Still Suburban (was rural idiocy)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Michael Hoover wrote:
>as Joel Garreau - who popularized the term 'edge city' with his book
>of that title - wrote, 30 years ago these places were pasture land...
>and if memory serves, JG also said that he used the term because they
>were on the edge of civilization...
>
>in any event, I'm not sure the term 'edge city' or - more
>importantly - the 'edge city' analysis captures what is happening...
>JG - among others, I guess his phrase was catchier than Robert
>Fishman's 'technoburbs' or Kenneth Jackson's 'urban villages' - calls
>attention to a socio-cultural/infrastructural phenomenon that doesn't
>fit the core-periphery model...but he/they don't really conceptualize
>these new settlement spaces that are collages of rural, urban, and
>suburban elements (KJ's other term 'centerless city' is a bit better)...

Or nominal 'cities' without any charms of urbanity, history, shared public
space, etc. Or suburbs with office parks and Starbucks.


>missing is a sense of interactivity between 'edge cities'...functionally
>specialized, folks drive between them as much as they do within them...
>Orange County, CA is the 'cutting edge' having been transformed from
>agricultural to post-suburban since WW2...Fairfax County, VA, on the
>other hand, still has rural-like separation zones between 'edge cities'
>but Reston, Falls Church, Fairfax, Vienna, and McClean are linked much
>as are Anaheim, Irvine, Newport, Santa Ana, and Garden Grove - by the
>auto...and where the auto goes, well, how long before Fairfax County's
>open space is deveoped as bulldozers uproot trees for shopping centers
>and roads...not the classic Chicago school concentric-circle formation
>and expansion, but a decentered/multi-centered 'formless mass' that
>consumes open space nonetheless...

Unplanned proliferation of 'planned communities'?

Yoshie