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Joel Garreau's article. (I posted on it last year here.)

Joel says here:

One of the reasons edge cities haven't attracted many artists and bohemians is that so much of it is brand-new and therefore expensive. That will change. Somebody had to be the first to look at an abandoned New England textile mill and realize it would make a great condominium. Somebody had to be the first to look at an old SoHo sweatshop and realize it would make a great artists loft.

Just so, in the near future, somebody realizes what a great space an old Kmart is - 80,000 square feet with

16-foot ceilings and killer HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning). Then he or she realizes you can get them for nothing from the Resolution Trust Corporation - and the first edge-city bohemian district is born.

First the artists break the space into lavish 5,000-square-foot sculptors studios. Then they punch skylights into the roof to let natural light into the interior. Then they do the sensible thing and start living there illegally.

They place sculptures and anything else they can think of on the roof, although the windmills quickly become cliché. When all the really great space in the Kmart is full, other people start filling the former drugstores and dry cleaners of the abandoned shopping center with funky bars, savory restaurants, computer-arts master printers, and the shady dens of CD-ROM pressers. The exteriors of the buildings are painted in intriguing ways. Think Berkeley, California - or better yet, its neighbor, Emeryville.

There are still a lot of parking spaces in the near-term future. This place will never resemble an old village because it was originally shaped by the automobile. Individual transportation is unquestionably here to stay. Artists are individualists, and they cherish the freedom that four tires and a steering column afford them - especially as vehicles become zero-emission and are easily modified with hand tools because so much of their makeup is plastic and fiberglass.

This edge-city bohemian district is unquestionably a working environment. Art is being made, and artists need their trucks to bring in materials and supplies. There are trendy industrial overtones to this place. An arc-welding unit on the back loading dock is quite the status symbol, as is a used hologram duplicator.

Comments

[ian]

This is the world of William Gibson - if the Golden Gate Bridge can be colonised then an old supermarket is easy!

[bkmiller]

Ah. I've seen it before, and I was looking for this article. An interesting little concept. My anti-suburban mind rebels a bit, but objectively, most decaying industrial districts (loftland) are not any more attractive (or interesting) than an old, decaying commercial strip. Plus, there's plenty of free parking!

By the way, thanks for the package! A nice update!

[TM Lutas]

Unfortunately, this is unworkable. Edge cities have to get big enough and corrupt enough that their building inspectors are either too busy or buyable enough to let the illegal residents of KmART stay there.

[clew]

In my optimistic imaginings, the strip-malls get improved by being wrapped in non-load-bearing strawbale (for noise insulation as much as heat insulation) and most of the parking lots get turned into raised-bed gardens, as at Bradner Gardens Park. Many an artist doesn't need to drive *everywhere*, having noticed that one is also free and mobile on foot.

Detroit is partly turning back into truck farms; this perplexes some city officials, who know they prefer that to miserable abandoned neighborhoods but would rather have the tax revenue from the 1960s uses.

[bkmiller]

Isn't much of the soil in formerly urban Detroit too contaminated to grow safe foodstuffs? Interesting concept, though.

[clew]

Phytoremediation works—for most things, eventually, especially if you also use bioaccumulative extraction. Advantages: it's potentially cheap, and it tends to improve the land under it as you go.

Are you offering alternatives? Ignore it or build on it and the residents keep breathing it; capping it is pricy, and doesn't save the groundwater, and we can't do that forever; digging it all up and dumping it on someone else is a net loss. Phytoremediation is the best of a lot of bad choices. I don't know if the Detroit gardeners are doing it consciously, but fortunately the cheapest way of reclaiming empty soil is to grow a couple years of different cover crops before you grow food.

Nor am I sure Detroit is worse off than New Jersey, which combines a history of industrial effluent with its status as the Garden State for the NE.

Bradner Gardens soil was also mildly contaminated - the Tilth site had been, IIRC, cracked blacktop for a long time. The raised beds are part of how they deal with that; they started with yards of compost and years of cover crops to build microbial action and break down wierd stuff in the soil.

[Chris Burd]

Clew wrote:

"In my optimistic imaginings, the strip-malls get improved by being wrapped in non-load-bearing strawbale (for noise insulation as much as heat insulation) and most of the parking lots get turned into raised-bed gardens, as at Bradner Gardens Park. Many an artist doesn't need to drive *everywhere*, having noticed that one is also free and mobile on foot."

I think most of the parking will be converted to *something* other than parking under this scenario. But if the complex gets Soho-ized, the rising land prices will ensure most of the empty space gets built on. Look for townhouses and low-rise condos. The final result may look more like a village than Gareau imagines. Think of commercial foci in some of the old streetcar suburbs -- certainly automobile-depended, but walkable and "village"-like nonetheless.

[Klintron]

My guess: the parking lots would initially be tent-cities, but once it's soho-ized and the real estate becomes valuable, the tenents will be evicted and new buildings will be erected in their place.

[Jason Perry]

I tripped over this thread while following a link from del.icio.us, and I was thrilled to see Clew's comment about insulating with strawbales. I've been involved in natural building for a couple of years now, and one of my wishes is to get a chance to do a "bale wrap" in an urban industrial space.

I will keep better track of the abandoned Ames and Grand Union plazas from now on. Cool article and great thread.

This reminds me of my friend's fantasy a few years back called the "Malls to Meadows" campaign, though as I recall that involved dynamite.