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It's a little embarrassing to show up to a debate over a decade too late, but regardless, this aggression cannot stand. Joel Garreau just pisses me off. He's the Thomas Friedman of urban thinking: a journalist who shunts aside major issues with cute quips and via the capitalization of Important Nouns.

Garreau's most famous work is Edge City, where he argues that American urban life is undergoing its most major transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Garreau argues that the dominance of the central downtown is ostensibly over. Instead, people would rather live in "edge cities." Edge Cities are basically suburbs, only better. Rather than mere bedroom communities, these are suburbs where people work (due to the relocation of industry and major corporate offices outside of central business districts) *and* seek entertainment (quality movie theaters, restaurants, and bookstores are more and more common in these places). Ideally, the edge city is a unity - or series of units - that is pastoral, but still an engine of production and provides quality culture.

So far, none of this is really bad or wrong. Suburbs get a bad wrap. bredoteau may remember a discussion we had where I suggested that film portrayals of suburbs as inherently and always oppressive was banal. I stand by that still. I think people should be able to choose where they live, and I think that people do enjoy living in more "natural" environments. It's pretty; you can spread out and breathe. It's *good.* And, it can be done well - it seems possible to imagine people living in suburbs in "the country" that change, without wholly pillaging, the surrounding environment.

Further, Garreau is aware of this. He doesn't want cookie-cutter housing. He endorses Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, a fairly famous text that obd and daversion may know. Alexander argues for fairly pastoral living, within fairly dense "villages" built on a livable scale in an interesting manner. It sounds groovy. Garreau is always sensitive to having a diverse living space; a place with "soul." He wants something more from our cities than Starbucks. But he also wants us to look beyond standard grid patterns and dense apartment living.

I liked all of this stuff. I also liked where Garreau challenged urban planners, who want to order everything. This often makes for very dead, uninteresting spaces. Shoot, I'm writing my dissertation on the hunch that state highway engineers mucked up cities. So, I'm sympathetic. [To digress, a better book on the flawed "ideology" of planning is James Scott's Seeing Like a State.]

All this is fair, and really quite insightful. What bugs me about Garreau, however, is two things. First, he pretends that the creation of the Edge City - the relocation of individuals and businesses to these exterior regions - is wholly one of personal choice. Now, obviously, no one coerced people to move here. *But* intense federal subsidies of construction in these outling areas, as well as of interstate highways (at the cost of mass transit, both in cities and across metropolitan regions) makes the "desire" to live pastorally much more feasible. Garreau totally ignores these historical turns of events, pretending that people just hate cities. Well no. Cities have been denied serious infastructure capital for *years,* while the suburbs have raked in the dough. Now, some people might always legitimately prefer country life. Cool beans. But our cities would be much different places - easier to get around, safer, more beautiful, diverse - if some of that federal money had spent wisely inside them, rather than just *around* them.

Garreau's second great sin, in my eyes, is that he really neglects the idea of public space, and even the relevance of space at all. Garreau posits that "the mall" is the new public square. In his eyes, when done right, the mall provides the perfect place for people to meet and socialize, shop, and be entertained. Why? Because it is safe and controlled - especially since it's private property. This means that any "trouble makers" can (quietly, of course) be taken away.

So? Well, effectively, this is the end of *public space.* In the Edge City, since everything is spread out and most everything is built by private developers, there are no public space. In fact, there are very few governments. Instead, home owners associations and private interests pretty much dominate everything. On the whole, Garreau praises this as being highly efficient.

This is, essentially, the end of politics and social responsibility. First, without true public spaces, there is no place for protests to happen, candidates to pass out handshakes, or for "strangers" (in the broadest sense of that term) to mingle. While we may not always like or want these things, I'm willing to say that they are *normatively* important. And I'm not the only one - thinkers like Margaret Kohn in her book Brave New Neighborhoods totally have my back. The idea is that public places allows us to exhcange ideas and build real community links. They are part of accpeting diversity. Strangers interacting may even be necessary to progress. Democracies and civic virtue require public spacs. Edge Cities, where we're in our cars or private land most of the time, just don't provide that. [And it shows - check out Eric Oliver's Democracy in Suburbia. It turns out that homogenous suburbs *lower* political participation. Space matters.]

Further, along these lines, Edge Cities amount to a voluntary segregation. Again, people can do this if they want - our liberal, individualism allows that. And that's good - it's part of freedom. But, that's not all there is to our polity - there is also the common good and interdependence. As people live in these controlled communities and shelter themselves away from tax burdens (all well taking the advantage of taxpayers in central cities when edge city residents use central city local roads...), they deprive themselves of more varied experiences and deprive cities of needed revenue. As jobs relocate out in the suburbs, it becomes harder for poor people in central cities to reach them. Essentially, a moat is erected around edge ciites - islands are created. It is not clear that you have a "society" when things become so bifurcated. In fact, in the long term, this could be bad for society as a whole, widening the gap between "haves" and "have-nots." But none of this *really* concerns Garreau...

Along these lines, space in general fails to matter to him. Garreau argues we build our own communities now, from our professions and hobbies. He dismisses residential community, in the small town sense, as oppressive. And it can be. But it also necesary. Sure, your friends might be jet-setters across the world .. but who do you turn to when you need a cup of sugar or someone to watch your kids in an emergency? Telescoping back, Edge Cities themselves still rely on central cities. Every Edge City Garreau profiles relies on a major American city: Detroit, Chicago, San Fran, DC, LA, Houston, and Atlanta (check out Place Matters for a better exploration of this]. In fact, these places remain economic and cultural engines, on which edge cities *rely.* Thus, both personally and professionally, spaces matter, and Garreau seems oblivious.

So, it turns out that space and centralization do matter It also turns out that Edge Cities might be bad for us *politically.* I'm no Aristotlean (sorry galvagin ... ), but political life does matter. Political values of tolerance and the collective good are positive things for a society. It just doesn't seem that edge cities, as they current exist are providing for that. Garreau seems too ready to trust the market and trust developers (who are notorious for screwing up cities; see Susan Fainstein's The City Builders). Garreau is quick to say that experts do not know what cities need - suggesting that all our great cities evolved over time by accident. I suppose .. but isn't it possible that planners have *learned* something from those past experiments? So that we could avoid some of those same mistakes again? Isn't it possible that some of the values and forms that planners desire - dense-living and diversity - *do* serve some greater good we should embrace? And maybe those benefits are unique to limited forms that need to be preserved? It seems there is a middle ground - one that incorporates experts and free choice. Garreaus spends too little time staking this out. (To be fair, he does say his work is jounalistic not theoretical ... but he raises the problems, he should own them.)

Garreau falls into a trap of simple optimism and faith in Americans. Now, Americans are great people, who have accomplished a lot. Hey, I believe in progress too. But are wisdom and caution such terrible ideas too? We've clearly made mistakes in the past (like despoiling the environment or driving species extinct) - maybe we should be a little more careful in the future eh?

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