooperation that addressed the universal hunger for a more humane life might also attract the developers. If nothing else, it would offer hope of addressing the growth revolt, our great national stress reaction lashing out at rapid change of all kind, demanding it all be shut down. It may even rescue the developers’ personal social standing from its current abysmal low.