Preface to the Paperback Edition: Beyond the Edge: The Dynamism of Postsuburban Regions

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION Beyond the Edge: The Dynamism of Postsuburban Regions Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster ORANGE COUNTY AND THE MEANINGS OF SUBURBIA 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 instance is a bit ambiguous and misleading. The 1970s saw a heightened concern with the "urbanization of the suburbs," with the term suburb customarily referring to low-density settlements located on the fringes of cities. Much of the writing in that period about suburban areas in the United States adopted a core-periphery approach, focusing on cities (at the core), suburbs (on the periphery), or the interplay between the two (as in studies of "white Hight" from cities to suburbs). Terms such 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 the suburban United States engaged in "bashing the 'burbs" and viewed traditional cities as the leading centers of civilization and of cultural vitality. 1 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, with a multicentered approach supplanting 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 VII vm ROB KLING, SPENCER OLIN, AND MARK POSTER 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." 2 To be sure, the earlier, more negative assessment of suburbia continues to have its adherents. The 1990s version of "bashing the 'burbs" portrays the new metropolitan regions in the United States as stubbornly resistant to heterogeneity and disturbingly parochial and exclusionary in mind set and behavior. From this highly skeptical point of view, many recent students of suburbia (including Kling, Olin, and Poster) have succumbed to a form ofboosterism called "suburbanophilia."' Our intention in the first edition of 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, as well as with a keen sense of the social and moral complexities of regions such as California's Orange County and Silicon Valley and Virginia's Fairfax County. While these particular regions originally developed in the 1960s as suburban appendages of larger cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., respectively), by the late 1980s they had developed their own economic and cultural autonomy. By then, for example, the vast majority of Orange County 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 a traditional city. POSTSUBURBIA AS A CONCEPT 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, linked primarily by private automobile transportation-makes them complex, seemingly incoherent and disorienting, 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 as to how to characterize postsuburban regions adequately that he simply refers to them as a "middle landscape," something between rural and urban. 4 Another astute observer, Kenneth PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION IX Jackson, is more helpful; he calls 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. 5 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 Denver, Pittsburgh, Dallas, or St. Louis. In seeking to provide conceptual meaning to these increasingly important, sprawling regions, we also considered Robert Fishman's notion of "technoburbs." 6 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," is more accurate analytically, but, nonetheless, it sounds more like something in a chemical laboratory than a place where people live and that they may actually come to love, or at least enjoy. After considerable discussion and debate, both 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 suburbs in the 1950s (e.g., Garden Grove and Buena Park) and also settlements that were once traditional cities (e.g., Santa Ana and Laguna Beach). As indicated in the first edition of our book, the postsuburban spatial formation is but one of four defining features of postwar Orange County; the others are cosmopolitanism, information capitalism, and consumerism. 7 How can one tell that a region is postsuburban? One clue is that many activities are conducted in centers that are functionally specialized and separated by travel times of 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 Debra Gold Hansen and Mary Ryan point out in 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." Furthermore, 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 work spaces, in postsuburbia one will find distinct and separable centers: residential neighborhoods, shopping malls, and industrial parks. X ROB KLING, SPENCER OLIN, AND MARK POSTER Postsuburbia's reliance upon automobiles has led 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 climatecontrolled environment designed to keep people moving in a purposeful manner, with few places to sit or "hang out," and few opportunities to receive personal service or to get to know the store owners by name. Why does this antipedestrianism, which is characteristic of postsuburban regions, matter? We believe that many nonrural 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 can also be found in many older towns, where houses have front porches and residents can more easily meet neighbors who stroll by, unlike the newer neighborhoods of postsuburbia where houses are likely to be walled off from the street. Orange County residents, as like postsurbanites elsewhere, are thereby handicapped in their efforts to create a local identity and form 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." 