Edge City

Edge City by Joel Garreau
Edge City describes, as optimistically as possible, rising areas of suburbia. It's a hard sell: the dominant images of suburbia in my mind are 1) Saturday afternoon gridlock on I-35 caused by, as far as I can tell, a big strip of box stores; 2) The giant and
horrifying I-35, Texas 45 superloop (below); and 3) huge tracts of identical KB homes, expanding ever deeper into the Texas Hill Country. Suburbs, in my imagination, are horrible, lifeless places with no culture and no identity. But Joel Garreau will try to convince us anyway. He has some valid points, but not enough to redeem suburbia.
The most useful contribution is the distinction between what Garreau calls an Edge City and mere suburbia. Suburbia is more like a bedroom community, he says; Edge City actually keeps people in it in the day. He has a useful taxonomy based on the amount of office and retail space and whether the place has more jobs than bedrooms. Essentially, he is describing the difference between Round Rock and Kyle.
Garreau's case that 'Edge City' (there are individual Edge Cities, but the collective phenomenon is Edge City) is essentially that, given a set of assumptions about Americans, Edge Cities are better than the alternatives. Americans will always prefer cars, always prefer houses, and always be willing to sacrifice identity for convenience. He describes a family who left jobs and an apartment in downtown Boston to live in a community of densely-packed, identical, yardless townhouses by a highway twice as far from downtown Boston as Walden Pond is. That was a convoluted sentence, but the Garreau's point is that if Americans will make those choices, Edge City will help. Notably, Edge City actually reduces commutes because office space is outside downtown. Edge City helps connect man with nature, he writes, because deer play in office parks in the middle of New Jersey. Malls like the Galleria in Houston are as impressive as cultural icons as many to be found in downtowns.
These are positive things, I suppose. But Reluctant Metropolis describes Angelenos willing to get up at 4 am to beat traffic in their 60 mile commutes. and in the paragraph about nature, he also lists 11 species sprawl is endangering in New Jersey alone. And everyone he interviews still goes to the actual city for culture and entertainment.
But its all ok, he says, because new city forms always look bad and chaotic, but then transform into something better. Chicago, New York, and London and Venice were all horrifying at some point. But they refined themselves year by year becoming better and better. What looks attractive about those cities now is the end result of a maturing process. Accordingly, Edge Cities will also refine and become more attractive as years go by. Except they won't. Because people will keep moving out. In a chapter on Dallas, Garreau takes to task the planners and architects who focus on “problematic downtowns” while ignoring Edge City. They can't change human nature, he argues, and so should focus on molding suburbia as best as possible. But as Downtown Inc. shows, the efforts to restore downtown are part of what makes the city form constantly improve. If you keep moving out, those refinements never happen.
Edge City is still a worthwhile book, even if it's 20 years out of date. (e.g. The facsimile machine will change the world in unfathomable ways!) But the economics are solid, and probably function similarly today. And it's a good ethnography of suburbanites. And I'll definitely be returning to some of the issues it raises. But its core thesis, that Edge City is ultimately positive, rings hollow to me.

All the Same!

Midtown West Commons

(Courtesy of Trammell Crow Co.)

The Triangle:













Allaustin.com
The Domain:














(from glidingresidential.com)

5350 Burnet:













(Courtesy of Ardent Residential)

Post South Lamar:










(Courtesy of Ardent Residential)
Post West Austin:










(Courtesy of Ardent Residential)

These are six recent mixed use development projects in Austin all built (or being built) within a range of five years. The Triangle was finished in 2007, and the Domain will be finished in 2011, I think. They are spread throughout the city, but they are all new, upper class, and they look the same. Not exactly the same but they have a common central element: Each building has boxy, rectangular prisms of alternating neutral shades. All of them, except the Triangle, project their windows in an angular fashion.

I have only vague guesses as to how this came about, whether by accident or by design. There may be a grander Urban Design strategy afoot, trying to establish, perhaps, an “Austin Architecture” but that seems unlikely. Or possibly, there is a general country or region wide trend towards such architecture. If there is, I will feel quite foolish, but I assume there is not. So I started looking at the developers, which offered some clues. Let's start with Ardent Residential.

Ardent Residential is an Austin based company, responsible for the Four Seasons condos, and three of the above projects: the Post West Austin, the Post South Lamar, and 5350 Burnet. For those three, but not the Four Seasons, Ardent Residential employed LRK. So it makes sense that these three buildings all look similar, but did they influence the rest? The two posts and 5350 Burnet were built, chronologically, in the middle of these projects. So let's look at the Triangle.

The Triangle was developed in 2008 by Cencor Urban, a company that developed three other pieces of property in the Austin area. But those projects, such as Mueller Regional Retail and another retail parcel out by Lakeline mall, are both purely retail, and do not look like the mixed use buildings.

