May 6
Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, Joel Garreau (1991)

This book got a friendly mention a few weeks ago in a post by the blogger formerly known as CalPundit. I vaguely remembered reading a magazine review of it (probably New Republic) when the book was new.

The topic those areas we generally call suburbs but which require a new label because "suburb" implies a residential area with inhabitants who commute to a central city. In contrast, these areas, to which Garreau gives the infelicitous name "edge cities," also contain office and retail space with jobs, shopping, and pretty much everything that their residents require. Thus, they serve the same function as cities, but they aren't recognized as such because they lack the concentrated center and the political borders.

Garreau discusses how developers who build up these edge cities are focused on making money, and since the way to make money is by creating what people want to buy, the edge city is better at giving people what they really want, as opposed to what urban planners think they ought to want. For example, they're very attentive to providing ample free parking everywhere, as opposed to beating citizens over the head trying to persuade them to take the bus to work. At times, it feels a little like Moneyball, with traditional architects and planners stuck on their traditions about what a city should be, willfully blind to what the number crunchers have proven actually works.

But Garreau is a newspaper journalist at heart, and thus he has a personal need to cover every angle. The initial pro-capitalist, pro-developer bent first gives way to the idea that although the free market does indeed succeed in creating what people want, it does so with lots of creative destruction, and thus many many developers, along with some entire edge cities, turn out to be failures along the way. From there he rambles on into a whole lot of navel-gazing about ferny ideas like mankind's relation to nature and the land, history, and all sorts of other anti-capitalist notions. As a liberal, I ought to care about such things, but in fact I found that half of the book boring, and I nearly gave up on it several times. What was interesting to me was the stories about how developers think and how well their creations work or don't work.

The best feature of the book is the developers' truisms about human behavior which dot the narrative like raisins in a muffin. (These same raisins are gathered together in an appendix as well, but somehow they aren't as appetizing all stuck together like that.) CalPundit quoted several of these -- including the best one: that the reason for glass elevators is not for the pretty view but to make women feel safe while riding in them -- but alas, his tantalizing sample proves to be nearly the entire supply. The only good one that he didn't mention is this: a subdivision or other development is always named after whatever natural feature (animal, vegetable or geographic) was destroyed in the process of building. One can think of several examples: Deer Hollow, Pine Grove, Lakeview.... Sitting here in the Bay Area, I wonder if the rule can't be applied to towns as well: Pleasant Hill, Walnut Creek (possibly even Concord!).

I've seen reviews say that Edge City has stood the test of time and is still relevant 12 years later. I'm not so convinced. Compared to the typical political tell-all, I suppose it lasts, but I'm used to reading histories which keep for several decades if not centuries. With this one, I kept thinking it's all well and good to read about the 1990s, but I wonder what's going on in these places now.

Garreau routinely uses "she" as his pronoun of choice to mean "he or she" and likewise for "her" and "hers". For a while, I thought he was using the female pronouns exclusively, but later I noticed at least one spot where a lengthy hypothetical began with "she"s and later switched to "he"s. Karen was very keen on this idiosyncrasy. I just thought it was weird.

The footnotes section is bizarre. There are plenty of footnotes, and they look pretty much like normal notes -- lots of citations, a few explanatory comments, etc. The difference is that there are no superscript numbers in the main text keying to them. Instead, in the footnotes section each note has a page number and a short phrase corresponding to a phrase in the main text (the referent, perhaps). But from just reading the main text, you'll find no hint that the footnotes even exist.

The junk at the back of the book -- what's the opposite of prefatory material? "postfatory"? -- was excessive. There are a bunch of appendixes, including a glossary composed mostly of cutesy observations disguised as definitions, not so much Ambrose Bierce as Harpers Weekly. There are 30 pages of recommendations for further reading, which rivals books far more academic than this one is. Even the acknowledgments run long (six pages).

On the plus side, the envelope I used for a bookmark is covered with noteworthy words to look up -- my longest list since that book of Bill Buckley columns I read last summer. Some of them are completely new to me. Others I mostly know, but wanted to explore and get to know better. Still others are familiar words used in new (or old) ways.

Unfortunately, I'm away from my bookshelf this week, so I have to rely on Merriam Webster Online, which, in spite of what some cyber-enthusiasts say, is not nearly as useful as a real dictionary.

