Hosted by Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer

Thank you for visiting "The Navigator – Live." Today's chat ended at 3 p.m. EDT.

My guest this week was Joel Garreau – friend, colleague, visionary. Joel is the author of "The Nine Nations of North America," (1981) a fresh way of looking at the geography and demography of our continent, and "Edge City", (1991) a book about the biggest revolution in 150 years and how the world builds the cities that are the capstones, cornerstones and sometimes millstones of our civilization. Amonst other things I asked Joel, "Will the Internet Kill Cities?" Read below to find the answer.

"The Navigator – Live" appears each Thursday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern time. It's a live, moderated discussion offering washingtonpost.com users the chance to talk directly to intriguing and sometimes unusual guests who are shaping the digital world. "The Navigator" appears in The Washington Post print edition every Thursday. You can read past columns by following this link.

Linton Weeks: Greetings, everybody. And hello to Joel Garreau.

Linton Weeks: Will the Web kill off cities?

Joel Garreau: The possibility exists. All cities are always shaped by whatever the state of the art transportation device is at the time. If the state of the art is shoe leather and donkeys, you get Jerusalem at the time of Jesus. Donkeys have sharp little hooves that can take them straight up those hills. Flash forward 1500 years and the state of the art is horse-drawn wagons. Jerusalem is screwed. You can not pull a freight wagon up that kind of incline. So in the 1700s, when the state of the art is horse-drawn wagons and ocean-going sail, what you get is Boston, or Antwerp, or Alexandria, Va. If the state of the art is rail, you get Chicago. If it's the automobile, you get Los Angeles. In the late '50s, it became jet passenger planes. As recently as the early '50s, the southwestern most major league baseball team was St. Louis. Why? Because you could not conduct a schedule that included getting back and forth from Atlanta, Houston, or Seattle promptly until then. Those cities could not become world capitals in any real sense before that breakthrough.

Linton Weeks: What the heck does that have to do with the Internet?

Joel Garreau: The state of the art today is the automobile, the jet plane, "and the computer." The computer is not just a communication device, it's a transportation device. As recently as the '40s, everybody in a corporation still went to one central location downtown, because face-to-face contact was still the most practical kind. But a generation ago, corporations like Marriott began to realize that there was no need to spend money on high-priced real estate just for, say, reservations clerks. With enough telephone lines and computers, they could be on the far side of the moon. So first they moved them to a rural location more than a hour from headquarters, and then they moved them to Salt Lake City. After all, if you could move their work down the wire, you didn't have to move their bodies down the Interstate. Today, as computers become cheaper and more powerful, few white collar workers haven't at least thought about telecommuting.

Linton Weeks: So what will the future look like?

Joel Garreau: Suppose that in the not too distant future (let us say 10 years) some large portion of the population (let us say the top 50 percent in income and education) have a magic screen on their wall. I don't know how it's wired. Doesn't matter. It's probably a television. But the properties of this screen is as follows:

If I want to buy an air-conditioner, I can go to this screen and it will tell me everybody who's interested in selling me one, with the price and the specifications. If quality is an issue, the screen will tell me what Consumer Reports thinks, what chat groups think, what my mother thinks.

I've used this screen before, so it knows my credit card number. More important, it knows that I'm an all-cotton kind of guy. So if I try to buy a machine in Harvest Gold, it will ask me, "Joel, are you sure?" and if I try to buy one in Avacado Green, it will log me off.

Most important, if I hit enter, within 24 hours, something that looks a whole lot like a UPS truck will show up. It will have been dispatched by a very sophisticated warehouse where everything is bar-coded. It is the pivotal place where, in the words of Nicholas Negroponte, "the electrons start the atoms moving." This truck will unload my air-conditioner and, if I were willing to pay a little extra, it will also unload a human being to install my air-conditioner.

Linton Weeks: How will this change our cities?

Joel Garreau: Cities are made up of buildings, and the Internet will challenge the use of all kinds of them. In this scenario, the key thing is the stuff will start coming to us, rather than us going to the stuff.

Linton Weeks: What will that do to the existence of shops?

Joel Garreau: Take a Safeway.

Jane Jacobs, in "Death and Life of Great American Cities," says that the point of cities is choices. (In fact, she says that the way you can tell the vitality of a city is by the thickness of its Yellow Pages. That tells you how many choices you have.)

Suppose you had the choice of having Safeway save a little money on real-estate by reducing the size of its stores, in exchange for being willing to home-deliver your toilet paper. Would you like to have the choice of not having to make the drive?

