From: randolph@cognito.ebay.Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz)
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk,alt.suburbs,alt.pagan
Subject: Book review: Edge City
Date: 25 Aug 92 21:38:44
Organization: St. Dismas Infirmary for the Incurably Informed
Distribution: alt
NNTP-Posting-Host: cognito.ebay.sun.com

[This was originally intended for alt.cyberpunk, and it occured to me
it might be appropriate to the groups I've cross-posted it to.
It's an odd group of newsgroups, but it seems to be an appropriate
one for the reasons I cite in the first paragraph.  For those of you
who haven't read any cyberpunk, the Sprawl is a vast mass of connected
decaying suburbs.]

Well, it's not the latest William Gibson novel.  It's not cyberpunk,
though it's about the Sprawl.  It's not pagan, though it's about our
culture's relationship with the land.  It is about suburbs: it's a
book about how we're building the Sprawl, and how the Sprawl is
governed.

*Edge City* is by Joel Garreau, senior writer at the Washington Post.
The last book by Garreau was *The Nine Nations of North America,* a
book on North American cultural regions which has informed cyberpunk
literature from the very beginning: Bruce Sterling reviewed it
approvingly in *Cheap Truth.* (I think.)

Now Garreau has given us a book on the practices of building that are
evolving into the Sprawl.  Garreau:

  How was it "planned"?  I asked him.

  I still find Hunter's answer memorable because it so thoroughly blew
  away any liberal-arts preconceptions about how things get built in
  our world.  Hunter basically said:  Planners?  Architects?  Say
  what?  Here's what happenned.  And he started running the numbers.
  It was like a mantra.  Like a Gregorian chant:

   "Anybody knowledgeable about the sewer system knew that there was
  only one place growth could go, and that was west, and there were
  only two roads heading west, Route 50 and Interstate 66.  [And so on
  through two pages of negotiation and tactics.]

In Phoenix, on the "shadow governments" that rule so much of our new
developments: "They eat up power, like the science-fiction movies.
They eat living things, derive power from what they've ingested, and
develop and independent power base."

Garreau has criss-crossed the USA, studying, the form of our new
cities, developments, and developers, and reported on what he has
learned in bouncy journalistic prose.  The end of the book is taken up
with a very good list of references and summaries of definitions and
development patterns.

Garreau is determinedly upbeat.  He feels that we'll ultimately make
beautiful, livable, capitalistic places out of the Sprawl.  It's a
very comforting vision, one which I have trouble accepting.  He ends
the book by discussing a dispute between developers and
preservationists, and hopes for a balance, to which I can only say
that the balance has already tipped, and all that remains is to make
sense of the imbalance, or even push harder and hope the whole thing
falls over.  I'm still glad I read the book, if only for the following
definiton:

  DELICATE DETAIL: An expensive architectural flourish meant to
    distinguish a development from its competition.  The structural
    element that skateboarders invariably discover makes a great ramp.

Happy skateboarding!

__Randolph Fritz  sun!cognito.ebay!randolph || randolph@ebay.sun.com

Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk