Interestingly enough, the term "edge city" has only been around since 1991 as a concept, as something that became very quickly a part of our currency, of talking about cities.  It was an idea, a concept, developed by a Washington Post reporter by the name of Joel Garreau.  We have had at the bookstore on sale some copies of his book, and there are copies of at least some of the chapters available at the reserve desk at the library if you're interested in pursuing it.  Joel Garreau has had a tremendous impact on the interpretation of urban sprawl.  In fact, he knew that this was such a good way to categorize something that looked like cities, smelled like cities, but really weren't cities, yet were growing them very rapidly by calling them edge cities, that he incorporated himself with several other people, and is now offering data and information about the qualities and characteristics of edge cities as a service.  So in a minute we also will take a look at something that relates to his web site.

I'm going to sit down and allow you all to watch the monitors as we work our way through this.  You'll notice that I begin with a drawing, * [URL] I begin with a drawing of the Samuel Owings house of 1767.  Keep that drawing in mind and keep that place in mind, because edge cities as an idea in fact have been around for a very long time--even though we didn't call them edge cities.  For example, you could argue that when the first Marylanders came to the Chesapeake Bay in 1633, in fact they arrived in March of 1634 in this area of Maryland on the Potomac River.  They came with a full blown concept of what they ought to be doing in this wilderness, or at least those that led them came with a full blown concept of what they ought to be doing.  What they felt they ought to be doing was establishing an urban place, making a better London, creating a city in the wilderness.  It was an idea whose time simply did not come for almost another whole century, until the beginnings of Baltimore, and even then Baltimore did not get started until the Revolutionary War, when all the other major cities of the continent of North America that were English-speaking were occupied by the British, so Baltimore had a great opportunity and began to grow very rapidly.  Cities grew out of adversity, cities grew out of dreams, and cities generally grow on the edge of other cities. Baltimore grew on the edge of London, Annapolis grew on the edge of London.

What's the magnitude of our problem, in terms of our future of our cities and the future of the world as a whole.  *[URL] Well, it should be very obvious to you that we have a population problem, and one of the ways that we can look at that very quickly is to realize that we have 265,000,000 people in this country, but that is not the real problem.  What the real problem is in the world population, which is about 5.7 billion at the present time and growing, and ticking.  And, if we were to just simply pause for a moment and take a look at the midyear population for the world from 1950 through the midyear 2050, we can get a very great sense of what the major problem in this world today is--people, population.  2.5 billion in 1950, 5.7 billion in 1996, and look what's happening here with regard to the projections of the statistics with regard to growth.  Somebody believes that it's going to start declining fairly soon, around the year 2016, and yet by 2050 there might be 9.3 billion people on the earth.  Where are they all going to live?  What are they all going to do?  How should they be relating to place and to their world?  What is the role of edge cities?

I'd like to begin by talking a little bit about the currency of the term "edge city," so that you know that this is not just something that I think is fairly popular.  As I was coming home from work last week, I tend to listen to "Marketplace," and I heard the lead story just as I was coming in the drive at home, and so I rushed upstairs and I put on my...  Let's for a moment, pause and listen to the way in which Marketplace deals with the question of edge cities, as of last week.

"This is 'Marketplace' and I'm David Brancaccio.  Urban planners say that American's future is in edge cities--conglomerations of retail outlets with office space and residential housing that has sprouted up on the outskirts of traditional cities.  These suburban retreats promise green space and relief from big city problems, but now edge cities are running into trouble.  Fairfax County, just across the Potomac River from Washington D.C., is perhaps the country's oldest edge city.  It has high land values and thousands of wealthy residents, but now even Fairfax is running into financial problems.  What happened?  Richard Paul from WAMU in Washington, prepared this cautionary tale that economists say is coming to an edge city near you."

Paul:  "While we're here on the lower level of the parking terrace," Carl walks across the parking lot of Tyson's Corner mall.  The mall is the cornerstone of the massive edge city that's grown up around it in the town of Maclean in Fairfax County, Virginia. Carl's lived in Fairfax County since 1951, so he remembers thirty years ago when a man named Marcus Bless owned a cattle farm here.

