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.