Since America's founding, four stages of population movement have marked our society. For more than 100 years, we were a rural country. The Industrial Revolution transformed us into a country of city dwellers, while the rise of the car in the '50s saw the switch to suburban life as people moved beyond the city limits but streamed back each day to work.
Over the last 20 years, a fourth stage of American development has emerged in parallel with the rise of edge cities around the cores of older metropolitan centers. The marked distinction between edge-city and suburban life is that, unlike the typical suburban dweller who's still linked to the city core for their daily bread, edge-city inhabitants rarely visit this core. Their jobs are close by, either within their edge city or one over.
Joel Garreau examines this demographic trend in his excellent work, Edge City, covering territories in New Jersey, Boston, Detroit, Atlanta, Phoenix, Texas, Southern California, the San Francisco Bay area, and Washington, DC. In this 1991 work, Garreau presages the incredible developments in PCs and telecommunications technologies since the start of the '90s and basically lays out a blueprint for how and why today's technocenters sprang out of the ashes of the collapse of the go-go '80s. Edge City is far from a dry tome of charts and figures; it reveals motivations behind the trend, the real estate economics at play, and the important implications of this new frontier on American society.
Two chapters at the end, "The Glossary" and "The Laws," should be read first and are worth the book's price alone. "The Glossary" is a concise compilation of real estate terms, such as FAR (floor-to-area ratio) and CC&Rs (covenants, conditions, and restrictions), while "The Laws" reveals developer rules of thumb, each utterly engaging. Here's a sample: The average distance from the main office of a company in edge city to the CEO's home: 8 miles. Cervero's Law of the value of time wasted in traffic jams: People view the time they spend in a traffic jam as equal, in dollar value, to half of their hourly wage. The maximum desirable commute, throughout human history, regardless of transportation technology: 45 minutes. The three laws of building: 1. Build. 2. Build at the lowest possible cost. 3. If Rule One and Two come into conflict, Rule One takes precedence.
Edge City is a glimpse of the America to come, whether we're ready or not.
Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, by Joel Garreau: US$15.95. Anchor Books: +1 (212) 782 0401.
This article originally appeared in the December issue of Wired magazine.
To subscribe to Wired magazine, send email to subscriptions@wired.com, or call +1 (800) SO WIRED.
