In the last quarter-century, scores of new urban centers have sprouted up across US. Joel Garreau visits some of them - three generations into the future.
Over the last 25 years, Americans have witnessed the biggest city-building boom in history. We have erected 181 new urban cores, each of which today is larger than the city of Memphis, Tennessee.
Almost nobody saw it coming. The people we pay to be urban planners never imagined a future in which ordinary people pick up and move their city functions as close as possible to their suburban homes. They never envisioned that we would be constructing enormous office buildings in areas like Silicon Valley, and filling them with the bulk of our information-age jobs.
Nonetheless, these places I call edge cities - places like Tysons Corner, Virginia; Schaumburg, Illinois; and Irvine, California - have become vastly larger than many of the 45 remaining major downtowns in the United States. In fact, edge cities have become the standard for the world's urban environments.
The hallmarks of edge cities are not the sidewalks of New York, for usually there are few sidewalks. Look, rather, for jogging trails. Nor are these new cities tied together by locomotives and subways. Instead, they are united by jet ways, freeways, and satellite dishes 10 meters across. You won't find a horse-mounted hero as the characteristic monument of an edge city. Instead you will find high, atrium-shielding trees perpetually in leaf at the cores of corporate headquarters, fitness centers, and shopping plazas. In this new kind of city, you will find few of the penthouses of the old urban rich or the tenements of the old urban poor. Instead, the landmark dwelling is the celebrated single-family detached home - the three-bedroom, two-bath unit with grass all around - that made America the best-housed civilization the world has ever known.
Since edge cities are so new - only 30 years ago, most of them were cow pasture - it's hard to project their future.
But humans have been building cities for 58,000 years now, and patterns have developed. All cities, for example, appear chaotic in their early stages. In 1848, Charles Dickens saw his first industrial-age city. Used to tiny agrarian towns, he wrote of London, "There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the earth, moldering in the water, and unintelligible as in any dream."
That's not a bad description of the strip malls in most edge cities today.
But just as London turned out to be a model of urban life after six or seven generations of tearing it down, rebuilding, re-envisioning, and planting ivy, there's hope for our new edge cities.
After all, Paris looks swell today because you can't see all the mistakes. The Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, for one, flattened quite a few of them when he redesigned the Champs Elysées.
Modern Venice is venerated as a shrine to livability. But "people forget that Venice was built by hook or by crook," says Dennis Romano, a social historian of the early Renaissance. "Venice was just as mercantilist" as our modern world. "It was full of land speculators and developers. The merchants' primary concern was the flow of goods, of traffic. Those who romanticize Venice today collapse 1,000 years of history. The architectural harmony of the Piazza San Marco was an accident. It was built over centuries by people who were constantly worried about whether they had enough money."
There's no reason Americans - who over four centuries have demonstrably handled chaos and change and invented the future with more dexterity than any civilization in history - can't aim as high.
The loft/condo
One of the reasons edge cities haven't attracted many artists and bohemians is that so much of it is brand-new and therefore expensive. That will change. Somebody had to be the first to look at an abandoned New England textile mill and realize it would make a great condominium. Somebody had to be the first to look at an old SoHo sweatshop and realize it would make a great artists loft.
Just so, in the near future, somebody realizes what a great space an old Kmart is - 80,000 square feet with
16-foot ceilings and killer HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning). Then he or she realizes you can get them for nothing from the Resolution Trust Corporation - and the first edge-city bohemian district is born.
First the artists break the space into lavish 5,000-square-foot sculptors studios. Then they punch skylights into the roof to let natural light into the interior. Then they do the sensible thing and start living there illegally.
They place sculptures and anything else they can think of on the roof, although the windmills quickly become cliché. When all the really great space in the Kmart is full, other people start filling the former drugstores and dry cleaners of the abandoned shopping center with funky bars, savory restaurants, computer-arts master printers, and the shady dens of CD-ROM pressers. The exteriors of the buildings are painted in intriguing ways. Think Berkeley, California - or better yet, its neighbor, Emeryville.
There are still a lot of parking spaces in the near-term future. This place will never resemble an old village because it was originally shaped by the automobile. Individual transportation is unquestionably here to stay. Artists are individualists, and they cherish the freedom that four tires and a steering column afford them - especially as vehicles become zero-emission and are easily modified with hand tools because so much of their makeup is plastic and fiberglass.
This edge-city bohemian district is unquestionably a working environment. Art is being made, and artists need their trucks to bring in materials and supplies. There are trendy industrial overtones to this place. An arc-welding unit on the back loading dock is quite the status symbol, as is a used hologram duplicator.
Nonetheless, this new use attracts much less traffic than did the old Kmart. So, on the land no longer needed for parking, the artists muse over why that parking lot is so ugly, and they do something about it - thus solving the most difficult aesthetic problem in the edge city. In the parking lot they plant trees and vegetable gardens and erect sculptures, paintings, band shells, tot lots, playgrounds, volleyball courts with imported sand, and farmers markets. Whenever a pothole emerges, it is seen as an opportunity to create a garden.
