What do you think of when you hear the word “city”? Most people envision a downtown filled with skyscrapers surrounded by lower-rise developments. At least, that’s what appears in most photographs, and the first two dozen of them, in a Google image search for “city.” Some even argue that cities such as Phoenix that don’t have big, skyscraper-filled downtowns aren’t “real cities.”
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However, as Joel Garreau pointed out nearly thirty years ago in his great book, Edge City, cities like that are “abberations. We built cities that way for less than a century.” Before about 1840, cities had no defined central business districts as we know them today. The first skyscrapers weren’t built until the 1880s. Since 1920, the economic forces that led to the construction of dense downtowns have been largely replaced by decentralizing forces. Continue reading