I would. In a heart beat. To be sure, there are some things in a Safeway that I want to have a face-to-face relationship with. My tomatoes, for example. And I probably wouldn't trust the kid to pick my spare ribs. (Although if the place was called The French Market, I might.) In short, anything I might find in a farmers' market I'd probably still want to drive for.

But 90 percent of everything in a Safeway is shrink wrapped, canned, packaged and nationally advertised. If Safeway was willing to make money through highly advanced home delivery, I'd say sure.

What will this do, then, to neighborhood retail? Is there anything else in that supermarket-based shopping strip that I need to drive to if I have a choice? Anything in that drugstore? That dry cleaner? That travel agency? I don't think so.

In this scenario, very soon, entire neighborhood shopping centers are empty. I wonder what they will be good for when we need to adaptively re-use them.

Tysons Corner, VA: The growth of the web should allow people to live anywhere they want and conduct business via e-commerce. In the local area however, we have seen a growth in people moving to the Virginia and Maryland suburbs in purusit of work in the high tech industries.

Will this trend continue or will it start to reverse? Why?

Do you have any resources that I could refer to later?


Thanks.

Joel Garreau: In the scenario I'm painting, the key determinant for where people choose to live, work and play will be people's need for face-to-face contact.

I think this cuts two ways. It breathes new life into the old downtown as entertainment centers. You can see that today in Manhattan, San Francisco, London and Washington.

But it also cuts the other way. If what you want to have face-to-face contact with is nature, in this scenario the
Web becomes the biggest agent for the physical expansion of cities since the automobile. In fact, I think it will be a more powerful expander, quicker, than the automobile. You ain't seen nothin' yet in terms of growth beyond the old downtowns.

Bethesda, MD: Do we really want a world without book stores and music shops?

Joel Garreau: No, and I don't think that will happen. This is about choices. You will decide whether or not to go to a bookstore depending on your mood, or the time of day, or how much you want to meet someone of the opposite sex who shares your interests.

I mean, if all you want is to exchange money for a commodity, go to amazon.com. They're hard to beat if all you want is the book.

But if you want human contact, by all means, you go to a bookstore. The most important thing there is not the books, it is the couches.

Linton Weeks: Joel, so does this mean we all can move to the country and telecommute our way to fame and fortune?

Joel Garreau: There's a theory that holds that with enough bandwidth, each of us will be able to retreat to our own personal mountain top in Montana, being lured down into the flats only to breed.

I think that's a profound misreading of human nature. I think we're social animals. I think telecommuting is largely a crock. I've done it, only to discover that the work I do on my computer is the most boring 20 percent of my job. The real hit to my job is face-to-face contact.

But suppose you decided that you could get all the face-to-face you need two days a week. Would moving your home out into the country start looking good? Suppose you could get all the face-to-face you need three days a month. Would the Caribbean start looking good?

(By the way, much of this sermon is inspired by a terrific book that I recommend heartily, called "City of Bits," by William Mitchell, head of architecture at MIT.)

Washington, D.C.: Basically, I think you guys in the media have done all you can to promote the idea that cities are places where you
re going to get victimized by crime. I think that the Internet and 500 channels on cable, etc. are also being pushed by the media as safe places for people to shop or live their lives vicariously -- also in the best interest of the media! Would you admit there's a fright element going on here? Happy Halloween.

Joel Garreau: Safety is absolutely an issue. Has been for the 8,000 years that we've been building cities. (The first cities were built largely because we thought we'd be safer *inside* them than outside them. Imagine that.)

Mercifully, the crime rate has been plummeting in most of the old downtowns, and the fact that they're a lot safer than they used to be will not escape the attention of the real estate industry.

Used to be that riverfront property was thought of as awful, because of all the bad smells. With the rise of the environmental movement, that changed, and now waterfronts are the hottest thing going.

As the news gets out that the old downtowns are a lot safer than we thought, I think they will get a shot in the arm, too.

But then the question is whether we will choose to live in places that were designed at 19th century densities. A lot of people will love it, especially if they are young and single. But I have a hunch that people with children will still prefer to have a yard -- if not an entire forest -- at their disposal.

Washington, D.C.: Is it possible that any effect the Internet has on cityness may be more than just overestimated, but truly a fantasy? Those who give life to a city are not those who under any circumstances will isolate themselves in front of a monitor; and the converse is that the city and its mix would be gloriously enhanced by the absence of those who are continuously poised to find out of the lint in their navels has really turned to Brillo.

