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from The New York Times, 1991
...The prejudices of planners and architects--cars are bad, density is good--put them at odds with the general American public, which believes the exact opposite. And although planners are aware of the suburbs, they assume that these outlying areas can be ignored since they will always be dependent on the traditional city center, whose revitalization has remained the focus of architectural attention. As for a city like Los Angeles, which appears to be following a different path, it is scornfully disregarded as a Southern Californian aberration--"Isn't San Francisco so much nicer?"
In fact, as Joel Garreau points out in his new book, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, every single American city that is growing today is growing precisely in the fashion of Los Angeles, with multiple urban centers at some distance from the old downtown. What Mr. Garreau (a journalist, not a planner) calls "edge cities" usually begin as a shopping mall at the intersection of two interstate highways. The mall gets bigger, office space is added, a hotel; several corporations establish their headquarters nearby (conveniently close to a regional airport, which also expands). Employees need housing, and housing means schools, community centers, golf courses and medical facilities. Pretty soon, the intersection of two highways (which may still have no formal name--Mr. Garreau refers to an edge city in New Jersey as "287 & 78") is providing jobs and retail services for thousands of people.
...All this adds up to what is probably the most vigorous period of city-building in the last hundred years. And yet, Mr. Garreau's insighttful book apart, it is going on largely unremarked. Perhaps that is inevitable. We often appreciate cities most when they are, so to speak, in their dotage, forgeting that even such charming places as Venice and London were, at one time, raw, unrefined and immature, centers of commerce rather than culture. And while the American edge cities are, for the moment, singularly bereft of visual charm, who is to say that these awkward teen-agers will not also one day grow into engaging adults?
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