Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  Welfeld, Irving. Where We Live: The American Home and the Social, Political, and Economic Landscape, from Slums to Suburbs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

  An authoritative dose of reality that dashes much of conventional wisdom. The book is made even more attractive by the fact that the author actually has a sense of humor.

  Wells, H. G. “The Probable Diffusion of Great Cities.” In Anticipations and Other Papers, vol. 4 of The Works of H. G. Wells. New York: Scribner’s, 1924.

  Wood, Joseph S. “Suburbanization of Center City.” Geographical Review 78 (1988).

  Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Living City. New York: Horizon Press, 1958.

  On the Automobile and the Future of Mobility

  Batten, David F., and Roland Thord, eds. Transportation for the Future. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1989.

  Bruce-Briggs, Barry. The War Against the Automobile. New York: Dutton, 1977.

  The combative tone of this defense of the automobile can be excessive. Nonetheless, it remains the best single explanation of why our great-grandchildren will probably be conveyed to the maternity ward to have children in an individual transportation device that has four wheels and a steering column.

  Cervero, Robert. Suburban Gridlock. New Brunswick, N.J.: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, 1986.

  —–. America’s Suburban Centers: A Study of the Land Use/Transportation Link. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Transportation, 1988.

  —–. “Jobs-Housing Balancing and Regional Mobility.” American Planning Association (Spring 1989).

  Downs, Anthony. “The Law of Peak-Hour Expressway Congestion.” Traffic Quarterly 16, no. 3 (July 1962), updated.

  Dunphy, Robert T. “In Search of the Holy Rail.” Urban Land (May 1990).

  Gregor, Harry P. “Alcohol Fuel: The One for the Road,” Washington Post, July 9, 1989.

  Laas, William, ed. Freedom of the American Road. Dearborn: Ford Motor Company, 1956.

  With a foreword by Henry Ford II and an introduction by the historian Bernard DeVoto, this is a wonderfully antique cultural artifact that presents with pride the virtues of the freeways and makes no bones that first among them is freedom.

  Lynch, Michael C. Oil Prices to 2000: The Economics of the Oil Market. London: Economist Intelligence Unit, May 1989.

  There really is a lot of oil on this planet, if we are willing to pay the political, military, environmental, esthetic, and social price.

  “Make them pay.” The Economist, February 18, 1989.

  A cogent argument that the best way to ration roads whose capacity cannot be increased is to charge a market price for the right to use them.

  Miller, Catherine G. Carscape: A Parking Handbook. Columbus, Ind.: Washington Street Press, 1988.

  Myths and Facts About Transportation and Growth. Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 1989.

  National Transportation Strategic Planning Study. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Transportation, March 1990.

  Noto, Nonna A. “The Economics of Commuting in a Higher Cost World.” Business Review (September-October 1977).

  Orski, C. Kenneth. “Transportation Management Associations: Battling Suburban Traffic Congestion.” Urban Land (December 1986).

  —–. “Toward a Policy for Suburban Mobility.” In Urban Traffic Congestion: What Does the Future Hold? Washington, D.C.: Institute of Transportation Engineers, 1986.

  —–. “The Problem of Traffic Congestion,” Vital Speeches of the Day, January 1, 1990.

  Pisarski, Alan E. Commuting in America: A National Report on Commuting Patterns and Trends. Westport, Conn.: Eno Foundation for Transportation, 1987.

  —–. The External Environment for Public Transit to the Year 2020: A Speculative Assessment. Prepared for APTA, January 8, 1988.

  —–. Issues in Transportation and Growth Management. A discussion paper prepared for a Joint Conference of the Urban Land Institute Center for Urban and Regional Studies, August 15, 1988.

  Of the many people writing about how to untangle Edge City surface transportation, the three most useful to me were Robert Cervero, C. Kenneth Orski, and Alan Pisarski.

