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- Info
Edge city: Life on the new frontier
| Author: |
Garreau, Joel |
| Date: |
1992 |
| Periodical: |
New York, NY: Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc. |
| Abstract: |
Welcome to Edge City. We Americans are going through the most radical change in a century in how we build our world, and most of us don't even know it. From coast to coast, every metropolis that is growing is doing so by sprouting strange new kinds of places: Edge Cities. Not since we took Paul Reveres Boston and Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia and exploded them into nineteenth-century industrial behemoths have we made such dramatic changes in how we live, work, and play. Most of us now spend our entire lives in and around these Edge Cities, yet we barely recognize them for what they are. That's because they look nothing like the old downtowns; they meet none of our preconceptions of what constitutes a city. Our new Edge Cities are tied together not by locomotives and subways, but by freeways, jetways, and jogging paths. Their characteristic monument is not a horse-mounted hero in the square, but an atrium shielding trees perpetually in leaf at the cores of our corporate headquarters, fitness centers, and shopping plazas. Our new urban centers are marked not by the penthouses of the old urban rich, or the tenements of the old urban poor, but by the celebrated single-family home with grass all around. For the rise of the Edge City reflects us moving our jobs-our means of creating wealth, the very essence of our urbanism-out to where we've been living and shopping for two generations. The wonder is that these places, these curious new urban cores, were villages or corn stubble just thirty years ago. Joel Garreau has spent four years exploring America's Edge Cities. From the Washington area (which alone encompasses sixteen Edge Cities) to Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York, Phoenix, Detroit, San Francisco, Boston, Houston, and Dallas, Garreau explains how these Edge Cities are changing our lives in countless ways, many of them elemental and profound. He examines everything, from the kinds of jobs Edge Cities generate to whether they will ever be good places in which to fall in love or hold a Fourth of July parade. For our new civilization, built on the shoulders of these Edge Cities, reflects once again our perpetually unfinished American business of reinventing ourselves, redefining ourselves, announcing that our centuries-old revolution--our search for the future inside ourselves-still beats strong. Thus, by looking at what we have done, we can more clearly see who we are, how we got that way, where we're headed, and what we value. |
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