‘Edge Cities’: A Challenge to Livability

Living on the edge is acquiring new meaning, thanks to Los Angeles-style cityscapes that are “erupting” across the American continent, according to the current issue of Landscape Architecture, an obscure 80-year-old magazine that’s been born again as an upscale publication for urban aesthetes.

In the lead article, geographic demographer Joel Garreau, author of “The Nine Nations of North America,” examines Edge Cities, his name for “high-rised, semiautonomous, job-laden, road-clogged communities of enormous size, springing up on the edges of old urban fabrics where nothing existed 10 years ago but residential suburbs or cow pastures.”

Garreau’s list of “Emerging Edge Cities” includes three in California--Irvine, Pasadena and Contra Costa County. Both Pasadena, where 8 million square feet of office space have been located in the last decade or so, and Irvine, whose “lack of spontaneity is so legendary in Southern California that it has been compared to the Stepford Wives--perfect in a horrifying sort of way,” rest on the edge of the original edge--Los Angeles. This city is described by Garreau as consisting of “many dispersed centers” and as “a metropolitan region that became the second largest in the nation before it managed to evolve a downtown worthy of the name.”

Other centers for Edge Cities are Washington, D.C., where the author counts 14, “with four more in the embryonic stage,” Houston and Dallas, where Las Colinas, near the city’s airport, is protected by triple strands of barbed wire atop chain-link fences.

These often sterile, overplanned communities “are the biggest change in 100 years in how Americans live and work,” Garreau writes. He also quotes Christopher B. Leinberger, an urban analyst and managing partner of a Los Angeles-based real estate consulting firm, to backstop this assertion. “This shift from pre-World War II cities to 21st-Century cities is a change every bit as major as the 18th-Century mercantile trading centers of Ben Franklin’s Philadelphia being transformed into the 19th-Century industrial cities like New York,” Leinberger said.

An ‘Open Question’

Garreau is not happy about the prospect of a landscape full of places on the edge. “Despite the Herculean efforts of some of the nation’s finest designers, it’s still an open question whether these cities will ever be diverse, urbane or livable,” Garreau asserts. “An Edge City landscape is an artifact meant to be examined from the safety of a distance, like a strange bug.”

But despite his strong reservations, Garreau concedes that Edge Cities may “reflect our perpetually unfinished business of reinventing ourselves, redefining ourselves, restoring ourselves, announcing that our centuries-old perpetual revolution, our search for the future inside ourselves is still going strong.”

As for the magazine itself, the redesigned December issue is a transformation from what a spokesman called “one of the ugliest magazines I’ve ever seen” to a handsome, slick 10-times-a-year journal. In fact, the remake is so extensive that it’s being referred to as a “new publication.”

The magazine’s role also will be different. No longer will it go to a tiny band of 16,500 landscape architects willing to suffer it’s confusing covers for its professional content. Henceforth, the Washington-based magazine will be oriented toward a more general audience and will be available on some newsstands, the spokesman said.

Future issues will concentrate on single theme with two or three articles developing the topic, a Global Landscape column about landscape architecture in a country or region and features on new designs and profiles on “the profession’s leading lights,” the magazine announced.

Thatcher on Reagan

The Dec. 30 issue of National Review contains political back scratching of a high order. Namely, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s assessment of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. In an article heavy with lavish praise, the prime minister, whose friendship with the outgoing chief executive is well known, lauds Reagan’s grasp of the American mood when he assumed office in 1981 during a period of economic uncertainty.

“President Reagan saw instinctively that pessimism itself was the disease and that the cure for pessimism is optimism. He set about restoring faith in the prospects of the American dream--a dream of boundless opportunity built on enterprise, individual effort, and personal generosity,” Thatcher writes. She cites Reagan for accomplishments in foreign policy, particularly in East-West relations.

While the praise is predictable, less obvious is the magazine’s inside track for snaring a prime minister’s byline. Editor John O’Sullivan, named to the job last summer after William F. Buckley kicked himself upstairs to editor-in-chief, is a former aide and speech writer for Thatcher.

Tops in Science

Discover magazine’s January issue, due out earlier this week, contains a handy summary of 35 of 1988 top science news stories, a list that may be more informative than a review of the year’s disasters and other ephemeral headline events.

Among the magazine’s picks:

--Cancer researchers finding the genetic switch that causes a cell to become cancerous, raising the possibility that drugs can be developed to prevent such switches from being turned on.

--The Greenhouse Effect, the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that may trigger climatic changes such as the drought experienced over much of U.S. farmland last summer.

--The first conception in captivity of a California condor, a most-endangered species with only 28 left in the world.

--The first “patented” animal, a strain of customized mice specifically developed for use in cancer research.

--The most convincing evidence yet that a planet exists outside our solar system, an object that exerts gravitational pull on a star 90 light-years from Earth.