Carl:  "It was open grass field with some hardwood trees around the perimeter."

Paul:  "Today, the 640 acre tract that was the Bless family cattle farm and its surroundings has more office space than downtown Miami or downtown Seattle.  * [URL] Combine that with the thousands of 2 million dollar mansions nearby and you can understand why in just thirty years, land values have surged from around a thousand dollars an acre to around a million and a quarter.  And it's not just Tyson's Corner.  Since 1966 adjusted for inflation, the total assessed value of a property in Fairfax County has gone from around 11 billion dollars to more than 69 billion."

Kate Hammond:  "We are going to have to make substantial cuts in order to adjust the fiscal realities."

"Paul," says Kate Hammond who chairs the Fairfax board of supervisors saying, yes and you heard right even with all that valuable land to tax, Fairfax County is cutting services."

Hammond:  "You certainly do have to find ways to reduce the number of people, reduce the positions in county government."

Paul:  "So what happened in Fairfax County?

Susan Wopner:  "On the face of it, it is a paradox,"

Paul:  "says Susan Wopner who is a real estate professor of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Wopner:  "The success is to build a city, and what has basically been done is Fairfax has started from farm land and constructed what amounts to an entirely new city."

Paul:  A new city with 877,00 people whose 1.6 billion dollar annual budget is larger than the city of Dallas's, and just slightly smaller than Philadelphia's.  But Fairfax County's budget now has a 150,000,000 deficit.

Hammond:  "Of course the result of creating a city as it were, that wasn't there previously, is that tax revenues do go up.  The tax revenues do not necessarily go up equivalently to the cost of the services, and the services are extraordinarily expensive," says M. Hammond.

Paul:  "It's a fact that Fairfax County has never scrimped on services, and it still lavishes goodies on residents while keeping property taxes low.  As the county has grown, that mix became unbalanced, speeded by the recession in the early 90's.  This is Longfellow School Board member Jamie Strauss, represents the neighborhood of expensive houses surrounding Longfellow.  She watches three classes at work, not on computers, but the old-fashioned way with pens and pencils.  Ms. Strauss says that's typical of the older schools in Fairfax.  They are trying to do much more with less.

Strauss:  "We have more kids who are disabled, we have had a growth in youngsters who don't speak English.  So you have these kids coming into us, and then since the recession, declining dollars available."

Paul:  "At the edge of the playground at Longfellow, a backhoe plows the dirt.  A sign advertises 45 luxury brick homes.  Everyone at Longfellow probably hopes for two things from this development, that the houses sell for a lot and that their owners have few kids.  Fairfax gets most of its money from property taxes, around half of that goes for schools.  School spending in Fairfax is right around the national average, $6,700 per student.  Think about a family with two kids in public school.  If the family lives in one of those expensive houses near Longfellow, they're paying at most $11,000 a year in property taxes, so at $6,700 per kid, even this rich family is not paying their way.  Now consider this, there are 24,000 of those rich homes in Fairfax County, but there are nearly 9 times as many houses with market values considerably under that.  It doesn't add up.  I'm here again with the University of Pennsylvania's Susan Wopner, this time with her tongue firmly in her cheek."

Wopner:  "The trick is to keep out those who will have a number of school children, and attempt to gather in those who will have the $350,000 dollar homes, and hopefully they'll be childless."

Paul: "Now don't think this can't happen where you live.  Professor Wopner says this trend is already going on around the country."

Wopner:  "Every expanding edge city is going through this same dilemma of increased costs and a citizenry that's in rebellion--that doesn't want to pay more taxes."

Paul:  "Political leaders tell us that economic growth is good, but as the experience of America's first edge city teaches there is a limit.  You reach a time where you have to ask, can we afford both a first class school system and subsidized shuttle rides for seniors?  Experts suggest taxpayers must play a part too.  Like being more realistic about how much they demand from government versus how much they're willing to pay.  In any event, the days of simple solutions to the financial problems of America's edge cities like the days of pasture land in Tyson's Corner are long gone.  I'm for Richard Paul for Marketplace."