  A Toolbox for Alleviating Traffic Congestion. Accompanied by Executive Summary. Washington, D.C.: Institute of Transportation Engineers, 1989.

  A discussion of just about all the tricks available today to reduce traffic congestion and increase mobility.

  Witcher, Gregory. “Smart Cars, Smart Highways.” Wall Street Journal, May 22, 1989.

  On Time, Freedom, Stress, and the Automobile

  Abler, Ronald, Donald Janelle, Allen Philbrick, and John Sommer. Human Geography in a Shrinking World. Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth, 1975.

  With an especially fascinating chapter by Ronald Abler on the devices—from the stagecoach to the railroad to air mail to the telephone—that ultimately made time and space interchangeable in Edge City.

  Allen, Henry. “Driving Us Crazy: Anatomy of a Traffic Jam.” Washington Post, October 21, 1990, Style section, F1.

  The cultural history of the automobile’s ultimate betrayal—the loss of our time and freedom.

  The Automobile in American Life. Dearborn, Mich.: Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, 1987.

  The guide to the exhibition by the same name shows how much automobiles have meant to us emotionally. In the portion named “Car as Symbol,” for example, the displays are labeled everything from “Freedom” to “Individuality,” with a 1931 Bugatti Royale Type 41 thought to epitomize “Style,” a 1920s Stutz Bearcat to mean “Youth,” the Rolls to embody “Success,” and, of course, the 1965 Pontiac GTO to mean “Power.”

  Baerwald, Thomas J. “Commuter Attitudes Toward Ridesharing.” Environments (University of Waterloo, Canada) 17, no. 2 (1985): 96–99. They hate it.

  Kimbrell, Andrew. “Car Culture: Driving Ourselves Crazy.” Washington Post, September 3, 1989.

  Levine, Robert. “Waiting Is a Power Game: Who Waits Up Front, Who Waits in Back, and Who Waits Not at All—Privilege Has Its Power.” Psychology Today, April 1987.

  —–. “The Pace of Life: Most Cities Where People Walk, Talk, and Work the Fastest Also Have the Highest Rates of Heart Disease. But What Do the Exceptions Tell Us?” Psychology Today, October 1989.

  —–, and Ellen Wolff. “Social Time: The Heartbeat of Culture.” Psychology Today, March 1985.

  Novaco, Raymond W. “Objective and Subjective Dimensions of Travel Impedance as Determinants of Commuting Stress,” American Journal of Community Psychology, 18, no. 2 (1990).

  —–, Daniel Stokols, and Louis Milanese. “Commuting, Stress and Well-Being,” Review 12, no. 2 (February 1989).

  Packard, Vance. A Nation of Strangers. New York: McKay, 1972.

  Paris, Ellen. “Trading Free Time for Better Housing.” Forbes, July 23, 1990, 88.

  The world of the supercommuter.

  Stokols, Daniel, and Raymond W. Novaco. “Transportation and Well-Being: An Ecological Perspective.” In Transportation and Behavior. New York: Plenum Press, 1981.

  On the Underpinnings of the Dematerializing Technologies

  King, Thomas R. “Working at Home Has Yet to Work Out.” Wall Street Journal, December 22, 1989.

  McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

  Miller, Michael W. “Digital Revolution: Vast Changes Loom as Com puters Digest Words, Sound, Images.” Wall Street Journal, June 7, 1989.

  Mills, Edwin S. “Sectoral Clustering and Metropolitan Development.” In Sources of Metropolitan Growth and Development. New Brunswick, N.J.: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, 1991.

  The source of the wonderful idea that all truly important information in life may be ambiguous and thus inherently resistant to computerization.

  Schwartz, Tony. Media: The Second God. New York: Random House, 1981.

  Stewart, Doug. “Through the Looking Glass into an Artificial World—via Computer.” Smithsonian, January 1991.

  On t
he New Black Middle Class

  Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–1963. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

  With an especially fine depiction of John Lewis.