Cheap but creative and intriguing structures spring up amid the trees. Reconditioned freight containers are stacked in imaginative ways with pergolas connecting them. (The trees, bushes, and vines are still small - they are only about 10 years old.)
Inexpensive but attractive structures such as elaborate vendor stalls are built parallel to the façade of the old shopping center, creating a walkable alley with places for adults to sit and kids play.
The artists go to the great trouble of digging up the old drainage-system pipes. Now storm water flows on the surface, in the form of streams and marshes.
Of course, these neo-Ecotopians put in a lot of little dams and channels so the water doesn't rush off after a rain the way the drainage system designed it to do.
Flash to the far-term future.
All this has changed. The trees and plantings have grown to a stately, British-gardenlike splendor. As always happens, the artist rehabilitation has led to yuppie gentrification. This place is now completely residential, abundantly high-end, and is called The Estates at Place K.
Two waves of change have occurred. First, extremely expensive but subtle and tasteful upgrades have been installed. There are French doors where the plate-glass windows used to be. There are Palladian windows over the entrance to what used to be the pizza parlor. All the fixtures of the former Baskin-Robbins are now brass. One of the most highly valued luxuries is that people have the space to carefully house - indoors - their antique collections. Thus, what used to be the drugstore now is a showplace for such beauties as the extremely rare 1996 Ford Windstar minivan.
Second, there has been an impeccably authentic restoration of the original structure, in the fashion of today's rehabilitated stables.
The paint on the Kmart has been sandblasted down to the original beige, after consultation with architectural historians who painstakingly chipped off 27 layers of paint and grime to discover what the first designers intended. The motorized clothing rack of the old dry cleaners has been lovingly restored to operation; some of the replacement parts had to be hand-forged. It is in constant motion during cocktail parties. A hot market in authentic acoustical ceiling tile has sprung up.
In the final touch, a complete Mack semi has been parked out front, in the fashion of the old, rusting horse-drawn mowing and plowing implements that grace the lawns of estates today.
The finest sculptures of the turn-of-the-21st-century bohos have been preserved. The storm water systems that they once brought to the surface have now become streams lovingly edged with slate and Japanese lanterns, and filled with koi.
The freight containers and vendor stalls have been upgraded to guest cottages.
The university/mosque
When the first big, regional, enclosed malls start to become obsolete, the historic preservationists stampede to their rescue. Like the old movie houses of the 1930s, these malls of the '70s and '80s are incredible palaces, built when price was no object. The layers of marble and gilt, the Amazon-like gardens and three-story computerized fountains and waterfalls, the amazingly sophisticated lighting systems designed to create different moods for every hour of the day.... They will never be seen again. They have to be saved!
As what, though?
University officials realize these structures would make great campuses. The anchors, where Macy's and Nordstrom and Sears used to sell goods, become excellent lecture halls seating thousands of students. The smaller shops are turned into more conventional classrooms. The three-story-high promenades in the center make fine places for students to flirt.
The most elaborate of these regional malls are known as gallerias. They are originally marked by office high-rises poking through the middle and hotels bolted onto the sides of the mall. The office towers, of course, become the administration buildings - quaintly called Old Main - and the hotels make swanky dorms.
Outside, goal posts rise from the acreage originally cleared for development that was never built. Nearby office buildings no longer prestigious enough for their intended purpose are turned into rollicking group houses with the skull of the Grateful Dead, that antiquated symbol of defiance, at the top of the tower.
Inside the old mall, the ice rink at the bottom and the tennis courts on the roof are reserved for faculty and distinguished guests only.
The old food court is forever jammed.
These structures are expensive to maintain, however, and soon tax-cutting politicians ask why students have to be surrounded by all this granite grandeur.
That's when, much later, the most ambitious churches begin to bid on these superb old buildings. The Mormons, particularly, grasp the significance of million-square-foot palaces at the precise center of the most accessible locations in America.
But the Muslim congregations are those with which they can never compete. The Grand Mosque at Tysons Corner Center in Northern Virginia becomes second only to the work of Süleyman the Magnificent in Turkey. The minarets, exactly 1 meter shorter than the Washington Monument, are 13 miles away from the old US Capitol. Beneath the oculus - the circular "eye" at the top of the mosque's dome - tourists tiptoe through the large, cool, central prayer hall in their socks. The tubs around the rushing water of the elaborate old fountains are planted with pomegranate and date palm. Victoria's Secret is completely encased in a hexagonal Casablanca mosaic of cobalt blue and sea green. No expense is spared on this, the largest mosque in the West, by its patron, the Emir of Riyadh, Prince Salman Ibn Abdulaziz al Saud.
Soon, this holiest of sites is walled off to infidels, and the only way to see the old places where the crossed tusks of Banana Republic once reigned is to look at them in old books cataloguing the glories of the golden age of 20th-century mercantilism.
Wasteland
In the last days of the 20th century, there was a profession of people who, ironically enough, called themselves "planners." Even at that time, their numbers were dwindling.