In order of appearance:

Quoin I knew from Scrabble and Boggle, but I had forgotten what it means. It's something like a keystone. Garreau uses the word metaphorically, which is common enough for keystone but not so much for quoin, I think.

Swale appears twice. Merriam-Webster says it's a "low-lying or depressed and often wet stretch of land." Lots of talk about land contours in the book.

Equipoise was the name of a Magic card. I looked it up just in case it means something more interesting than just a state of equilibrium, but it doesn't.

Medivac looked like a misspelling to me. I'm right: it should be medevac, short for "medical evacuation".

I was delighted to see awesome used in its true sense of inspiring awe, rather than the bland sense of generic approbation it now carries. Even in 1991, Garreau's sentence, "The bad news is that a forest fire would be awesome," must have sounded pyromanic. But let's admit it, "true sense" is a lie; I really should say "obsolete sense", because that meaning no longer exists. Like so many adjectives before it, awesome was embraced for its beauty and uniqueness, robbed of all personality through overuse, and then discarded like last year's pop star.

Curious how no word can hang on to awesome's original meaning. Awful used to mean the same thing. One went bad, and the other went good, but neither have anything to do with awe anymore. Pretty much the same thing happened to terrible and terrific.

Swatch looked to me like a malapropism for swath. If so, it's a well-established malapropism. M-W Online shows four definitions for swatch, but the only one consistent with Garreau's "vast swatches" is the one which refers me to swath in the sense of "a long broad strip or belt."

A yawp is a raucous noise. I thought Garreau's sentence about architect John Portman -- "His first sin was that his exuberant American design yawps turn life inward toward the air conditioning and away from the beastly streets" -- excessive, until I realized that he's alluding to a couplet in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, quoted more than 200 pages earlier. Misquoted, in fact, if the poetry website I found is accurate:

I'm still not sure what this has to do with inward-looking, air-conditioned buildings.

A referent is something which is referred to, logically enough, though I'd never seen the word before. But Merriam-Webster Online defines it as "one that refers or is referred to," suggesting that it is one of those confusing words which can be its own antonym. Well, not antonym, but you get the idea.

Porte cochère, French for "coach door", is the roofed area of a driveway where it approaches the main entrance of a building, so that passengers don't get rained on when going from car to building. Lots of talk about building features in this book.

Flummox I know as a verb, meaning to confuse, but Garreau uses it as a noun. Telling a story of how Nathaniel Hawthorne sat down in a sleepy wood to contemplate life and was interrupted by the sound of a locomotive passing nearby, he says, "Hawthorne's was not an isolated flummox." Sounds almost like a disease. If the flummox is not isolated, will it become an epidemic?

Hove turns up in Boggle all the time. When reading her word list, Mom always says, "you know, as in 'hove to'." She's been saying that for years, so I'm very familiar with the phrase, but I never really did know what it means to heave to. I had a vague sense that it has something to do with a ship. I think I imagined the ship leaving the shore, but now I see it's arriving. To heave to is to bring the ship to a stop. Hove is an old-fashioned past tense of heave which survives only in this idiom.

Garreau describes clerisy as "that marvelous word he used for the priesthood of our self-appointed intelligentsia", "he" being Robert Nisbet, author of History of the Idea of Progress. I read that as indicating that Nisbet had coined the word, though I see now it doesn't actually say that. In fact, the word is much older. Or at least that's how it looks on Merriam-Webster, but the online version doesn't give actual dates like my dictionary at home does.

"Not one American in a thousand in the 1950s knew that the word 'ecology' referred to the study of energy flows within a closed system." I was thrilled to read this revelation, which made up for about 30 pages worth of boring discussion of post-1970s ecology. The thrill lost much of its glow when I found the dictionary gives a somewhat different definition. Merriam-Webster offers "a branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments" and "the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment", neither of which seem all that distant from the current common meaning of the science associated with environmentalism. The room is Latin oeco-, from Greek oikos = house.

Caustically I knew as suggesting biting sarcasm, but I felt a need to double-check its origin which I knew was something like abrasive. It's actually corrosive.

Caviling is one of those words I've seen several times but never quite knew exactly what it meant. It is to raise trivial objections.

Festooned I thought meant decorated, but I wasn't sure. I was right. Root is festa (party, celebration).

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