8 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 uses 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 PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION XI 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. 9 Fairfax County, located in northern Virginia and the site of Fred Barnes's story, has about one-fourth the population and one-half the land area of Orange County. Despite many similarities between the two, in Fairfax County, unlike Orange County, there are 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 contains other large shopping centers, such as the Fair Oaks Mall in Fairfax, Merrifield, downtown Reston, and Seven Corners. In addition, the adjacent city of Arlington has its own large residential areas and downtownlike highrise office I retail complexes that are 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. THE CULTURAL VITALITY OF POSTSUBURBIA 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: 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 comprised (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 the county's 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 in this regard Orange County serves, along with similar settlements, 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 by focusing on the economies of those counties. It is also important to note- ROB KLING, SPENCER OLIN, AND MARK POSTER Xll 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 compared with settlements of similar size elsewhere. TABLE 1 Population and Arts Rank of Selected U.S. Cities and Postsuburban Regions Settlement Los Angeles I Long Beach New York City Philadelphia Boston Dallas Minneapolis I St. Paul *Long Island *Orange County St. Louis Pittsburgh Tampa Seattle Denver *Silicon Valley Milwaukee *Northern New Jersey *Fort Lauderdale Portland Rochester Louisville Oklahoma City Syracuse Ann Arbor Modesto Macon Boulder Urbana I Champaign Santa Fe *= 1993 Population (millions) 9.04 8.60 4.98 3.81 2.85 2.64 2.62 2.62 2.54 2.41 2.26 2.18 1.73 1.54 1.45 1.41 1.37 1.36 1.07 0.97 0.97 0.75 0.50 0.42 0.30 0.24 0.17 0.13 Arts Rank 2 I 8 7 39 18 9 19 23 36 30 24 47 17 35 22 55 88 65 102 60 40 50 301 252 114 161 110 Postsuburban region. One indicator of such cultural vitality is the arts. Table l, which lists a diverse set of cities and five postsuburban regions, ranked by their populations and the relative strength of their arts, helps to illustrate how larger settlements usually have stronger arts cultures. 10 Savageau and Boyer's top ten arts cities, for example, all have more than two PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION Xlll 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 I Champaign, and Boulder, for examplecan 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 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) with New York City (1), or Orange County (19) 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. POSTSUBURBIA OR EDGE CITIES? 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.11 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 30 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 7 edge cities in Orange County and 5 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 XIV ROB KLING, SPENCER OLIN, AND MARK POSTER have called "postsuburban" because he ignores the fundamentally decentered 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 that widely separated cities like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are located 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 Garreau's assessment of community and its limitations in edge cities (see Edge City, Chapter 8). 12 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 I Fashion Island, the Irvine Spectrum, and the John Wayne Airport area (including South Coast Plaza-Costa Mesa, as well as the bulk of Irvine). However, even though their industrial and office parks are centered five to seven miles from each other, these are not distinct and separable edge cities. 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 I Fashion Island, where Irvine residents go for shopping and entertainment but rarely for work. In turn, few Newport Beach residents travel to Irvine for shopping or entertainment, and the affluent professionals and top executives who reside in Newport Beach are employed throughout Orange County, not PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION XV primarily in Irvine. The point is that there is no easy way to combine some part of Irvine and Newport Beach I Fashion Island into the equivalent of a functional, or edge, city. Similiarly, the South Coast Metro area is functionally rich, like Newport Beach I Fashion Island, but not as tightly t-ied 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 in Santa Ana and Costa Mesa. But its residents are unlikely to travel to 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, or the Chicano I Latino 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. They settle in older neighborhoods, depend on people who share their native language and culture, 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 understanding Orange County as a postsuburban region. This is by no means to suggest that Orange County's developing cosmopolitanism has reached a point where it enthusiastically accepts 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. participation in the United Nations) has been substantially transformed in more globally aware directions. A POSTSUBURBAN POLITICS? Our colleague at the University of California; Irvine, 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. 