Lead article for: Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Postwar Orange County, California (2nd ed.) .. Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster (eds.) University of California Press. 1995.
Note, also: "The Emergence of Postsuburbia" -- lead essay for the 1991 edition
Many people, including scholars and journalists, refer to Orange County as a suburban region. As we argue later, the use of the concept "suburb" in this particular instance is a bit ambiguous and misleading. The term "suburb" customarily referred to low density settlements located on the fringes of cities. Even with the development in the 1970s of a heightened concern with the "urbanization of the suburbs," much of the writing in that period about suburban areas in the United States adopted a core- periphery approach, focussing on cities (at the core), on suburbs (on the periphery), or on the interplay between cities and suburbs (as in studies of "white flight" from cities to suburbs). Such terms as "outer city" (Jack Rosenthal), "new city" (Louis Masotti), and "satellite sprawl" (Anthony Downs) were applied to newly-urbanized suburbs. A significant fraction of those earlier works about life in suburban United States engaged in "bashing the `burbs" and viewed traditional cities as the leading centers of civilization and of cultural vitality.
More recently, there has emerged a tradition of scholarly research characterized by a more open- minded evaluation of the structures and ways of life in suburbs, in which a multicentered approach has supplanted the core-periphery model. Writers within this tradition have discovered economic, social, and cultural dynamism in what was formerly viewed as the sleepy suburban hinterland. They have also coined some new terms to characterize these places, including "technoburbs" (Robert Fishman), "urban villages" (Kenneth Jackson), "middle landscape" (Peter Rowe), and "edge cities" (Joel Garreau). Despite their common focus on suburbs, most of these terms, and the analytical strategies associated with them, nevertheless retain an urban reference point. For example, Garreau is said to have coined the term "edge cities" partly "because they're on the frontier of U.S. civilization."
To be sure, the earlier, more negative assessment of suburbia continues to have its adherents. The contemporary, 1990s version of "bashing the `burbs" portrays the new metropolitan regions in the United States as stubbornly resistant to heterogeneity and as disturbingly parochial and exclusionary in mindset and behavior. From this highly skeptical point of view, many recent students of suburbia (including Kling, Olin, and Poster) have succumbed to a form of boosterism called "suburbanophilia."
Our intention in Postsuburban California was neither to bash nor to boost. It was, rather, to understand and explain. We joined others in writing the book with an awareness of the competing scholarly and journalistic orientations and, as well, with a keen sense of the social and moral complexities of regions such as Orange County and Silicon Valley in California and Fairfax County in Virginia. While these particular regions originally developed in the 1960s as suburban appendages of larger cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.), by the late 1980s they had developed their own economic and cultural autonomy. By that time in Orange County, for example, the vast majority of residents worked in that region rather than commuting to Los Angeles, as had previously been the case. And the county's economy had grown into the thirtieth largest in the world, with an export-driven economic output approaching $70 billion. Orange County is thus no longer a suburb of Los Angeles, or even a collection of such suburbs. Instead, it now exhibits the dynamism customarily associated with major urban centers, although it is much more decentralized than are traditional cities.
The fundamentally decentralized spatial arrangement of postsuburban regions -- in which a variety of commercial, recreational, shopping, arts, residential, and religious activities are conducted in different places and are linked primarily by private automobile transportation--makes them complex, seemingly incoherent and disorienting, and yet dynamic and lively. Precisely because they are a new kind of settlement space, such regions cannot easily be understood in terms of traditional conceptual categories, such as "rural," "urban," and "suburban."
One leading student of contemporary metropolitan America, Peter Rowe, is at such a loss adequately to characterize postsuburban regions that he simply refers to them as a "middle landscape"--something between rural and urban. Another astute observer, Kenneth Jackson, is more helpful in calling these regions "centerless," but by referring to them as "centerless cities" he repeats the city-centered reference point. For Jackson, although these regions lack a center, they still resemble cities. Yet, at the same time, as we seek to demonstrate in Table #1, these regions are often "more" than cities: Orange County, for example, has more artistic vitality than do Denver, Pittsburgh, Dallas, and St. Louis. In seeking to provide conceptual meaning to these increasingly important, sprawling regions, we also considered Robert Fishman's notion of "technoburbs." Ultimately, however, we were not convinced that unusually intense per capita investments in technologies truly distinguished these large multicentered regions from the more traditional suburbs. The alternative label adopted by our Postsuburban California contributors M. Gottdiener and George Kephart (see Chapter 2), "multinucleated metropolitan region," while certainly more accurate in analytical terms, nonetheless sounds more like something that belongs in a chemical laboratory than a place in which people live and may actually come to love, or at least to enjoy.
After considerable discussion and debate among ourselves and with others, we coined the term "postsuburban." In doing so, we hoped to capture the way in which Orange County's recent development was anchored in a group of settlements that were once suburbs in the 1950s (i.e., Garden Grove and Buena Park) and also settlements that were traditional cities (i.e., Santa Ana and Laguna Beach). As we indicate in the first edition of our book, the postsuburban spatial formation is but one of four defining features of postwar Orange County (the others being cosmopolitanism, information capitalism, and consumerism).
How can one tell that a region is postsuburban? One clue is that many activities are conducted in centers, but, importantly, these centers are functionally specialized and separated by travel times of from fifteen-to-thirty minutes. People are likely to travel by automobile across city boundaries for work, socializing, and shopping as much as within them. As our contributors Debra Gold Hansen and Mary Ryan point out (Chapter 6), "The flow of private automobiles through the net of freeways seems both a basic infrastructure and a fitting metaphor for social life in postsuburbia." Further, such regions typically contain several centers with specific foci (such as shopping and entertainment) that provide multiple attractions for many residents. Instead of stores and residences being integrated into neighborhoods, or shopping being mixed in with industrial workspaces, one will find in postsuburbia distinct and separable centers--residential neighborhoods, shopping malls, and industrial parks.
Postsuburbia's reliance upon automobiles has lead many traffic planners and architects to design shopping centers, industrial parks, and other commercial zones so that they discourage pedestrians. The most pedestrian-friendly places, as it turns out, are the centers of pre-World War II towns or cities. In Orange County, older beach cities such as Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, and San Juan Capistrano, or inland cities such as Orange, have interesting walking districts, usually in commercial areas. The large regional shopping malls may also be conducive to walking, but in a limited manner. One drives to the mall, leaves one's automobile in a parking lot, and then enters a climate-controlled environment designed to keep people moving in a purposeful manner, with few places in which to sit or "hang-out," as well as few opportunities to receive personal service or to know the store owners by name.
Why does this anti-pedestrianism characteristic of postsuburban regions matter? We believe that many non-rural places--both interior segments of major cities and small towns--are marked by a public sense of conviviality because they are consciously designed to promote walking and social interaction. Certain neighborhoods of New York City, for example, resemble small towns in terms of their convenience and sociability. A sense of neighborliness may be found, as well, in many older towns, where houses have front porches and residents can more easily meet with neighbors who stroll by than is the case in the newer neighborhoods of postsuburbia, where houses are likely to be walled off from the street. Orange Countians, as with postsurbanites elsewhere, are thereby handicapped in their efforts to create a local identity and community values. Again, as Hansen and Ryan conclude, postsurburbia "has not yet created a ceremonial platform from which to express a powerful, nuanced, diverse, and authentic local culture."
The kind of spatial distribution to which we have alluded is common across Orange County, as well as in other postsuburban regions. Journalist Fred Barnes, for example, has commented on his family's driving patterns in northern Virginia in terms strikingly reminiscent of Orange County:
My family has four cars. I drive only one, but the other three don't sit idle. My wife, my daughter in college, and my daughter in high school each use a car every day ... There's not much chance I'll go back to two or even three cars, and one car is downright unthinkable. I don't believe anybody else is going to cut back either. There's a reason, and it's not just that Americans are car crazy (though they are). It's the freedom, convenience, and flexibility that comes from having a car at your disposal. The automobile is the most freeing instrument yet invented. It allows folks to take jobs far away from their homes. It enables them to live far from central cities and, if they're anti-social, far from other people. Two cars make the two-earner family possible. .... And the attachment has grown as cars have become an extension of home and office, with telephones, message pads, coffee cups, books (on tape), etc.
Fairfax County in northern Virginia, the site of Fred Barnes' story, has about one-fourth the population and one-half the land area of Orange County. Despite many similarities between the two, there are in Fairfax County, unlike Orange County, large rural-like separation zones between key cities--Reston, Falls Church, Fairfax, Vienna, and McClean. The county includes some major destinations, especially Dulles Airport and Tyson's Corner, as well as one of the country's largest commercial centers and shopping malls and numerous smaller office and industrial centers. It also includes other large shopping centers, such as the Fair Oaks Mall (Fairfax), Merrifield, downtown Reston, and Seven Corners. In addition, the adjacent city, Arlington, includes its own large residential areas and downtown-like high-rise office/retail complexes that are also important destinations for Fairfax residents. While these various centers are scattered over hundreds of square miles, many of them are comparably accessible from cities well within the county, such as Reston and Vienna. The net effect is that there are few identifiable corridors that could effectively support mass transit.
As suggested earlier, one of the major contentions of Postsuburban California is that cosmopolitanism has increasingly replaced parochialism as a defining feature of Orange County. Admittedly, "cosmopolitanism" is an understudied phenomenon, for which we have general indicators but little direct evidence. We use the term here in the common dictionary manner, as being marked by an interest in, knowledge of, and appreciation for many parts of the world. Further, a region becomes more cosmopolitan when it is composed (as Orange County increasingly is) of persons and elements from many parts of the world. The term is the opposite, therefore, of provincialism and localism. Cosmopolitan tendencies within Orange County are also promoted by its increasingly export-oriented commercial activities and the fact that its largest corporate enterprises are decidedly international in their operations (see Chapter 8).
Moreover, we claim that Orange County in this regard serves with others of a similar nature as a "window on the future" or an "anticipatory region." In Chapter 2, Mark Gottdiener and George Kephart show how such developments are taking place in twenty other large and decentralized (or "multinucleated") counties in the United States. Gottdiener and Kephart focus on the economies of those counties. It is also important to note, contrary to the claims of those who would deny the urban character of postsuburbia and therefore its cultural significance, that these places also have impressive cultural vitality when compared with settlements of comparable size elsewhere.
One indicator of the cultural vitality that we allege characterizes these new postsuburban regions may be found in the arts. Table #1 lists a diverse set of cities and five postsuburban regions, ranked by their populations and the relative strength of their arts.
Settlement 1993 Population Arts Rank
(millions)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Los
Angeles/
Long Beach 9.04 2
New York City 8.60 1
Philadelphia 4.98 8
Boston 3.81 7
Dallas, Tx 2.85 39
Minneapolis
/St. Paul 2.64 18
*Long Island 2.62 9
*Orange County 2.62 19
St. Louis 2.54 23
Pittsburgh 2.41 36
Tampa 2.26 30
Seattle 2.18 24
Denver 1.73 47
*Silicon Valley, Ca 1.54 17
Milwaukee 1.45 35
*Northern N. Jersey 1.41 22
*Fort Lauderdale 1.37 55
Portland, OR 1.36 88
Rochester, NY 1.07 65
Louisville KY/IN 0.97 102
Oklahoma City 0.97 60
Syracuse, NY 0.75 40
Modesto, Ca 0.42 301
Ann Arbor, MI 0.50 50
Macon, Ga 0.30 252
Boulder, Co 0.24 114
Urbana, IL 0.17 161
Sante Fe 0.13 110
Table #1 helps to illustrate how larger settlements usually have stronger arts cultures. Savageau and Boyer's top ten arts cities, for example, all have more than two million residents. In contrast, all but a handful of the cities they rank between 244 and 343 in the arts have fewer than 300,000 residents. Larger settlements often have stronger arts cultures because it takes hundreds of thousands of workers in varied industries to support a large group of artists, actors, poets, writers, and musicians. The exceptions prove the rule: towns with relatively large and well-funded universities--Ann Arbor, Urbana- Champaign, and Boulder, for example--can create disproportionately dynamic arts communities through their campus arts programs and related off-campus communities. Even larger medium-sized cities that have small colleges, such as Macon, Georgia, have much less elaborate arts communities.
The main point established by Table #1, however, is the important relationship between size of settlement and its strength in the arts. The five postsuburban regions range in population between 1.37 and 2.62 million people. According to the Savageau and Boyer report, these same regions rank between 9 and 55 in the arts. We should therefore not compare Long Island (9) primarily with New York City (1), or compare Orange County (19) primarily with Los Angeles (2), any more than we should casually compare Dallas or Tampa with New York City. It is important, instead, to compare these regions with cities of comparable size, such as Dallas (39), Minneapolis (18), St. Louis (23), and Pittsburgh (36). Such comparisons more accurately demonstrate the artistic vitality of the postsuburban regions.