The hand out that you have in front of you is taken from the "Edge City News."  What we're going to do now is begin to explore just what an edge city is by definition, based upon primarily the work of Joel Garreau.  What is an edge city?  They're large diverse information age cities that emerged within the last twenty to thirty years.  That was the point of the NPR story.  It's only been in the last twenty years that this massive growth has taken place on the edges of our traditional cities.  They rarely follow any political boundaries.  Edge cities are typically defined as job cores that primarily feature commercial office buildings--the factories of the information age-- where most of the commercial and office and retail developments occurred during the real estate booms of the 1970's and the 1980's.  They're not suburbs or sub-anything.  They rise, or rose up out of the pastureland as urban cores, from what thirty years ago was considered to be the suburbs.  What used to nothing but the residential areas outside the old downtowns. And they're numerous.  They're almost five times as many edge cities as there are downtowns of comparable size.  They're huge.  Each is approximately equal to or larger than the city, the downtown area of Orlando, Florida.  Indeed, if you wanted to figure out the downtown area of Orlando, Florida, you could simply go to Orlando today, and get a profile of the city, realize that it has 77 square miles and a population of 172,000 people in its core.  If we were to move to the question of where are edge cities today?  You can see that they're spread out all over the United States, just in Baltimore alone:  Towson, Hunt Valley, Owings Mills, Security Boulevard, the BWI Airport area, and Columbia, Maryland.  We're going to come back and talk a little bit more about Owings Mills in a minute.

Let's look at the most recent work that Joel Garreau has put together with regard to how he analyzes edge cities.  If you like you can follow along in your handouts.  You can look at the number of jobs in edge cities.  But most importantly, I'd like you to move through the statistics to the Achilles heel of edge cities which relates to the question of, what is the major problem facing edge cities today?  The Achilles heel of edge cities is that in transportation terms, most are still mono-cultures what do they depend on--what do they primarily depend on for their vitality?  Anyone want to throw it out?

Student:  The mall?

Professor Papenfuse:  They depend on the mall, but how do they get to the mall?  They depend on the automobile.  The down side is if the automobile can't get around, and there's no other choice, bad things happen.  And we begin to see slides within the edge cities.  So fundamentally, people gather at the mall, but if they don't have an easy way to get to the mall, there is then the question of what constitutes the heart of an edge city?

So, let's spend a little bit of time talking about Maryland's own edge city, and what I'd like us to think about again is this question of place, and the question of importance of place.  Because, symbolic of what the edge city is--it is this house--the Samuel Owings house.  How many of you saw the front page of the Maryland section of the "Sun" not too long ago showing this house?  Do you remember what it looked like?  Let's go visit it.  What is happening to it?  * [URL] It's been destroyed. That's symbolic of what edge cities are all about.  They really do--are really geared towards destroying the essence of what our culture is, and they have very little of culture contained within them themselves.  So something as important as the house for which the edge city was named, is allowed to be destroyed.  So the sense of continuity with the past, the sense of the importance of the past in relationship to the future of the history of the city is lost through the aggressive way in which the edge city itself is constructed.

Have any of you taken the time to go out on the web site and look at the Owings Mills project?  All right.  There's been a really fascinating study, a joint project done by the University of Virginia and Catholic University together.  They set up teams of planners and architects and they asked the fundamental question, "Here we have an edge city--what can we do to really make it into a viable, livable environment?"  Let's visit the project.  * [URL] Fundamentally, although they were the loci of majority of urban growth during the last fifteen to, I would say, thirty years, edge cities generally, as this project points out, have no coherent urban form, and are defined more than anything else, by highways and by parking lots.  These places contain many of the functions and aspects of the city, such as living, working and shopping, even occasionally civic activities, but there is no hint as the project points out, of the principles so key to the definition of the traditional American city or town, or of the street as a pedestrian public place.  Note for example, Red Run Boulevard in Owings Mills, note the size of the street and the lack of sidewalks.  What the project tried to do was to use the emerging city of Owings Mills in Baltimore County, Maryland as the focus of a case study of urban design in the suburban context.  And, in particular, their reconsideration of the urban form of the edge cities.  Edge cities are, as the project points out, the latest evolution of the dispersal and decentralization of the American urban form into multiple centers, the retail, office and residential developments.  They're concentrated around highway interchanges surrounding an older central city.  And again, perhaps the best example of that is that one that we heard about on MPR, which is Tyson's Corner outside of Washington D.C.  Owings Mills because of its peculiar pre-conditions of transportation development and ecology has the potential, according to this project, to serve the needs of helping us better understand what might be done with these edge cities if we concentrated our attention on planning, our attention on how to make these cities work within a larger structure of an integrated urban world.  How to go about adding sidewalks to the streets. How to go about dealing with the question of public spaces that are engaging.  How to deal with an area that, in fact, forms that watershed for one of the major stream systems feeding into the Patapsco River--the Gwinns Falls.  So the particular focus of this study was the development of design proposals that address the growing realization that natural systems, and urban systems, need to be seen as a whole continuum that must be treated in a complete and coherent manner.  Let's just simply take a quick look at the map.  I will bring in, I hope, a larger version of the map which makes it a little bit easier to see.

