Edge City by Joel Garreau

Author:Joel Garreau [Garreau, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80194-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

“My brother and I had that memorized. They’d bring us out and we’d sing it.”

Nielsen loves neighborhoods that “seethe.” He loves places where you can walk to work and if you regularly stop at a little joint on the way to pick up a carton of coffee, soon everybody in the neighborhood knows you. He likes to talk to people in different strata of society. He likes urban areas that are full of sur prises. He thinks the whole point of cities is to bring diverse people together.

That is why it troubles him that he feels personally excluded from Edge Cities like the one built by his father, vice chairman of the Irvine Company. His dilemma is sharpened because each such development emphasizes the idea of community. As in “master-planned community.”

“I feel locked out in the financial sense,” says Nielsen of the Irvine that has been such a market success that the median home prices in its region are the third highest in America.

“But I don’t mean to imply that if I had enough money that is where I’d go. The things I am interested in are not part of a place like Irvine. There’s that whole notion: We’re going to build this thing that is perfect for you. We haven’t met you but we know what you’re like and we know you’re going to like it here. That is a repulsive idea, and I wouldn’t trust the person who tried to tell me that. You’re in the artist’s conception. You wake up and you’re one of those lanky people walking around evenly spaced. I can’t see that. My experience has been that in places like that you have a lot of people who think they have it figured out. You just have the coffee-bean machine here and …” Nielsen’s voice descends to a whisper. He is almost talking to himself. Then he hurtles back.

“That kind of ordered circumstance is scary to me. Maybe the world is divided into people who love to hum ‘Is that all there is?’ and take random walks and people who don’t. It’s a hard thing for me.”

What Nielsen is struggling with is the extent to which Edge Cities weave or unravel the American social fabric. For this reason, his conflicts are historic. Ever since the rise of what used to be called “bedroom communities”—that is, classic residential suburbs—scholars have been trying to define where these places fit into a larger social scheme. Especially in the 1950s, when the floodtide of homes moved out past our old conception of city, the outpouring of journalism, fiction, and sociology on these issues was prodigious. It had a distinct tone. Herbert J. Gans, in his landmark 1967 work, The Levittowners, pungently described the shots that were taken. If you believed the critics, he wrote, the “myth of suburbia” would have you surmise:

“The suburbs were breeding a new set of Americans, as massproduced as the houses they lived in … incapable of real friendships; they were bored and lonely,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.