Edge City. - book reviews

.. lives up to its perfect title. With a warm, vicious wit journalist Garreau explores and solidly explains the current and future convulsions of American cities, exfoliating into adaptive new things at the perimeter that don't have mayors or even names, but they are where urban life - and thus civilization - is being newly invented

Surprise: edge cities are mainly good even for the city cores left behind, even for environmentalists - when we are honest enough to participate in this most robust ecological "edge effect."

The reporting here is American; the phenomenon is global.

Already, two thirds of all American office facilities are in Edge Cities, and 80 percent of them hove materialized in only the lost two decades.

Cities are always created around whatever the state-of-the-art transportation device is at the time.... The combination of the present is the automobile, the jet plane, and the computer.

"Edge City is an adaptable creature," said Pamela Manfre..." It fixes itself. It redefines itself. It's almost as if we're working out equations. We 'solve for' problems. We 'solve for' commutes. And then we 'solve for' sterility. And then we solve for' choice."

There is probably no more important low of Edge City location than this; Whenever a company moves its headquarters, the commute of the chief executive officer always becomes shorter.

Master Planning: ... In practice, that attribute of a development in which so many rigid controls are put in place, to defeat every imaginable future problem, that any possibility of life, spontaneity, or flexible response to unanticipated events is eliminated.

Depending on whom you listen to, [Christopherl Alexander is the most innovative thinker in the last one hundred years on the way we design and build our lives; or he is o dangerous radical who threatens the fabric of the building, banking, real estate, and architecture industries; or he is a

delusional flake.

Edge City Joel Garreau, 1991; 546 pp.

$22.50 ($25 postpaid) from Doubleday & Co./Fulfillment Dept., 2151 S. Wolf Rood, Des Plaines, IL 60018; 800/223-6834 (or Whole Earth Access)

COPYRIGHT 1991 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group