Joel Garreau: Navel lint turned to Brillo! I love that scenario!

I agree with you that cities are here to stay. But I have difficulty imagining a scenario in which they are not radically changed.

For the first 200 years in North America, cities were tiny little places like Alexandria, Va., or Paul Revere's Boston. The way to create wealth was out on the land, hunting, mining, farming. So 97 percent of the people lived out there, not in cities.

For the 100 years or so of the Industrial Revolution, we had a radical upheaval. All of a sudden, the way to make money was in factories. That required thousands of people to be within walking or trolly distance of the factories. That is what caused us to build to incredible densities like in Manhattan or Chicago.

But in 1915, the one millionth Model T rolled off the assembly line and we never built another old downtown again. Calgary, Alberta, Canada was the last one -- a railroad town, 1914.

Now we're entering the Information Age, or whatever you want to call it. The way to make money is through cleverness. You make money by figuring out new ways to use graphite in wings of Boeing 747s, or new ways to make telephones smaller and smarter. Or you make books or movies or legal opinions.
Today those cleverness factories are office buildings -- and most of them are in Edge Cities.

Tomorrow? Well, where do you want to create your cleverness? Those ads for laptops never show somebody in a city. They show them on a beach, or near a ski slope. I think that is hugely telling for the future of cities.
C

TEXAS: This computer and internet stuff is already causing folks to be less sociable. The more and more we interact digitally the less and less we interact verbally or vocally. It think that just ain't right. Someday we won't need to speak at all. And i bet we are gonna become less physically fit, too. What do you think about that?

Joel Garreau: I dunno about that. One of the kinds of city buildings that I'm very bullish on is airports. I think they're use soars. (Buy stock!) The more we have an opportunity to build up virtual relationships with people all over the globe that we could never have gotten to know so well before, the more we're going to want to finally meet them and have face-to-face.

Rack up them frequent flyer miles.

Linton Weeks: It's about half-time here and I must say, Joel's giving us plenty of food for thought. I need a little iced tea to wash it down. Keep those questions flowing.

Washington, DC: Many readers of you book, myself included, wonder how you can possibly be so enamored of edge cities?

What's to possibly like about sprawling, faceless technoburbs, traffic jams and the inconvenience of having to use you car to do *everything*? (There are no sidewalks in Tysons Corner!)

-Brian K.

Joel Garreau: Yeah, I've wondered more than once whether I've wasted some important portion of my life -- I mean, it's embarrassing how many Victoria's Secrets I've seen all over the globe.

The answer to your question is that if I thought these were the final product, I'd slash my throat. But we've just gone through the biggest city building boom in the history of the Republic -- there are now 181 Edge Cities bigger than Memphis or Providence. There are only 45 downtowns of comparable size. This all happened in the last generation. It took Venice 500 years to become great.

We don't have as much time to make our new places great. But I think we are very inventive people, and we are "solving for" all kinds of problems in our new places.

The key question is whether they will ever evolve the squishy things like civilization, soul, identity and community.

I'm guardedly optimistic that we will be able to. All new cities in the past always gave people the creeps initially. People thought Chicago in the late 1800s looked like a "frontier boom town" -- and it turned out okay.

I don't see any particular reason to think we've lost our abilities to face new challenges and solve them.

And it's a gas to watch this civilization figure out what it values -- who we are, how we got that way, where we're headed and what makes us tick. You can see us doing it by looking at what we build.

Linton Weeks: And what about all this hoopla over distance learning? Whither university campuses, do they wither?

Joel Garreau: I think university campuses thrive. Face to face with teachers and other students is crucial for a first-class education, I think. I don't care how much bandwidth you're talking about, I think university classes on the Net will be a second-class option for as far as the eye can see, like today's correspondence courses.

Linton Weeks: And other kinds of buildings? Malls?

Joel Garreau: Those are turning into face-to-face entertainment meccas where it so happens you can buy a shirt.

I have a friend by the name of Jaron Lanier, who invented virtual reality. He's doing a lot of work in Las Vegas, creating new entertainment realities.

He thinks the way you'll know that malls have predominantly become places to gather for face-to-face is when you see the escalators disappear.

Linton Weeks: Escalators?

