“Shakespeare had it wrong,” Washington Post senior writer Joel Garreau said on a recent visit to Chicago. “Instead of ‘Let’s shoot all the lawyers,’ he should have written ‘Let’s shoot all the planners.’”
His treason is twofold. First, he no longer automatically disapproves of such places on principle. Having compared planned communities with those that grew up under comparative anarchy, Garreau suspects that anarchy works better, reminding us that the prototypical beautiful European city, Venice, grew without benefit of a plan. And he doesn’t think that edge cities compete destructively with downtowns; most big-city downtowns, after all, flourished during the 1980s.
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But they don’t have attractive public spaces. The malls, stores, and campuslike corporate lawns are privately owned and carefully patrolled. “In Edge City,” writes Garreau, “about the closest thing you find to a public space–where just about anybody can go–is the parking lot. In Edge City, no commercial center could survive if it had as poor a reputation for safety as do the streets of most downtowns.” He quotes George Sternlieb of Rutgers University: “They don’t want the strangers. If it is a choice between parks and strangers, the people there would sooner do without the parks.”
Garreau studied nine edge-city clusters, from northern New Jersey to southern California. (He didn’t do Chicago–Detroit beat us out because it gave him a better venue to discuss the automobile.) His thinking changed more than the scenery did. “I used to think architects were the guardians of the built environment. I thought planners had some idea of how the world works,” he told me ruefully. But when he asked them about these weird new places–places growing so fast that when he returned after a year he would get hopelessly lost–they knew little and cared less. “They not only regarded the suburbs as sprawl gone morally wrong, they considered these places and the people in them so banal as to be utterly remote from their experience and interests. They viewed themselves as having a higher calling.”
It’s one thing to choose the old compact central cities and try to make them work. It’s quite another to imagine them being made more or less compulsory. Even the gawky growing pains of Naperville might be better than that.