  Farley, Reynolds, and Walter R. Allen. The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987.

  Frazier, E. Franklin. Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class in the United States. New York: Free Press, 1957.

  This is the benchmark on the subject.

  Freeman, Richard. The Black Elite. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

  Garreau, Joel. “The Emerging Cities: Blacks—Success in the Suburbs.” Washington Post, November 29—December 1, 1987.

  Green, Constance McLaughlin. The Secret City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967.

  Jaynes, Gerald D., and Robin M. Williams, Jr., eds. A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989.

  King, Martin Luther, Jr. “I Have a Dream.” In The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Coretta Scott King. New York: Newmarket Press, 1987.

  Lake, Robert. The New Suburbanites: Race and Housing in the Suburbs. New Brunswick, N.J.: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, 1981.

  Landry, Bart. The New Black Middle Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

  This generation’s Frazier.

  McFate, Katherine, ed. A Statistical Portrait of Blacks and Whites in Urban America. Washington, D.C.: Joint Genter for Political Studies, 1988.

  Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton, “Hypersegregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas: Black and Hispanic Segregation Along Five Dimensions.” Demography 26, no. 3 (August 1989).

  —–, and Mitchell L. Eggers. “The Ecology of Inequality: Minorities and the Concentration of Poverty, 1970–1980.” American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 5 (March 1990).

  Murray, Charles, with Deborah Laren. According to Age: Longitudinal Profiles of AFDC Recipients and the Poor by Age Group. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, September 1986.

  The statistical link across gender and racial lines between middle-class attitudes toward education, family structure, and work, and middle-class incomes.

  Sowell, Thomas. Preferential Policies: An International Perspective. New York: Morrow, 1990.

  Thomas Sowell is the black Hoover Institute economist who analyzes the preferential government policies of various cultures that favor disadvantaged minorities (blacks in the United States, Maoris in New Zealand, untouchables in India, etc.). He argues that minorities worldwide succeed or fail largely without regard to well- or ill-meant social programs. This is his most recent work.

  Steele, Shelby. The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

  Shelby Steele is a professor of English at San Jose State University. He has been attempting to resolve issues of race and class in a “new vision of race in America,” in which blacks reclaim responsibility for the internal as well as the external condition of their lives.

  Wilson, William Julius. The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

  The works of Frazier, Wilson, and Landry, in that order, can be read as a trilogy. Each builds on the previous one, consciously using similar categories.

  Welniak, Edward J. Money Income of Households, Families, and Persons in the United States: 1987. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1989.

  The bible on who’s got it and who doesn’t.

  Woodson, Robert L., ed. On the Road to Economic Freedom. New York: Kampmann, 1987.

  On Politics and Government

  The Mayflower Compact

  The Declaration of Independence

  The Constitution of the United States

  Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” Speech

  John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address

  The Civil Rights Act of 1964

  All or parts of these documents, along with many others that are well worth rereading, are made pocket-size in The Little Red, White, and Blue Book: A Collection of Historic Documents and Chronology of American History, compiled by the editors of The World Almanac and Book of Facts (New York: Scripps Howard, 1987).

  Goodgame, Dan, and Richard Hornik, with bureau reports. “Is Government Dead? Unwilling to Lead, Politicians Are Letting America Slip into Paralysis.” Time, October 23, 1989, cover story.

  “Paralyzed by special interests and shortsightedness, the Government risks slipping into irrelevancy,” this report charged.

  Lapham, Lewis H. “Democracy in America?: Not Only the Economy Is in Decline.” Harper’s, November 1990.

  Taylor, Paul, “Citizenship Fades Among Disconnected Americans.” Washington Post, May 6, 1990, A1.

  Fewer people are voting or standing up to be counted in the Census or voluntarily paying their taxes.

  On Shadow Governments

  Alexander, Gregory S. “Dilemmas of Group Autonomy: Residential Associations and Community.” Cornell Law Review 75, no. 1 (November 1989): 1.

