1 The Santa-Fe-ing of the Urban and Urbane New Urbanism 8 April 2006 Joel Garreau
Human settlements are always shaped by whatever is the state of the art transportation device of the time. Shoe-leather and donkeys at the time of Jesus results in Jerusalem. Sixteen centuries later, when the state of the art has become horse-drawn wagons and ocean-going sail, you get places like Boston or Antwerp. Railroads yield Chicago – both the area around the ―El‖ (intraurban rail) and the area that processed wealth from the hinterlands (the stockyards). The automobile results in places with multiple urban cores like Los Angeles. The jet passenger plane allows more places with such ―edge cities‖ to rise in such hitherto inconvenient locations as Dallas, Houston, Seattle and Atlanta and now Sydney, Lagos, Cairo, Bangkok, Djakarta, and Kuala Lumpur. (Not to mention Stockholm, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Toronto, and Milan.) The state of the art today is the automobile, the jet plane, and the networked computer. What does adding the networked computer get you? I think the answer is ―the Santa-Fe-ing of the World.‖ This means the rise of places the entire point of which is face-to-face contact. These places are concentrated and walkable, like villages. Some are embedded in the old downtowns – such as Adams Morgan in Washington, or The Left Bank of Paris, or the charming portions of what in London is referred to, somewhat
2 narcissistically, as ―The City.‖ Some are part of what have traditionally been regarded as suburbs or edge cities, such as Reston, Virginia, or Emeryville/Berkeley, California. Many, however, erupt far beyond our current understanding of metropolitan areas, wherever people find it nice to congregate. Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a remarkable example of this trend. It is the home of world-renowned opera, charming architecture, distinguished restaurants, great places to buy used boots, quirky bookstores, sensational desert and mountain vistas and major diversity, while being little more than a village of 62,000, far from the nearest major metropolis. This ―Santa-Fe-ing‖ means urbane well beyond the current definition of urban. It means aggregation and dispersal. As with all innovation, its impact is first seen among people with enough money to have choices. But as the cost of enabling technology drops precipitously, this effect is already transforming the built environment worldwide – including in such unlikely places as Croatia and Ecuador. I have a hunch this transformation is spreading even more rapidly than was the case with the automobile or the jet plane, because it involves putting an increasingly high value on whatever is valuable about a place that can not be digitized. The logic of this hypothesis starts with the question: ―In the 21st century, is there any future for cities of any kind?‖ After all, some would have us believe that with enough bandwidth, each of us can wind up on his or her own personal mountaintop in Montana, being lured down into the flatlands only to breed. That‘s a preposterous view of human nature, of course. There‘s a reason solitary confinement is a punishment. We are social animals. But the question makes a serious point. Many of the historic reasons for human concentration are gone. It‘s been a
3 century since you‘ve had to live within walking distance of your factory. Today, you often don‘t even need be within driving distance of your office – as anyone with a cell phone knows. (I‘m not advocating this arrangement, I‘m reporting it.) You certainly don‘t need a metropolis to acquire anything a dot-com is willing to sell – which is a very great deal and growing exponentially. I think this means the one and only reason for congregation in the near future is face-to-face contact. Period. Full stop. The places that are good at providing this will thrive – think Oxford, England. The ones that are not will die. Cities are not forever. You have not heard much lately from the Babylon chamber of commerce. There are 87 classes of real estate out of which you build cities, according to William J. Mitchell, the former head of the architecture and planning department at MIT. They are all being transfigured. The classic example is bookstores. If all you want to do is exchange money for a commodity, the path with least friction is often Amazon. In backwaters where, just ten years ago, buying or even borrowing a non-best-seller was a chore that took weeks, hundreds of thousands of titles are now within one click. Does this mean bookstores have disappeared? Of course not. The half of them that have survived and even grown since the ‗90s, however, have morphed. The critical elements are no longer the shelves. They are the couches, cappacino machines, and cafes. Bookstores have become places to loiter, face-to-face, among like-minded people. What about grocery stores? Do they have a future? What happens when it becomes cheaper for the supermarket to deliver your toilet paper to you than it is to heat, light and pay rent and taxes on its store? Under what circumstances would you ever again get in your car to drive to market again? For me, the answer is that I want to have
4 face-to-face contact with my tomatoes – or anything else you might find in a social setting like a farmers‘ market. I‘m not sure I‘d trust the kid at the dot com to pick out my spare ribs – although if the emporium was called TheFrenchMarket.com, I might. If the grocer wants to ship me my barbecue sauce, however, I won‘t mind. Ninety-five percent of everything one finds in a supermarket is flash-frozen, shrink-wrapped, and nationally advertised. We are in the midst of a burgeoning freight revolution, in which the stuff is coming to us, rather than us going to the stuff – as anybody who has Christmas shopped lately may have noted. When the grocers enter this realm, that will be fine by me. In fact, I can‘t think of anything in an entire Wal-Mart that I would regret having delivered to me in a big brown van. Visiting a Wal-Mart doesn‘t give me enough of a psychic boost to justify a drive now. Of course, if big-box retail migrates into the digital ether tomorrow, we‘ll have an enormous challenge figuring out the adaptive re-use of their buildings. What will we make of them? Roller skating rinks? Greenhouses? Nondenominational evangelical churches? Artists lofts? Whatever the answer, I doubt their passing will be mourned. What about college campuses? Is there any future for those? After all, the University of Phoenix, the online learning establishment, became one of the hottest growth stocks of the early 21st century. Internet MBAs abound from some of the world‘s most distinguished schools. Why bother ever getting out of your pajamas to learn? Again, I think the answer is face-to-face contact. After all, distance learning is nothing new. Benjamin Franklin engaged in correspondence classes. The United States military is awash in senior officers with advanced degrees from the University of Maryland, which has pioneered its outreach programs to people in remote locations.
