The Agile City by James S. Russell

Author:James S. Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press/Center for Resource Economics, Washington, DC

Megaburbia Seizes Up

For decades, business-location analysts assumed that downtown was for finance and banking and that the suburbs, with their easy mobility, were for most every other kind of business. But highly interactive and highly collaborative ways of working have grown in tandem with the “distributive,” supposedly suburb-friendly technologies that have matured in recent years, such as e-mail and the Internet. This has begun to change the game for megaburban business centers, which have depended on the ability to move quickly across very large landscapes by auto.

Have a look at what’s happened to Hollywood—the industry, not the place. The movie and television (and, nowadays, computer game and animation) businesses grew within the greater Los Angeles basin everywhere but downtown, even though these are quintessentially creative and collaborative endeavors. You find studios north, in Burbank, or dozens of miles south, in Orange County, and scattered everywhere in between. For decades, it didn’t matter that Burbank and Culver City were not close to each other, because freeways knitted them together. Today, traffic conditions require chauffeured producers to motor an hour from the coast to see bankers and attorneys downtown. Low-paid production assistants haul perhaps forty-five minutes from somewhere near USC to the San Fernando Valley. The stakes are too high in Hollywood, and the business too competitive, to afford to have so many people stuck in so much traffic. For now, though, that’s the only possibility.

The realm that Hollywood occupies in metropolitan Los Angeles represents a tiny slice of its geographical extent—a reach that up to a few years ago was entirely accessible by car in under an hour. As the metropolitan area grows beyond a hundred miles in every direction, and “close-in” housing has gotten more expensive, the roads have congealed and greater Los Angeles has begun to divide itself into separate spheres determined by drive times. Orange County and the San Fernando Valley are severing themselves from Los Angeles, creating independent economies that are less integrated because it is too difficult to get from place to place. These developments undermine the ability to access talent that is the key business advantage of large urban areas. As each person’s drive-time radius shrinks, Los Angeles loses the advantages of bigness and the disadvantages begin to loom larger. You can say the same about both Atlanta and Silicon Valley, though these are among the most heavily freewayed landscapes in America. For similar reasons, the economy of Long Island is becoming steadily more isolated from that of metropolitan New York, because sclerotic freeways and a lack of train service make Westchester County, southern Connecticut, and New Jersey suburbs all but inaccessible.

The changed way businesses interact with one another has become noticeable in the way companies build facilities in the megaburban hinterlands. Up until the 1990s, prestigious corporations erected self-contained campuses on vast acreages in tony suburbs, wrapping these emblems of success with private lakes, running trails, and impeccably groomed landscaping. The insightful urban observer William H. Whyte noticed that no one wanted to visit

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