  Shadow governments as a clear and present danger.

  Articles of Amendment to Articles of Incorporation of Leisure World Community Association. Phoenix: Leisure World Community Association, 1989.

  The laws of a shadow government.

  Ellickson, Robert C. “Cities and Homeowners Associations.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 130, no. 6 (June 1982).

  A ringing defense of shadow governments.

  Garreau, Joel. “The Shadow Governments: More Than 2000 Unelected Units Rule in New Communities.” Washington Post, June 14, 1987, A1.

  Hanke, Byron R., Jan Krasnowiecki, William C. Loring, Gene C. Tweraser, and Mary Jo Cornish. The Homes Association Handbook. Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 1964.

  The classic study on the impact of such a shadow government on home values: they go up.

  Ingram, Kenneth J. “The Community Association: Mini-Government or Business Entity?” Common Ground: The Journal of the Community Associations Institute (Alexandria, Va.), November-December 1986.

  What would happen, constitutionally, if we ever decided to force these shadow governments to live up to the standards of conventional governments?

  McDowell, Bruce D. The Privatization of Metropolitan America. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Affairs, June 1990.

  1991 Revised Preliminary Community Budget. Leisure World Community Association, prepared for the Board of Directors, October 31, 1990.

  How a shadow government can collect and spend $4,989,220 a year.

  Residential Community Associations: Private Governments in the Intergovernmental System? Washington, D.C.: Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, May 1989.

  Washington wakes up to the news that it has competition.

  Residential Community Associations: Questions and Answers for Public Officials. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, July 1989.

  Among the most thorough looks at community association shadow governments to date. It examines them as real governments.

  On Design, Planning, and Architecture

  Apocconio, Umbro, ed. The Documents of 20th Century Art: Futurist Manifestos. New York: Viking, 1973.

  The Costs of Sprawl. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1974.

  Crary, Jonathan, Michel Feher, Hal Foster, and Sanford Kwinter, eds. Zone: A Serial Publication of Ideas in Contemporary Culture. New York, Urzone, 1986.

  A wonderfully surreal and challenging look at the new city.

  Fleming, Ronald Lee, and Renata von Tscharner. Placemakers: Creating Public Art That Tells You Where You Are. Boston: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.

  Fondersmith, John. “Downtown 2040: Making Cities Fun!” The Futurist, March-
April 1988.

  Giedion, Siegfried. Space, Time, and Architecture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941.

  —–. Architecture, You and Me. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.

  Gruen, Victor. The Heart of Our Cities. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967.

  —–. Centers for the Urban Environment. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973.

  Hall, Barbara Jane. 101 Easy Ways to Make Your Home Sell Faster. New York: Ballantine, 1985.

  Another one of those small pieces of reality therapy which America from time to time throws in the face of grand theory.

  Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

  Lennard, Suzanne H. Crowhurst, and Henry L. Lennard. Livable Cities. Southampton, N.Y.: Gondolier Press, 1987.

  Lewis, Roger. Shaping the City. Washington, D.C.: AIA Press, 1987.

  Lynch, Kevin. A Theory of Good City Form. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981.

  MacKaye, Benton, and Lewis Mumford. “Townless Highways for the Motorist: A Proposal for the Automobile Age.” Harper’s, August 1931.

  In which two of America’s foremost defenders of the landscape at that time strongly advocated the virtues of the cul de sac, the bypass, the overpass, and a federal system of superhighways—largely on environmental and esthetic grounds.

  Maddex, Diane. Master Builders: A Guide to Famous American Architects. Washington, D.C.: Preservation Press, 1985.

  Maddex’s work, and Nuttgens’, below, are excellent compact guides.

  Newman, Oscar. Defensible Space. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

  Newton, Norman. Design on the Land: The Development of Landscape Architecture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.

  Nuttgens, Patrick. Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Guide to Architecture. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.