ABSTRACT
In his book Edge City, Washington journalist Joel Garreau (1991) proposes that the history of America constitutes a continuing attempt by utopian-minded pioneers to head out of the cities in order to create a new Eden on the physical edge of the landscape (the frontier). Here they would forge a “new restorative synthesis” by merging the best features of both urban and rural living: the machine and the garden. Contemporary “edge cities” – outer suburbs with their own corporate offices, shopping complexes and cultural centers – represent the most recent imprint of this dominant historical current. Unfortunately, Garreau fails to emphasize exactly what else underlies this century-long flight from the city proper: the desire for social class segregation. As historian Robert Fishman (1987: 119) has noted, unlike the rich who could securely barricade themselves wherever they wished, the middle class had more to lose if they were caught in a changing urban neighborhood engulfed by immigration. Remaining in an urban townhouse, he observes, represented a considerable economic and social risk for the American bourgeoisie after the mid-nineteenth century. Not only were their new working-class neighbors thought to be rowdy and given to bouts of public drunkenness but they were also suspected of harboring socialist and even anarchist political tendencies. 1
