Edge City:
Life on the New Frontier
New Stuff
Luxury Urban Apartment Bubble About to Burst?
Joel Kotkin argues that all the high-rise luxury apartment growth in downtowns like New York, the Bay Area and Miami are built on a myth -- that retiring American seniors are heading there.
New Uses for Office Space Surging
As the Net transforms where and how we work, the demand for office space, predictably, is lagging. Enterprising developers are looking for new uses -- even for brand new office space that is not filling up.
Collapse of Office Market in Places Not Good For F2F
Santa-Fe-ing of the World Update: As predicted, the more time we spend in front of our screens, the more premium we put on F2F contact.
Shockingly Empty Chinese Edge Cities
Sixty Minutes tours millions of square feet and miles of high-end emptiness all over the country, saying this is a bubble that could take down the Chinese economy
An Edge City in Ethiopia
Of all places. But hey, Addis Abeba is growing fast, and sure enough, the greatest activity is in the Bole District, which includes Bole International Airport.
Surprising Study of Phoenix Area Edge Cities
In a slide show, Daniel J. Christen shares a study of the Phoenix area he started in grad school. Joel is not familiar with his numbers methodology. But if true, the most startling aspect is the growth of the Scottsdale Airport Edge City -- coming out of essentially nowhere when Joel published in 1991 -- to become the biggest Edge City in the entire region.
The Stuff Coming to Us in Ways That Transform Cities
We are in the middle of a freight revolution that is transforming the built environment. Instead of us needing to go to the stuff (traditional retail), the stuff is increasingly coming to us (Santa Claus now comes in a Big Brown truck).
Santa-Fe-ing Dispersed Concentration as the New Normal
Joel's "Santa Fe-ing Effect," in which the future of cities seems to be a technology-enabled drive toward dispersed, nicer and smaller places that are great at creating face-to-face contact, is noted by Witold Rybczynski in Slate.
Las Vegas as an Exemplar of the Santa-Fe-ing Phenom
The New Yorker has an excellent piece describing how, in the age of advanced communications and rapid global delivery of anything, cities can now rise anywhere people choose to congregate. It masquerades as a piece about how haute cuisine is possible in Las Vegas. (A plane lands there every three minutes.
Santa Fe-ing of the World, Part Two
This is part two of the NewGeography piece, in which Joel discusses how information technology is also reshaping the non-affluent parts of the globe.
Santa Fe-ing of the World, Part One
NewGeography published a two-part piece by Joel on his latest major update of Edge City, about how information technology is reshaping cities as thoroughly as did the automobile, and faster. This is Part One.
Edge City Contributing to Drop in Male Employment?
Mother Jones magazine asks the question.
What’s It About
Joel Garreau is the foremost chronicler of the biggest revolution in 150 years in how humans build the cities that are the cornerstones, capstones and, sometimes, millstones of their civilizations -- the places where most of our new wealth is being created.
This shift toward what Garreau christened "Edge Cities" – Information Age 21st-century nodes where the majority of Americans now live, work, play, pray, socialize, shop, grow up and grow old – shows what people genuinely value.
Garreau's work has been acclaimed by marketers, entrepreneurs and social analysts. He pioneered the Edge City Boundaries, which demonstrate there are now 171 new urban cores in the U.S. outside the old downtowns. These Edge Cities – such as Silicon Valley, Calif., The Route 128 Technology Corridor in Massachusetts, Tysons Corner, Va., Schaumburg, Ill., and Irvine, Calif. – are home to the headquarters of such world shapers as Microsoft, Motorola, McDonalds and The Greatest Show on Earth, The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Some of these Edge Cities are now larger than downtown Seattle or Minneapolis. They have become the places around which the majority of all Americans now live, work and vote. Edge Cities are not simply American creations. They have sprung up in urban areas as diverse as London, Paris, Toronto, Seoul, Peking and Jakarta. They are the great drivers of wealth and jobs, worldwide.
For his work on Edge City, Garreau was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize three times. He has been much in demand from all groups with a stake in these new places: Marketers of consumer products and political professionals, financiers (e.g. Prudential, CB Commercial, J.P. Morgan, pension funds and Japanese investors); stakeholders in particular Edge Cities (e.g. the Buckhead Coalition, Oregon Metro); and future-oriented professionals (e.g. the American Institute of Architects, Brown University, Michigan State University). Joel has appeared on over one thousand television and radio programs, including "Good Morning America," "Today," "The CBS Evening News With Dan Rather," "the NBC Nightly News," "ABC World News With Peter Jennings," National Public Radio's "Morning Edition," Cable News Network, The Jesse Jackson Show and The Larry King Show.
Joel Garreau is a senior writer for The Washington Post in Washington DC, president of his company, The Garreau Group, and a member of the scenario-planning consortium Global Business Network. He writes and consults from his Virginia home, which he shares with his wife and two daughters.
Chapters
Introduction: Pioneers, Frontiers, and the Twenty-first Century
The controversial assumption undergirding this book is that Americans basically are pretty smart cookies who generally know what they're doing.
Lord knows, we have sorely tested that premise over the last four centuries. But it is further assumed that this good sense is especially evident when Americans cussedly march off in precisely the opposite directions from those toward which our elders and betters have been aiming us. At such times of apparently rampant perversity, this thinking goes, the correct response is not to throw up one's hands and decry Americans as fools. It is to echo Gandhi when he said, "There go my people; I must rush to catch up with them, for I am their leader."
Chapter 1: The Search for the Future Inside Ourselves – Life on the New Frontier
"But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory." —Huckleberry Finn, at the close of Mark Twain's novel, 1885
Chapter 2: New Jersey – Tomorrowland
"For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we—you and I—shall build." —John Cheever, 1978
Chapter 4: Detroit – The Automobile, Individualism, and Time
"Americans are in the habit of never walking if they can ride." —Louis Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, 1798
Chapter 5: Atlanta – The Color of Money
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963
Chapter 6: Phoenix – Shadow Government
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want . . . and deserve to get it, good and bad." —H. L. Mencken.
Chapter 7: Texas – Civilization
What happened to you living in England—what exactly did you see?
"I saw how much more in tune I am with a forceful society like our own, fueled by immigration, where the ambition is naked and the animus is undisguised and the energy is relentless and expended openly, without embarrassment or apology. I'm speaking of intellectual and literary intensity no less than the intensity behind all the American trash, the intensity that's generated by the American historical drama of movement and mas-sive displacement, of class overspreading class, region overtaking region, minority encroaching on minority, and the media cannibalizing the works. Try to imagine England inviting, on the scale that the U.S. does, the cultural and political clash." —Philip Roth, 1988
Chapter 8: Southern California – Community
"Man is returning to the descendants of the wandering tribe--the adventurers, I hope." —Frank Lloyd Wright, 1958
Chapter 9: The San Francisco Bay Area – Soul
"Until it has had a poet, a place is not a place." —Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
Chapter 10: Washington – The Land
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." —William Faulkner
Chapter 11: The List – Edge Cities Coast to Coast
This is a select compilation of Edge Cities in North America.
Although this is one of the more thorough such lists at this writing (1991), the nature of the beast doubtless makes it incomplete. Edge Cities are a function of growth; they change. In a time and place of rapid expansion, as in the Washington region of the late 1980s, the number of Edge Cities swelled from thirteen to sixteen in two years. By the same token, while the area around Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport does not qualify as a mature Edge City in the early 1990s, that is probably not a permanent condition.
