whose axe is it , anyway?

Garreau posits that the edge city of today is like the Venice or London of yesteryear. While I see his logic, I must respectfully disagree. Obviously great cities of the world—Rome, New York, London—were created by dynamic processes dictated by mercantile and residential needs and few, if any, planning codes. But I think that an important distinction is that these cities weren’t created at the expense of other, immediately proximate, cities of equal or greater size. They were perhaps built atop such cities, which one might argue was at that original city’s expense, but it was a gradual re-building, much like that old story about your great-grandfather’s axe—if you replace the handle, and then the head, and then the handle again, is it still your great-grandfather’s axe? Well, yes, by name you might still say it is.

I think that Harvey nails it when he says that New Urbanists privilege spatial forms over spatial processes. Whether or not you might call these Edge Cities New Urbanist, they most definitely are guilty of the same sin. The process that creates a successful place to live—whether it be a mountain hamlet or a thriving city—is one that takes generations of slow growth, and because of that slow growth, is capable of adapting, in time, to the new and varied pressures exerted on it by the economy, new social orders, etc. Successful communities of the type that most Americans are seeking, consciously or not, are not disposable. They aren’t shams of community built for the profit of a few individuals. Or maybe they were. Whatever. At least the de’ Medicis had good taste.