The pink circle, of course, represents the area around Owings Mills.  Close to the Beltway, close to Baltimore City, and if you were to see this in a geographical sense you would see that it's sitting atop the watershed of the Gwinns Falls, which by the way has become one of the major projects for a new coalition of people interested in preserving urban park lands in the United States and has been the focus of a major redevelopment effort.  You can see the Gwinns Falls here near the Patapsco.  So, how did they go about doing this. Well, let's take a look at the project goals and some of the design proposals.

The goals of the project, as I pointed out, were twofold.  One was to serve the local community of Baltimore County by providing a set of urban design proposals based on different development scenarios, which could then serve as the foundation of public discussion of what the nature of the town of Owings Mills ought to be.  The second goal was of a much broader nature.  Because of the extraordinary confluence of issues and conditions at this one site, Owings Mills has the potential to serve as a significant model with national implications in which to explore and test a variety of ideas relating to the problems of creating new and sustainable towns within the urban fringe.  Because of its unique combination of mass transit infrastructure now what that means is, there is of course a subway that comes out from the city of Baltimore, and goes almost to the town. And interestingly enough, it doesn't go all the way to the town center.  It stops just short of the town center.  There are extraordinarily fine highways running out and encircling the town of Owings Mills.  And it sits in an area that is ecologically diverse and ecologically sensitive.  If anybody's ever interested in the future of trout fishing in this part of the world, they have to pay some attention to the stream that runs right through the center of town.  What happened was that these two universities, Virginia and Catholic, got together, and on the web and with their teams getting together in person, began to lay out suggestions for how the city of Owings Mills...

City is an interesting point here, because Owings Mills is unincorporated.  Owings Mills is nothing but a conglomeration of buildings and properties of high-rises and stores and malls.  It does not have an urban essence, or even an administrative nature, relating to the question of how the area should be handled in a political way, in a managed way by public servants serving as mayor of the town or serving as city council.  But this particular project doesn't address itself to the political needs of the community.  What this project addresses itself is to how the community ought to be reshaped to make it into a livable environment for human beings who work there and would care to live there, close to where they work.  There were six student teams, were formed from the combined design studios of the University of Virginia and Catholic University.  The UVA students were graduate students of landscape architecture, and the Catholic University students were much more oriented towards urban architecture as opposed to landscape architecture.  So there was a good combination of landscape and urban design.  If you were to visit the site on the web, you could go into some great detail with regard to each of these proposals.  Let's just simply take a look at High Density Trout.  One of the advantages of bringing these files into a local environment is that they move much more quickly into view, and you're able to deal with the imagery much more efficiently than if you were really out there surfing on the web yourself.  We could spend time taking a looking at each one of these plans but fundamentally what they were designed to do was to try to make the city a much more liveable environment, a much more comfortable place within which to live and to work.  I assume that you are all working on projects right, for this semester.  What are some of you working on?

Student:  The web site of downtown Baltimore.

EP:  Oh, excellent, the redevelopment of downtown Baltimore.

Anybody else?  Nobody wants to mention their projects?

Can't hear students!!!!!!

EP:  How many of you are working on projects relating to the city of Baltimore?  How many of you are going outside the city for your projects?  Those of you that have been working on city projects, how many of you are dealing with the question of transportation in and out of the city?  The question of what brings people back into the city?