Chapter 12: The Words – Glossary of a New Frontier
The builders of Edge City—the developers and their cohorts—are the biggest gossips since federal prosecutors, and for the same reason: they are constantly trying to figure out what makes human beings tick. As professional gossips, they have evolved their own code. It includes:
Chapter 13: The Laws – How We Live
The North Star of moral certitudes, or at least prayerful assumptions, for developers is that human nature, and hence the marketplace, is rational. Hence, predictable. Therefore, they believe, all they have to do is figure out what the rules of human behavior are, and they will be rewarded greatly. There are two things they find most perplexing:
Acknowledgments
Any large-scale look at America ends up involving a legion of co-conspirators, I've discovered. Hundreds of people all over the country contributed interviews, information, candid advice, incisive readings, and lasting companionship to this effort. It quite simply could not have been done without them. I regret that I cannot either thank each of them here or cite them all adequately in the text. Any errors of fact, emphasis, or interpretation in this volume are entirely my own. However:
Suggested Reading
Edge City draws on the efforts of many thoughtful people. It is not possible to list all their works. So this, instead, is a cull of items that I think the general reader may find useful, enjoyable, and even startling. Many of these, in turn, have bibliographies and notes that lead off in yet more directions.
This is a personal list—hardly an attempt at a complete one. Nor is it a list of prime sources. Many of those were interviews, several were computer runs, and more than a few were too boring to inflict casually on other human beings. Readers with specific questions about resources and research opportunities are welcome to contact the author in care of The Edge City Group, Broad Run, VA 22014-9501.
Edge City New Stuff
Luxury Urban Apartment Bubble About to Burst?
Joel Kotkin argues that all the high-rise luxury apartment growth in downtowns like New York, the Bay Area and Miami are built on a myth -- that retiring American seniors are heading there.
New Uses for Office Space Surging
As the Net transforms where and how we work, the demand for office space, predictably, is lagging. Enterprising developers are looking for new uses -- even for brand new office space that is not filling up.
Collapse of Office Market in Places Not Good For F2F
Santa-Fe-ing of the World Update: As predicted, the more time we spend in front of our screens, the more premium we put on F2F contact.
An Intentionally Inclusive Detroit Edge City
Southfield, Michigan -- the prototypical Detroit Edge City, with a staggering 27 million feet of office and the motto "The Center of It All" -- intentionally made itself multiethnic and inclusive. Now affluent, educated blacks are in the majority.
Shockingly Empty Chinese Edge Cities
Sixty Minutes tours millions of square feet and miles of high-end emptiness all over the country, saying this is a bubble that could take down the Chinese economy
An Edge City in Ethiopia
Of all places. But hey, Addis Abeba is growing fast, and sure enough, the greatest activity is in the Bole District, which includes Bole International Airport.
Surprising Study of Phoenix Area Edge Cities
In a slide show, Daniel J. Christen shares a study of the Phoenix area he started in grad school. Joel is not familiar with his numbers methodology. But if true, the most startling aspect is the growth of the Scottsdale Airport Edge City -- coming out of essentially nowhere when Joel published in 1991 -- to become the biggest Edge City in the entire region.
The Stuff Coming to Us in Ways That Transform Cities
We are in the middle of a freight revolution that is transforming the built environment. Instead of us needing to go to the stuff (traditional retail), the stuff is increasingly coming to us (Santa Claus now comes in a Big Brown truck).
Santa-Fe-ing Dispersed Concentration as the New Normal
Joel's "Santa Fe-ing Effect," in which the future of cities seems to be a technology-enabled drive toward dispersed, nicer and smaller places that are great at creating face-to-face contact, is noted by Witold Rybczynski in Slate.
Las Vegas as an Exemplar of the Santa-Fe-ing Phenom
The New Yorker has an excellent piece describing how, in the age of advanced communications and rapid global delivery of anything, cities can now rise anywhere people choose to congregate. It masquerades as a piece about how haute cuisine is possible in Las Vegas. (A plane lands there every three minutes.
An Intentionally Inclusive Detroit Edge City
Southfield, Michigan -- the prototypical Detroit Edge City, with a staggering 27 million feet of office and the motto "The Center of It All" -- intentionally made itself multiethnic and inclusive. Now affluent, educated blacks are in the majority.