Joel Garreau: Yeah, to be replaced by rides, or water slides. The next time you take a ferris wheel to the top level of a mall, remember Jaron.

rosslyn, va: Seems to me, computer networks, far from allowing people to travel and commute less, force them to do it more. Tech workers drive many miles to get to an office park, while old-style workers can often jump on the metro for a few stops.<P>

In my humble opinion, cars are a blight on the earth and the city.<P>

So how can we get tech companies to move to the inner cities?<P>

And how can we get rid of cars - at least from our cities?

Joel Garreau: I think we could have a lot of surplus asphalt on our hands in a not-to-distant future.

Even in the middle of rush hour, three-quarters of the people on the road are not commuting. They are dealing with the effluvia of life -- picking up laundry, groceries. If the Web causes a massive freight shift where our stuff comes to us in delivery trucks each of which can replace 20 or 30 trips by us in a car, that could get an amazing amount of useless traffic off the road, making it open for really important trips -- like the ones required for face-to-face contact.

Re tech companies downtown. I have friends at Wired magazine. They have so much bandwidth, they could be anywhere -- Maui.

They chose their offices to be South of Market, in San Francisco, in an old rehabbed warehouse. Why? Because they like to go out into a park for their meetings.

I think you'll see more of that -- people choosing high-quality locations for face-to-face. But I don't think that will only be in downtowns. I can imagine office work booming in highly attractive resort areas like the beach or the mountains.

Washington, DC: I heard you speak at a conference about one year ago. You stated that you had some doubts as to the future of downtown Silver Spring, but did not go into any details. What do you think about the new plan for downtown Silver Spring? In a few years, could downtown Silver Spring experience revitalization on the level of Ballston or Bethesda? Where do you think downtown Silver Spring is going?

Joel Garreau: Most first-tier inside-the-beltway Edge Cities nationwide are booming. In fact, I'm typing this from Washingtonpost.com's offices in Rosslyn-Ballston, just across the river from Georgetown. It's now *the* hot place for young singles to live in the Washington area. (I'm totally shocked, given what a pit this area was as recently as 10 years ago.)

Silver Spring, unfortunately, is in Montgomery County, Maryland, which has the highest ratio of professional planners to total population of any place outside the former Soviet Union. Planning is a citizen spectator sport.

Unfortunately, that means Silver Spring has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity over the last 30 years. There have been dozens of redevelopment ideas that people did not allow builders to put up.

I deeply hope this new plan works. I really do. I guess the question is whether the people of the area will allow exciting new places like rock bars to grow up in their carefully controlled area.

Vienna, Va.: Do you still admit coming from Pawtucket, R.I.? Where can I find your writing on Til Hazel?

Joel Garreau: Don't believe everything you read in the FBI reports. &-)

You can read about Til Hazel, who did more to shape the built environment of the Washington metropolitan area than any man since L'Enfant -- and I'm not so sure about L'Enfant -- in my book. Plug: "Edge City: Life on the New Frontier," published by Doubleday.

Linton Weeks: Joel: Shame on you.

Nashville, TN: What about all the people who are forced to live in cities? Is the outlook bleak?

Joel Garreau: Good question.

The good news is that amazing things are happening to people who we thought we're trapped. For example, two-thirds of all African Americans in the Washington area do *not* live in the District of Columbia. They live in the burbs where the education and real estate opportunities are better. The median income for those black suburban households is $60k -- well over the white American average.

You see numbers like that all over the place.

The other good news is that business is actively seeing opportunities in unemployment sumps like Oakland near the docks. In this economy, we need workers bad enough that we're willing to search them out wherever we can find them.

washington, d.c.: how was yer iced tea?

Linton Weeks: Pretty good, under the circumstances. Even iced tea is getting complicated. When I ordered it at the cyber cafe across the street from washingtonpost.com, I was asked if I wanted mango or berry. I chose the berry and I have no regrets. I even bought some for Joel.

Joel Garreau: It was a pretty nice place except for all those bloody terminals.

Linton Weeks: Joel: Let's wrap this baby up. Thanks for your thoughts on cities and other things. How about one more question. Here's a good one.

London, England: You gave us a new way of looking at cities in "Edge City" and a new way of looking at a country in "Nine Nations." Logically, you should next produce a new overview of the world. Will you?

Joel Garreau: You sound like my editor.

My current area of confusion is human networks -- not electronic ones. I'm interested in whether there are laws that are common to the behavior of sororities, Mafias, and Marine brigades.

Linton Weeks: That was great. Thanks to everyone for joining in. Next Thursday we'll be in a Halloween spirit and we hope to have a real live ghostbuster with us. See you then.

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