In part, this was because they came out of a 19th-century mechanistic tradition in which the universe was seen as a vast piece of clockwork and chaos was feared. So the planners tried to create a world where nothing was left to chance. "Disney is the ultimate example of this sort of world," noted urban designer Patricia L. Faux. "It is an egomaniac's version of what a community would do to itself if it had the time. It's spooky. It's false. It is predictable, not real. It is not what a community builds. There are no little mom-and-pop stores. Parks are used as buffers. Their function has been changed. They are not places for people to congregate; they are places to keep people at bay."
The largest master-planned urban environment was Irvine, in Orange County, California, 35 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. It was the center of a development of staggering proportions. Originally a Spanish land-grant ranch, it covered 160 square miles, ranging from the Pacific Ocean to 20 miles inland. Some of those acres sold in the 1980s for US$1 million apiece. It was so big that its tentacles entangled an entire university campus, two Marine bases, and three edge cities - one called the Irvine Business Complex, another Newport Center, and a third Irvine Spectrum.
In the medium future, history seems to be going Irvine's way. The market for its walled burbclaves - featuring homes painted only in variations on the color of Caucasian skin - booms. So what if the $400,000 Spanish townhouses with their tiled roofs are so indistinguishable that the easiest way to find yours is to hold down the button of the garage-door remote until it makes a panel open?
So what if the neighborhood shadow-government, which rules with an iron fist in the innocuous name of community association, can control the color you choose for your front door or your living-room curtains? So what if it can prohibit washing your car in your own driveway or regulate what size dog you own?
This seems like a small price to pay in a period when uncertainty swirls and security - physical, financial, and moral - is at a premium.
In fact, in the medium future, Irvine markets itself as the Singapore of the Americas. It brags about the Victorian rigidity of its régimes - the safety of the office towers in which a central computer has to recognize you before you are so much as allowed into the ladies room. More corporate enclaves sprout, like the home of the construction industry's Fluor Corporation. They seem to be mirror-finished moon bases visiting this realm. And in a way, they are. The streets are spotless, the SAT scores extraordinary. Everything gleams. The golf courses gleam. The endless gold fixtures in the bathrooms gleam. The robot monorails, the curved geometry of the BMWs and Mercedeses, the uniform trim on the shoulders of the gardener fishing minute cigarette specks out of the water features - they all gleam.
How then, does Irvine come to ruin? Why do vines climb the elevator shafts and plywood sheath the windows?
Adaptation.
Irvine tries to prevent it. But over the course of a raucous century, Irvine goes downhill. First, the comptrollers of corporate America can't stand to alter their corporate palaces in Irvine. Put in a fireplace to make an office more homey? Retrofit a building with windows that open? Forget accomplishing that kind of radical change quickly in Irvine. If it's not in the plan, it's anarchy.
People interested in getting on with their everyday lives, meanwhile, find it simpler to live and work in less authoritarian edge cities. It's not that people don't love the safety and security of the walls that surround them in Irvine. It's just that as their lives change - as they marry, have children, retire, or become empty nesters - they have to move on because the plan for Irvine will not. People find it simpler to move than to fight, and the resistance movement that arises briefly is crushed by fines and foreclosures.
With the benefit of hindsight, people in the far-term future now view it as obvious that cities are not clockwork, but living organisms following the rules of biology. To thrive, cities must be able to evolve ingeniously. They must be able to adapt quickly to a changing environment.
This must happen on at least two levels. Cities must have a leadership with vision to build the new airport, fund the new university, forever save the treasured seashore. But the most successful edge cities - the ones that thrive and prosper - are the ones most able to change the details quickly. Each of these changes brought about by people using hand tools is insignificant, but in the hundreds of millions, they create the places we most want to call home.
Irvine, on the other hand, violates the spirit of the great William Levitt, the genius who built his original Levittowns in the 1950s with the full expectation that returning GIs would add to his original cheap designs the gables, dormers, wings, second stories, fireplaces, porches, decks, and bathrooms they both needed and could afford.
Old man Levitt was so smart that today, when you go to a Levittown, you have to be an architectural historian to know you're in one. None of the homes is alike. They're all attractive, upscale, diverse American properties. When the preservationists finally found one that had not been adapted, they put a brass plaque on it. That was the only way it could finally be set in amber. It was a historical singularity.
So Irvine's holdings are sold to ever less demanding users. Ultimately, the city becomes an extension of the barrio of nearby Anaheim. Mexican and Central-American immigrants love the new homes the Anglos have inexplicably left. It is as amazing a windfall to them as were the beautiful homes of the old downtown districts whites hysterically abandoned to blacks back East in the 1960s.
But the spiral continues because the office buildings are no longer near the homes of the overclass who flee to Coeur d'Alene and Santa Fe (and even Manhattan!), where the rigidity is not as stifling as in Irvine. The city's sanitized vision turns to vapor and still less scrupulous dwellers take over again.
Yet Irvine is an exception. Most edge cities thrive - the ones that are adaptive and open-minded; the ones that constantly rebuild themselves and embrace the heretical and the young.
