First there was downtown. Then there were suburbs. Then there were malls. Then Americans launched the most sweeping change in 100 years in how they live, work, and play. The Edge City.
First there was downtown. Then there were suburbs. Then there were malls. Then Americans launched the most sweeping change in 100 years in how they live, work, and play. The Edge City.
Edge City: Life on the New Frontier
by Joel Garreau
(1992)
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.