13 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, the group we call postsuburbanites creates their lifestyle in a place where central institutions, XVI ROB KLING, SPENCER OLIN, AND MARK POSTER 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). Today careers are 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 nonterritorial, virtual offices which have been described by one observer as "the most radical redefinition of the workplace since the Industrial Revolution." 14 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 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 every workday. Many of these workers can use mobile technologies, such as car phones and portable computers, to communicate with their managers and coworkers, 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 working 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." 15 In postsuburban, information-oriented regions, such changes are certain to have political consequences 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 December, 1994-complicates matters even further. The debacle, the largest municipal bankruptcy in history, dramatically exemplifies several themes of our study. In the first place, the bankruptcy demonstrates the extent to which certain governmental agencies-in this case the office of County Treasurer-Tax Collector Robert L. Citron-had become insulated from the larger political process and functioned with relative autonomy in respect to that process (see Chapter 8). An internal audit, for example, concluded more than a year prior to the bankruptcy declaration, had warned the County Board of Supervisors that Citron was operating without adequate controls. 16 When reminded of this audit, none of the supervisors could remember it. Some observers have argued that the supervisors lacked sufficient expertise in the securities markets to PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITIOJ'\ xvn provide effective oversight of the county's high -risk investment strategy, thereby contributing mightily to the ultimate disaster. As their senior member, eighty-two-year-old Thomas Riley, a former Marine Corps general, was quoted as observing in the bankruptcy's aftermath, "I feel so incompetent in responding to some of this. 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." 17 Whatever one may conclude about the competency of the supervisors, it is clear that they gave the treasurer's office free reign with regard to the county's investment portfolio. Second, the collapse reveals the close and continuing interaction between municipal and county governments on the one hand and private business on the other (see Chapter 8). In Orange County, political and business leaders have most often functioned as one unit in promoting rapid and unrestrained growth. The elected board of supervisors, for example, historically has been predisposed to favor the needs of the county's pro-growth oligarchy (bankers, financiers, and developers, such as the Irvine Company, the Rancho Santa Margarita Company, and the Mission Viejo Company).'" The bankruptcy debacle of late 1994 exposed yet another feature of that long-standing and collaborative interaction: in constructing the county's investment fund during the 1990s, the role of Merrill Lynch, the Wall Street brokerage firm where Citron was a favored customer, was crucial. "By all accounts," writes Charles R. Morris, a Wall Street consultant, "Merrill rang up huge investment fees by feeding Citron's recklessness like a bartender pushing drinks on a drunk driver." 19 Even earlier, in the late 1980s, Merrill Lynch representatives had joined with Orange County lawmakers to work diligently and successfully in the state legislature on behalf of several bills designed to widen the county's authority to invest local tax money in complex financial instruments. 20 Third, Orange County's financial crisis may also be viewed as one significant legacy of the California "taxpayers' revolt" of the late 1970s and the 1980s. Sharply limiting the growth of property taxes resulted in increased reliance on higher and higher yields from investment funds in order to finance the quality of municipal services (police, fire, parks, street maintenance, sanitation, etc.) to which residents of that relatively affluent region had become accustomed. (For a comprehensive analysis of this matter-stressing the importance of rapid growth, consumerism, home ownership, and increasing property values in Orange County-see Chapter 10.) It is difficult to gauge the long-term economic, financial, and political effects of Orange County's declaration of bankruptcy. The county will certainly have to pay higher interest rates to borrow money in the future, which will have a negative impact on public construction xvm ROB KLING, SPENCER OLIN, AND MARK POSTER projects of all kinds. It is unlikely, however, that the investment losses, as serious as they are, will permanently derail an otherwise robust regional economy. 21 However, when added to the aforementioned factors-postsuburban spatial organization and the reshaping of work under information capitalism-the historic bankruptcy of Orange County will have long-lasting political reverberations. As urban economist David Friedman observed in reference to the midterm elections of 1994, in terms completely 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." 