City Independent: Agrarian or Urban

There’s a confusion of the Edge City condition as an individualist and new city, stemming from the return to the agrarian context but with the density of population. The Edge City’s interior programs are tied to urban progress in conflict to the nature of the picturesque in aping the rural. What is it we love more: the land or our car, freedom or ownership, the machine or the frontier, city or landscape? As it were, the polls report a desire for both.

Is individualism in conflict to collection? Suburban repair sounds similar to the return of the industry-inviting city, at least in terms of pedestrian community with narrowing and connected streets, sidewalk accessibility, and corner stores. However the populace would like to maintain the feel of the romantically rural with porches, nighttime starscapes, countrysides—the reminders of when work is done. Is it not disingenuous to maintain a system reconciling symbolic independence and dependent realities of the car (oil and import), home ownership (debt or conversely a financial security rarely procured from farming), or nightlife (where the refusal to sleep is supported commercially).


“And into these places, these special places in the city, Ben's is one of them, there's drawn this very urgent cross-section of people who have somehow committed the first rebellious act that a man can perform; refusing to sleep.” (Leonard Cohen, from Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965))

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