Student:  I'm comparing Memorial Stadium to Camden Yards, and the people that travel to both.

EP:  Memorial Stadium once being a community stadium for the community in the area--an interesting point.  Anybody doing anything about the sort of suburban towns, in relationship to the city, Towson, Owings Mills.  You might want to take a look at the question of the way in which these students tried to deal with Owings Mills, to make it into a more liveable world, because the fundamental question here is as these edge cities spring up and draw capital resources away, as McCormick moves out, as major businesses come out of the center city and move out into these edge city places, what happens to the inner city?  What happens to the world of the old city, the old central city?  What happens to Baltimore?  What are ways in which you can link the new world with the old world, in order to encourage the integration of both into one urban whole, as opposed to what edge cities really represent, which is white flight.  An ability to move out to avoid crime, to avoid all of those things which are considered the worst aspects of living within the context of the city itself.  Not the least of which are high taxes--we pay the highest taxes in the city of any residents anywhere in any subdivision.  So you might want to take a look at the design proposals we're looking at--sort of the architecture of the city both from the standpoint of the buildings and from the standpoint of the nature, the context of nature.  What William Cronin calls "second nature," the remaking of the world into something that brings back a sense of the "natural world."
 
One of the ways in which they looked at this whole place in terms of trying to figure out what to do with it, was creating this rather striking image map of the whole area--looking at the area as a whole, photographing it from above, from sideways, just one example.  The yellow markers are on the ground, and the blue markers are aerial.  * [URL] So, if you wanted to get a sense of the space from above, or aerial, you click on the blue.  If you wanted to look at it in terms of what it looks like along the roads, you click on the yellow.  Now I cheated:  I only did one of these because downloading each of these photographs takes somewhere in the neighborhood of about ten minutes each.  But again, this notion of--you know--there's just simply--
you're going into the city.  There's no sense of relationship to the countryside.  You don't see any sidewalks, you don't see any sense of the use of the space outside the city except as just simply leaving it in a sort of semi "natural state'' after it's been raked over by the developers.  The question then becomes, well, where does all of this lead?  If you spend your time studying Baltimore City, how you might improve housing within the City.  Or if you spend your time looking at the question of how you might reshape the urban environment of the edge cities.  You still haven't addressed the fundamental problem and that is: population growth, and the integration of that population growth into a space which is increasingly precious with regard to what represents as resources for our existence.  So, if you are going to spend the time looking at remolding, reshaping and improving the edge city, how are you going to go about integrating the edge city into the larger world of a network urban existence.  * [URL] What I'm going to do at this point is go back to the outline, and I'd like you to begin to consider ways in which we might approach the question of improving upon the edge city, and incorporating it into the older notions of what a city ought to be and how a city ought to function.

We could for example go to an article by Kling, Olin etal, and just simply move to a discussion of how things in Orange County, California are very much like they are in Tyson's Corner; and talk just a little bit about the problem of the automobile and the role of the individual in relationship to his car as it affects the urban sprawl.  The kind of spatial distribution--meaning urban sprawl--to which we've alluded, is common across Orange County, CA, as well as in other post-suburban regions.  Journalist Fred Barnes for example has commented on his family's driving patterns in northern Virginia in terms that are strikingly reminiscent, say these authors, of what it's like in Orange County, California.

"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 everyday.  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 is a reason, and it's just not that Americans are car crazy, though they are.  It's the freedom, it's the convenience and the flexibility that comes from having a car at your disposal.  The automobile is the most freeing instrument yet invented that allows folks to take jobs far away from their homes.  It enables them to live far from central cities, and if they're antisocial, far from other people--Montana for example. 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 the Fred Barnes story--has about 1/4 the population and 1/2 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 Maclean.  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 small office and industrial centers.  It also includes other large shopping centers such as the Fair Oaks Mall, Fairfax, Merrifield, downtown Reston, 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.  What we need to begin to look at is the way in which perhaps we may be able to bring people back to the center city, and begin to integrate the edge cities into a much more systematic and sensible arrangement--distribution of population that moves to greater density, less dispersion emphasis on better working conditions, more jobs and communities that are far more integrated as a whole into regional governments, which extend beyond the notion of just simply the central city, or for that matter extends beyond the notion of the county and to a regional arrangement of some kind.

