Towards a New Eden?

I find the dichotomy of center and periphery to be problematic, and thus I question the fascination with the Edge City phenomenon. The split implies clear definitions, boundaries, walls... these have ceased to exist since our cities lost the need to be physical centers of defensible space. Cities as centers of finance and commerce is also fallacy, as the means by which we exchange money, goods, etc. have dispersed across a vast informational/geographic landscape. Those fascinated with Edge Cities will point to this trend and say "See, people have moved out from the center, and now they live on the edge". So what happens with the center, are there not voids created, and do not the voids constitute edges within the city? Couldn't all the definitions of 'Edge City' be met by inner city gentrification with their live/work lofts and glorification of a garden city ideal, a desire of the city to reclaim Eden?

In Bruegmann's piece, the split between downtown and suburb has productive potential. For example, downtown centers (I think of Los Angeles' Bunker Hill and the Bonaventure Hotel) built large, expansively landscaped ground to mimic the success of suburbs, and vice versa, suburban towns looked to build a center where people felt as though they lived in an old city center. This exchange is healthy, and it also blurs the distinction between the two. It's simple a matter of scale and time. One is just a larger version of the other, and one has more layers of previous development than the other. Proximity to center and edge is irrelevant; it is all one syrupy, viscous (not necessarily vicious) landscape. Bruegmann agrees with this view in his view of suburbia and the city as one continuous, 'celestial' body.

The 'Edge City' is really a phenomenon of time, not space. It is born from the quickness at which we build, the rapid movement of people both out from and back into the center, an artifact of our increasingly transitory habits. It is the uppermost crust of our desire to cohabit; only recently has this manifested as towers around the periphery, big box stores, and tract home developments. It's a swelling of scale, an amplification of the past, not an obliteration of it. Nothing is destroyed without leaving its mark on the destroyer. Even an Edge City must grapple with the frontier, and the way previous human traces upon the landscape have changed it or been changed by it. The West was not discovered as it is often romanticized: a virgin landscape. Rather, it was landscape inhabited by a human society hundreds of years old. Well, that's a discussion for another time.... I just disagree with the notion that Edge Cities have no history; they just choose to ignore it.