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Edge
City: Life on the New Frontier, by Joel Garreau.
From the very beginning of Washington
Post editor Joel
Garreau's popular and influential account of the edge
city phenomenon, he explains that the book is an act of
reporting, not criticism or polemics. This distinction allows
the author to present other people's stories -- a la Studs
Terkel or Haruki Murakami
-- in addition to the presentation of facts that explain
the phenomenon. These stories help give the book a personal
flavor that make it more understandable to more people.
The most interesting aspect of the book is the variety of
voices and approaches to what is in effect a homogenous
physical thing, the large cities with a great deal of office
space and other uses that exist well beyond traditional
downtowns.
Garreau covers specific edge cities
around Atlanta, Detroit, Houston, and Washington D.C., among
others American cities. But rather than using each of these
chapters to focus on the peculiarities of each situation,
he uses each as a starting point for the widespread conditions
of all edge cities. For example, Detroit naturally leads
to a discussion of the impact of the automobile, Atlanta
deals with race issues, and Phoenix looks at the blurring
of public/private distinctions that are typically clear
in downtown jurisdictions but not in edge cities. He also
discusses Christopher Alexander's
alternatives to this condition, notions of progress, technology,
shopping, developers, the list goes on. Garreau is most
lacking in environmental considerations, thinking that automobiles
will always be around, be they powered by gasoline or corn
or hydrogen. The subtitle of the book says as much: the
edge city condition is a frontier, a stepping stone into
the future and continued progress. In the less than twenty
years since this book was published, ideas of progress and
its relationship to the built and natural environment are
increasingly called into question, enough that the continued
existence of edge cities is not guaranteed, at least not
in its current form.
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