In 1991, Joel Garreau, a senior writer at the Washington Post, published Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, thereby adding his provocative term to the debate about metropolitan development in contemporary America. In what is arguably the most popular and widely-quoted study of these new urban formations, Garreau identified more than 100 new urban centers popping up across the United States (including in Orange County) on the peripheries of older, high-density cities. According to his definition, areas become "edge cities" when they have urbanized within the last thirty years, and have at least 5 million square feet of leasable office space and 600,000 square feet of retail space, along with a population that increases at 9 a.m. on workdays. These criteria enable Garreau to identify seven edge cities in Orange County and five in Fairfax County.
Unfortunately, Garreau's conception of edge cities is blind to the complex social ecologies of postsuburban regions. In defining edge cities primarily by their centers, those spaces in which commerical or retail activities occur, he completely obscures the essence of what we have called "postsuburban" because he ignores the fundamentally de-centered or multicentered nature of these emerging regions. His criteria do not permit us to draw boundaries around edge cities or to conceptualize relationships among these "new downtowns." His edge cities, then, do not interact and therefore are situated in a region such as Orange County in much the same way as are widely separated cities such as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia within the state of Pennsylvania. Edge City thus misses much of the fundamentally decentralized and interactive character that makes postsuburban regions so complex, incoherent, and dynamic. Such regions are not merely multicentered in their commercial activities. As we have noted, their commerce, shopping, arts, residential life, and religious activities are all conducted in different places on a spider web of interconnected travel paths linked primarily by private automobiles. In Orange County, as in Fairfax County and other similar regions, residents drive as much between Garreau's edge cities as within them.
The limitations of the edge city concept are dramatically illustrated by Garreau's analysis of Irvine, California. A city of approximately 120,000 residents and one of the major planned (by the Irvine Company) communities of Orange County, Irvine plays a key role in his assessment of community and its limitations in edge cities (see Edge City, Chapter 8). Irvine is located about four miles inland from the Pacific Ocean and lies adjacent to several cities, including Newport Beach, Laguna Hills, Costa Mesa, El Toro, Laguna Beach, Santa Ana, and Tustin. There are three major regional shopping centers located within a ten-to-twenty minute drive from Irvine: Fashion Island (Newport Beach); South Coast Plaza (Costa Mesa); and Laguna Hills Mall (Laguna Hills). Irvine also includes two major industrial parks, the Irvine Spectrum and another near the John Wayne Airport.
In order to comprehend the commercial and cultural dynamism of "Irvine," Garreau expands Irvine to include three of his edge cities: Newport Beach/Fashion Island; the Irvine Spectrum; and the John Wayne Airport area ("including South Coast Plaza-Costa Mesa, as well as the bulk of Irvine"). Yet these are not distinct and separable edge cities, even though their industrial and office parks are centered five-to-seven miles from each other. In fact, Garreau creates a significant problem by treating the Fashion Island shopping mall as part of Irvine rather than. correctly, as part of Newport Beach. Irvine, in fact, functions more like a suburb for Newport Beach/Fashion Island, to which Irvine residents go for shopping and entertainment but, much less often, for work. In turn, few Newport Beach residents travel to Irvine for shopping or entertainment, while the affluent professionals and top executives who reside in Newport Beach are employed throughout Orange County, not primarily in Irvine. The point is that there is no easy way to combine some part of Irvine and Newport Beach/Fashion Island into the equivalent of a functional (or edge) city.
Similiarly, the South Coast Metro area is both functionally rich, like Newport Beach/Fashion Island, but also not as tightly coupled to Irvine as Garreau implies. The South Coast Metro area does include a significant portion of the Irvine Industrial Park North and its primary residential areas are to be found in Santa Ana and Costa Mesa. But its residents are unlikely to travel to parts of Irvine for either shopping or the arts.
Perhaps the largest oversight in Garreau's chapter on community in southern California edge cities is his failure to examine some of the new ethnic communities, such as those composed of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians in Garden Grove and Westminster and those Mexican communities of somewhat longer standing in Santa Ana. Such ethnic enclaves are inhabited by people who are often relatively poor when they arrive in the region, settle in older neighborhoods, depend upon people who share their native languages and cultures, and tend to live outside of Garreau's edge cities. However, they definitely provide the larger metropolitan region with much of its cultural diversity and vibrant character.