So what perhaps may be a global solution?  Well, I think the global solution as suggested by this diagram of the Peking (Beijing) subway.  * [URL] Notice the line into the city and notice the circle around the city.  A simple idea, but a way in which to begin to bring together communities that have begun to spread out, and become extraordinarily fragmented.  So what is the suggestion for drawing the edge cities into a more integrated urban world?  What I'd like to read to you from is a proposal that's been developed by Stan Allen of Harry Wiess Associates.  * [URL] Stan Allen was the chief architect on the subway for Washington, DC, and Harry Wiess Associates, which is based in Chicago, has long had a proposal on the books for something different--something extraordinarily different for the city of Washington--that abandons the automobile and stresses the ways in which public transportation may begin to knit the edge cities together with the old central cities, such as Washington, DC, Boston, Baltimore, and any other place in the nation where we can very easily see that there is an encirclement that has taken place, and edge cities have gone up, but it has been within the context of truck and car transportation, and not in the context of public transportation.  Interestingly enough, the idea of the circle route--the notion that you build your community in relationship to an encircling road around the city in Baltimore--goes all the way back to the middle of the last century, when in fact there were many plans put forth for creating a circle route around the city to improve transportation about the city, as well as through the city.  Now we're going to turn that model around and look at those circles as a means of better integrating the urban world into the larger picture of making the world a bit of a better place to live.  And let's talk a little bit about Stan Allen's proposal.

"Today the area within the fifty mile radius of Washington contains a population of more than 7 million.  Between 1960 and 1990 Washington lost about 200,000 residents and many businesses to its outlying suburbs.  This exodus continues to even the far rural reaches of the city, driven in response to dynamic and rapidly evolving social and economic factors.  It mirrors the apparently inevitable nationwide decentralization of society around our cities.  While seeking safety, privacy, better schools, less noise and congestion, and the absence of crime, the numbers of people involved to produce the very environmental problems from which they fled--the suburban home and the automobile--one, two, three, and now four to a family, have replaced the former interconnectedness of city pedestrian life with the human disconnections of no sidewalks, substituted by plenty of increasingly congested streets and highways for multiple family automobiles to do the connecting.

"The long range consequences of the sprawling fabric of single family subdivisions intermixed with burgeoning edge cities are now increasingly apparent:  the cost of the new infrastructure, utilities, highways and roads, schools and public service organizations.  (What were they saying about Fairfax?  What was happening in Fairfax?  What did you just hear NPR say?  What did 'Marketplace' say about the nature of the cost of libraries and schools in Fairfax?  The tax base wasn't there, the resources weren't there to pay for what people were demanding for their children.)  All of these demands far outstrip revenue from taxes leaving little for maintenance and improvement.  That's an old story.  The dilemma has become systematic of situations nationwide.

The pattern continues under the careful guidance of local land use, zoning policies and highway construction funding.  Developers and builders have a seemingly uncontrolled runaway domination of the marketplace, strengthening their attempts to produce the virtual reality of the American dream for every homeowner, single family unit dwellings.  Perhaps in the American dream, but accompanied by the sobering revelation of a transportation nightmare.  And missing the reality of what is in fact an extraordinary population explosion in which we can no longer sustain that dream.

"Stunting sophistication of balanced transportation throughout metropolitan Washington, the sprawling suburban growth was accompanied by construction of a network of interstate highways, the capital beltway, new roads and bridges, keeping pace with the surge of automobile and truck traffic, which is now seriously overloading the network.  Now due to current fiscal constraints, planners can only recommend the edition of a limited number of HOV--high occupancy vehicle--lanes, some highway widening, and general improvements to the fast deteriorating streets and bridges throughout the region.  This is a crippling response to escalating traffic.  In the mid-1960's Washington planned and started to build a rail system which opened for revenue operations in 1976--and has been growing ever since--to and beyond the Beltway.  This hub-and-spoke system met the forecast work trips and other new needs foreseen by the planners who however did not visualize the future demands for circumferential travel.