Likewise, Trammell Crow, who built Midtown Commons, also built The Shore (at Red River south of Cesar Chavez) and is working on the Austin Water Treatment plant. Neither of these buildings look like multicolored boxes placed side by side, so I'm not sure if the design of Midwest Commons intentionally looked like the others.

I think I'm going to write a separate post about the Domain in the next few weeks, whereat I may revisit this topic if I have any new insights, but otherwise it seems that the multicolored box formulation only affects mixed use developments outside downtown.

The upshot of all of this is mostly just that it's interesting and I'm not sure how it happened. All the buildings, taken individually, look good. If they propagate further, I might get grumpy, but as of now the phenomenon is just interesting.

Introduction:
This blog is an intellectual exercise. I've been reading extensively on cities and city planning, and I feel that writing about them with descriptions, and analysis will cement knowledge in my mind, and hone writing skills that have languished this past year since I finished my B.A. And, since I live in Austin, I'll try to apply the readings to the city. So, for the book I read on Los Angeles (below), I compare the two cities, and hopefully find more dissimilarities than similarities.
Posts will take one of two forms. Every Tuesday and Friday, a big post on the book I'm reading. And periodically, hopefully several times a week, they'll be posts on relevant issues to Austin. If, for instance, I had started this blog last week, there would be a post about the TODs along the Red Line.
I've been reading for a while, so here are summaries of the books I've already read.

The Life and Death of Great American Cities – Jane Jacobs
This is the seminal text of urban planning, and the title that drew me to the field. I ran across it in an article I read for my eminent domain work, which it condemns (as it were) in very harsh terms. Written in 1962, the book was a polemic against the urban planners of the day. Urban renewal plans of the 1950's and 1960's focused on tearing down blighted communities and replacing them with big single use buildings, like office buildings and housing projects. The projects were designed according to Le Courbusier's radiant city ideas: tall buildings surrounded by open grass and streets were supposed to make for an attractive city. Such ideas spawned projects like Cabrini Green and other slums; Jacobs rightfully attacked them for fostering crime and poverty.
She also attacked big office buildings downtown; since the workers they brought to town left as soon as 5 o'clock hit, she argued they added nothing to the value of downtown. Instead, she argued for diversity: downtown buildings with office, retail and housing space. (Which Austin is trying to create with the condos and the 2nd street shopping district, among other projects.)
Jane Jacobs lived in New York, and many of her insights, though substantiated by other examples, come from the positive experience of her neighborhood. This can be kind of irritating, but its the still the foundational book of planning, and it will come up many more times. Accordingly, I'm not going to elaborate with respect to Austin beyond the brief note on 2nd street and condos.

The Reluctant Metropolis – William Fulton
The mechanics of Los Angeles are somewhat terrifying. I've always wondered why a city of such size arose in a desert with no water and no harbor, and no discernable core. Los Angeles was engineered by a cabal of real estate planners. They tricked and bullied the rest of Southern California for water rights and then sold the city as rural and idyllic to attract people seeking lots of land and a nice climate. Los Angeles' economy was urban sprawl: the more people came, the farther away from the center they settled and homebuilding was the biggest industry. And LA county was big, and freeway money was plentiful, so this expansion never really stopped.
Unfortunately, all the suburbs incorporated as different towns, diffused power through the entire region, making the region almost entirely ungovernable. No good public transportation, no effective water sharing plan, no cultural center (the Walt Disney center was unfinished and millions of dollars over budget when the book was written – it was a prime example of the city's failures) and a host of other urban problems resulted. A collection of towns that saw themselves as independent led to a “reluctant metropolis” lacking identity and unity.
Austin, happily, has a core identity built around the Capital and the University of Texas. And the music scene establishes a cultural identity for the city in a way that Hollywood can't for Los Angeles. The book made me happy, because even though Austin continues to sprawl, it will never turn into L.A.

Mega Projects – Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff
This book was essentially Downtown Inc. about highways, airports and convention centers. It kept referencing Downtown Inc. and said essentially the same things, so I read Downtown Inc. instead.

Downtown Inc.
This is an awesome book. It was written in 1990 and concerns the struggle to renew downtowns eviscerated by suburban malls and failed urban renewal projects. The book focuses on four projects: Faneuil Hall in Boston, Horton Plaza in San Diego, Pike Place in Seattle, and Town Square in St. Paul. All of these successfully adopted the idea of a suburban shopping mall but made it work within a city's character to establish city landmarks that bring people back to downtown. It made me happy, because I like downtowns, and it illustrates what urban planning can accomplish with creativity and persistence. Downtown Inc. is the opposite of the book I'm currently reading, Edge City, and I'll discuss it at greater length next post when I discuss Edge City.