There is a major difference, therefore, between Garreau's narrow, commercially-defined concept of edge cities, on the one hand, and, on the other, an emphasis on the socially-defined communities that are now so crucial to an overall understanding of Orange County as a postsuburban region. This is by no means to suggest that Orange County's developing cosmopolitanism yet incorporates an enthusiastic acceptance of all newcomers or completely obviates patterns of residential and occupational segregation. Yet, for reasons we seek to identify in our book, the parochialism of an earlier Orange County (whose residents were once largely opposed to U.S. involvement with the United Nations) has been substantially transformed in more globally-aware directions.
Our UC, Irvine colleague, urban sociologist Mark Baldassare, has observed that Orange County residents are often simultaneously "liberal" on social issues relating to individual choice (such as abortion) and "conservative" on fiscal policies (such as raising taxes to support enhanced government services). Both positions are congruent with a libertarian orientation that favors maximal individual freedom and limited government regulation. Because of the spatial organization discussed elsewhere in our book, what we have called postsuburbanites create their lifestyles in a place where central institutions, such as the government (or the state), are less visible and functionally significant than they are in traditional urban cities. We wonder whether the decentralized lifeways of postsuburbia help engender (or reinforce) what can be called a politics of decentralization.
Such a politics may be further stimulated by the reshaping of work under information capitalism in contemporary America (see Chapters 1 and 4), as careers are now pursued far less often in large, bureaucratic entities (where seniority is customarily accompanied by reasonably secure pay and increases in benefits) and more often in smaller companies (where employment is more unstable and risky) and even in what are called "non-territorial, virtual offices" (described by one observer as "the most radical redefinition of the workplace since the Industrial Revolution"). The decentralizing trend toward the use of virtual offices is likely to become even more pronounced in both urban and postsuburban regions because of many organizations' reluctance to incur high fixed real estate costs. This trend from larger central offices toward virtual offices (often with small central offices) is most common for sales, service, and field-based workers whose travel between home, a central office, and clients in congested postsuburban regions can consume several hours of each workday. Many of these workers can use mobile technologies, such as car phones and portable computers, to communicate with their managers and co-workers, while their richest communication is face-to-face with their off-site clients. Despite the potential benefits of such practices, some have expressed concern that employees doing their work away from traditional office settings will have "greater deadline pressures, work longer hours, and find they no longer can escape from their work after hours..."
In postsuburban, information-oriented regions, such changes as are mentioned here are certain to have political consequences that we are only beginning to comprehend. A historic event occurring at the time this edition of Postsuburban California was going to press--the Orange County bankruptcy debacle of late 1994--complicates matters even further. The debacle, the largest municipal bankruptcy in history, dramatically exemplifies one of the central themes of our study, namely, the manner in which the fragmentation of the county's system of municipal government, with its proliferation of semiautonomous local units, has resulted in inefficiency and confusion of authority (see especially Chapter 8). The Orange County Board of Supervisors, in turn, has long been a relatively weak governmental institution whose members were often ill-equipped to manage a region of Orange County's increasing economic maturity. As their senior member, 82-year-old Thomas Riley, a former Marine Corp general, was quoted as observing in the bankruptcy's aftermath, "I'm used to saying, `Damn it. This is the way we're going to do it.' I can't do that with this challenge. I'm not qualified." Considering the inability and unwillingness of the Board of Supervisors to manage the region's overall development with balanced-growth in mind, being highly receptive instead to the pro-growth arguments of the newer economic elites (again, see Chapter 8), it should come as no surprise, perhaps, that they were also unable and unwilling to exercise proper oversight over the county's high-risk investment strategy, thereby contributing mightily to the ultimate disaster.
As urban economist David Friedman has observed in reference to the midterm elections of 1994, and in terms painfully applicable to Orange County, "The passions unleashed [by those elections] are in no small part attributable to the enormous tension between the America being molded by the new economy and the bureaucracies that survive from an earlier era..." This is the kind of emerging issue that would merit another study. We wrote Postsuburban California with the expectation of stimulating new research and analysis about such issues in these new metropolitan regions throughout the United States.
January 1995
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