"Cicumferential travel:  the notion of around the city and out to the edge cities, interconnecting the edge cities and bringing the edge cities also back into the center of the city.  Today looking ahead to the decades of the next century, it is clearly apparent that the growth of circumferential work trip demands may well equal or surpass the hub-and-spoke work trips."  Anybody that has sat on the Beltway for hours knows damn well what he's talking about.  Try to get across the Wilson Bridge sometime in rush hour.  "Present day assessment then:  in the overall regional panorama we are to foretell the spiraling growth in the number of automobile trips over the existing highway and roadway network.  It will remain essentially the same size, creating alarming complexities of congestion, pollution and inconvenience.  Add to this the real effects of the cutting back of federal funding for rapid transit, thwarting the ability to build new lanes obviously needed to anticipate and accommodate emerging patterns of travel demands.  At the same time the number of three-car garages being built at single family homes continues unabated. Trucks moving goods and providing services increase in size, weight, and numbers, to further add air pollution, clogged traffic, and wear out roadways.  Everyone wants the public sector to provide and maintain the needs of an ever-growing infrastructure without raising taxes."

So what do you do?  What do you do is very simple.  It's absolutely a stroke of genius if you can just get people to think about it in terms of how you would go about doing it.  And that is to dig up the Beltway and put a subway underneath it.  Make a circumferential subway.  Transport people around the Beltway and out to the edge cities, as well as bringing people back into the center.

Now let's think about in terms of costs because this is where it becomes fascinating.  How is it that you revive an economy? How is it that you get people back to work and give them jobs?  There is only one way in which that's been proven in this country to really work.  It didn't happen with the New Deal; it was tried.  It happened during the second World War, when we got ourselves geared up before fighting the second World War in an industrial way--in such a way that we produced like we had never produced before.  Let us allocate some of those energies, some of those monies into the creation of the subway system itself.  $500 million dollars a year, perhaps, in the Washington, DC area.  Let's employ people actually in digging the tunnels, and making the stations, and creating that particular infrastructure.  Why?  Because it will strengthen the role of the edge cities as places easy to get to, inexpensive to get to through public transportation.  Let's focus our attention back on the creation of an infrastructure that brings the edge cities back into sync with, and in conjunction with the older urban areas themselves.  Let's think for example of what might happen with regard to the city of Baltimore.  Would it not make it much more sensible for us to be able to move not only out into the countryside but also to be able to move around the Beltway, via the transportation system that would be built underneath the roadway?

Question?  What about the Light rail? (Can't hear student at all)

EP:  I agree with you.  I think you've got it.  You have to make more of a connection.  You not only have to go this way:  for example, the inner urban has to be extended all the way to Annapolis.  It can't stop in Glen Burnie where it stops right now.  All right, once upon a time it did go all the way to Annapolis, but that's another story.  But what I'm talking about is also in terms of encircling the older cities by connecting them to the edge cities, and making them more a part conceptually of an integrated whole.  Now this is going to require some reassessment of what we are as Americans.  We're going to become far less dependent upon our individual cars.  We're going to have to deal much more with the notion of directing traffic and movement of people towards jobs, to and from jobs, this way and also around this way.  And it's going to involve the investment of tax dollars not in the improvement of our roadways, but in the creation of some form of easy to maintain, relatively inexpensive over the long run, inner urban transportation and circumferential transportation.  Most of our transportation is this way--into the centers and out.  We haven't really thought in terms of connecting in a circumferential way--those places which are really where most of the urban growth has taken place within the last twenty to thirty years.  A suggestion for you, an idea.

Student - Can't hear them once again!!

Oh well we're going to have to move to a much more regional concept in terms of how this would be paid for.  This would have to paid for by state funds, both Virginia and Maryland.  The tax base would have to be broadened.  The concept of who should pay for this becomes a much a very important issue, in terms of how you spread out the responsibility part.

Student again.

It means we're going to have to readjust our sense of what a community is, and how a community should function.  I'll leave you with a thought because I think we are at the end of the hour.  * I look forward to reading your projects.  Thank you.
 

Copyright 1996 The Johns Hopkins University