22 These are the kinds of emerging issues that would merit another study, and we wrote Postsuburban California with the expectation of stimulating new research and analysis about Orange County and other similar metropolitan regions throughout the United States. December 1994 NOTES Thanks to Greg Walsh for his cordiality and patience in teaching us about lifeways in Fairfax County, Virginia, and to Gene Rochlin for discussions of political orientations in postsuburban regions. 1. See Brett W. Hawkins and Stephen L. Percy, "On Anti-Suburban Orthodoxy," Social Science Quarterly 72 (September 1991): 478-91. Also see William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, "Bold New City or Built-Up 'Burb? Redefining Contemporary Suburbia," American Quarterly 46 (March 1994): 1-30 and following comments. 2. See Matt Hamblen, "Frontierland," Planning 58 (Aprill992): 17. 3. See, for example, Sharpe and Wallock, "Bold New City or Built-Up 'Burb?": 13-14, 23. 4. See Peter Rowe, Making a Middle Landscape (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). 5. See Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 6. See Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987). 7. We have been gratified by the generally positive reception of our book and its conceptual categories of analysis. See, for example, the following reviews: Arnold Hirsch, Reviews in American History 20 (March 1992): 78-83; Craig Hendricks, journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1512-13; Robert Young, Urban Geography 13 (March-April1992): 203-4; Michael Ebner,Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (Summer 1992): 219-20; Robert Fishman, Con- PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION XIX temporary Sociology 22 (January 1993): 86-87; and Fred Viehe, California History 74 (Spring 1994): 73. 8. In addition to Chapter 6 of this book, see Fred Kent III and Kathleen Madden, "Streets vs. Malls: The Modern Dilemma of Urban Public Spaces," Los Angeles Times, 4 Dec. 1994. 9. See Fred Barnes, "Me and My Cars," The New Republic 206 (1 June 1992): 54. 10. David Savageau and Richard Boyer created an arts ranking for 343 metropolitan regions in the United States and Canada. See Places Rated Almanac (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1993). Their ranking system is based on a measure that includes certain kinds of fine arts and venues, including radio concert time, symphonic performances, theaters, museums, and touring performances. It emphasizes mainstream fine arts and down plays some important arts, such as jazz, and performance venues, such as clubs and galleries. Even so, the ranking seems to have good face validity for our purposes. We have selected settlements for Table 1 to include the five postsuburban regions identified by Gottdiener and Kephart that are distinguishable in Savageau and Boyer's report. Unfortunately, their report sweeps many of Gottdiener and Kephart's counties into larger metropolitan agglomerations. For example, they include Fairfax County, Virginia, as part of Washington, D.C., and Du Page County, Illinois, as part of Chicago. 11. See Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991). 12. For an analysis of the Irvine Company's role in Orange County, see Chapter 3 by Martin Schiesl. 13. See, for example, Mark Baldassare, Trouble in Paradise: The Suburban Transformation in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 14. See Gil Gordon, "Are We Being Run Over By the 'Virtual Office' Bandwagon?: Alternatives for Workers That Perform Their Jobs Away from the Office," Telecommuting Review: The Gordon Report 11 (July 1994): 6-10. Also see Alison Sprout, "Moving Into the Virtual Office," Fortune 129 (2 May 1994): 103, and Samuel Greengard, "Making the Virtual Office a Reality," Personnel journal 73 (September 1994): 66-70. 15. See, for example, Gordon, ''Are We Being Run Over By the 'Virtual Office' Bandwagon?", 8. 16. See Lee Romney and Tracy Weber, "Auditor Warned O.C. in '93," Los Angeles Times, 9 Dec. 1994. For further coverage, see Dan Morain and Eric Bailey, "Brokerage Urged More Authority for Officials," ibid., 10 Dec. 1994. 17. See Dan Weikel and Matt Lait, "Even Supervisors Aren't Sure They're Up to Task," Los Angeles Times, 11 Dec. 1994. Also see Josh Getlin, "The Unthinkable Fall of the Golden Orange," ibid., and James Flanigan, "No Longer Riding High in the Saddle," ibid. 18. Within two weeks of their bankruptcy declaration, the board of supervisors, acting against the urgent appeals of local residents, approved a plan submitted by the Koll Real Estate Group to build as many as 3,300 homes in a wetlands area near Huntington Beach. After the approval, Huntington Beach councilperson Ralph Bauer declared, "They crammed this down our throat. The board just went through the largest municipal bankruptcy in history and XX ROB KLING, SPENCER OLIN, AND MARK POSTER apparently has learned nothing from it." See David Haldane, "O.C. Supervisors OK Wetlands Development," Los Angeles Times, 15 Dec. 1994. 19. See Charles R. Morris, "Margin Call: Orange County's Romance With High Yields Has a High Price," Los Angeles Times, 11 Dec. 1994. 20. See Dan Morain and Eric Bailey, "Brokerage Urged More Authority for Officials," Los Angeles Times, 10 Dec. 1994. 21. See Seth Mydans, "Orange County Loss Unlikely to Derail a Basic Prosperity," New York Times, 13 Dec. 1994. 22. See David Friedman, "The Politics of America's Changing Work Experience," Los Angeles Times, 27 Nov. 1994.