Living on the Edge (of the world) - Why I moved to Dallas.

I was listening to KCRW in Los Angeles yesterday, and they had a story on the development of banlieue Paris. In their words, the housing is “large and widely separated, requiring total dependence on your car. In a word: America.” From big-box stores in Issy to the fashionable suburbs of Japan being (in the words of the architect explaining them to me) “just like f-----g Plano” it seems like the whole world is becoming America – or at least a version thereof. Rem Koolhaas writes about this phenomenon as the arrival of the “generic city.” [SMLXL, with Bruce Mau – look at the dictionary entries.] It’s the universal reshaping of the world around the ideal lifestyle of convenience and space (at the expense of local character) that the rest of the world thinks of as native to the New World. I saw this all over Europe. Everywhere I went, I saw two things: 1) the place was the distinct product of a formative point in time (Baroque Rome, Haussmanian Paris, Seventeenth Century Weimar,) and 2) its residents seemed to be trying very inexplicably hard to adapt them to the place I’d just left.

This got me thinking. As a (future) architect with no particular location in mind I probably ought to go to the place the most steeped in the zeitgeist in its purest form. This meant young, forming, American, and in the van of the horizontal car-oriented cities that we were all told in school that we were supposed to hate. What, then, was the most nouveau-riche, low-density, car-oriented, growth-focused place in the country? Where was, in other words, the most unambiguously American place one could think to move? Texas. Of course.

Add to all of this memorizing Garreau’s Edge City again, and a semester of regional economics where I arrived at the inevitability of Houston on Marxian grounds, and my mind was made up. Off to the frontier. Sure, there’s no history. Sure, it’s practically impossible to find a neighborhood where anti-commuters like me would want to live. Sure, it’s hot. Sure, they’re too damn full of their myth. Sure to all of that, but it was a chance to be in the grand experiment of the anti-city, and chance to see what the world was like among all of those in the great majority that stubbornly refuse to let New Urbanist professors tell them how they ought to live - and to do it in its most extreme form.

Was the experiment successful?