ABSTRACT
Joel Garreau's Edge City: Life on the New Frontier is a great description of the phenomenon, but he refrains from evaluating the strangely fragmented way in which development occurs. These new places seem almost accidental, despite the high-powered developers, designers, and public officials who guide the building process. Lewis Mumford called the highway cloverleaf America's national flower, but even Mumford at his most pessimistic and sarcastic did not imagine broad bands of highway pavement or grasslands owned by the state transportation department permanently enshrined as the centerpiece for so much new development. If the investors and the community had understood that they were shaping several million square feet of urban development, they might well have preferred the alternative shown in the next drawing, concentrating new buildings in a single quadrant of the interchange nearest to an existing railway line and town, tying new investment to transportation and other communities.