5 However, I think distance learning will always be everyone‘s second choice. It works best for people who do not have the time or money for the conventional academic experience. First choice remains the traditional universities. Getting into them has become insanely competitive and expensive. Why are they so desirable? Because sitting in class, absorbing information from a lecturer, is only a tiny part of the college experience. College is where many people meet their first spouse. It‘s where they develop a network of friends that they‘ll likely maintain for life. It‘s an entertainment center and an athletic center. Oh, and as for learning – most of the stuff that has stuck with me came out of dorm sessions at one in the morning, engaging in face-to-face contact with smart people. As we shall see, the impact of face-to-face on urban calculations includes office space, and even home locations. But why is this transformation occurring now? It all starts with Moore‘s Law. On July 18, 1968, Gordon E. Moore transformed the world when he and Robert Noyce founded a company called Intel. They would usher in a new age. The desks of the whole world would wind up featuring strange new appliances, these dun-colored boxes with ―Intel inside.‖ Moore and his early compatriots would become billionaires many times over. But it was back in 1965 that Moore made the observation that may truly secure his place in history, for it may have the most consequence for the future of human kind. What he noted, in an article for the 35th anniversary issue of Electronics magazine, was that the complexity of ―minimum cost semiconductor components‖ available for a dollar had been doubling once a year, every year, since the first prototype microchip had been
6 produced six years before. Then came the breathtaking prediction. He claimed this doubling would continue every year for the next 10 years. Carver Mead, a professor at Caltech, would come to christen this claim ―Moore‘s Law.‖ Moore‘s Law has sprouted many variations over time. As the core faith of the entire global computer industry, however, it has come to be stated this way: The power of a dollar‘s worth of information technology will double every 18 months, for as far as the eye can see. Sure enough, in 2002, with a billion-transistor chip, the 27th doubling occurred right on schedule. A doubling is an amazing thing. It means the next step is as tall as all the previous steps put together. The 30 consecutive doublings of anything manmade that we have achieved at this writing – an increase of well over 500 million times in so short a time — is unprecedented in human history. This is exponential change. It‘s a curve that goes straight up. Such continuity is new. Take the time before the American Civil War. The number of miles of railroad track in the U.S. doubled nearly seven times in the 10 years between 1830 and 1840, from 23 miles to 2,808. That was impressive. It was a curve that would be as steep and world altering as was the chip‘s in the 1960s. Nonetheless, in the beginning, most people viewed railroads as a curiosity for the elite. They still traveled by water, on horseback or on foot. Most people didn‘t use computers in the 1960s, either. Here‘s the difference. For railroads, the pace of growth was not sustainable. You needed more and more land and steel and coal to expand the system. Those are finite resources. So the curve began to level off. It took 40 more years, until 1880, to get the next five doublings, to almost 100,000 miles. It took another 36 years, to 1916, for U.S.
7 railroads to make their final doubling plus a bit, reaching their peak mileage of over 254,037 miles. Make no mistake. The railroads changed everything they touched. They transformed Europe. North America was converted from being a struggling, backward, rural civilization mostly hugging the East Coast into a continent-spanning, worldchallenging, urban behemoth. New York went from a collection of villages to a world capital. Chicago went from a frontier outpost to a brawny goliath. The trip to San Francisco went from four months to six days. The West became a huge vacuum, sucking record numbers of immigrants across the Atlantic. Distance was marked in minutes. Suddenly, every farm boy needed a pocket watch. For many of them, catching the train meant riding the crest of a new era that was mobile and national. A voyage to a new life cost 25 cents. Of course, as railroad expansion ran out of critical fuel — including money and demand for the services – things leveled off, and society tried to adjust to the astounding changes it had seen during the rise of this curve. Historically, adapting to this sort of upheaval has been like shooting the rapids. We start in the calm waters to which we are accustomed, bump and scream and flail through the unprecedented, then emerge around the bend into a very different patch of calm water, where we catch our breath and assess what we‘ve done. The last transcontinental railroad completed in the United States was the Milwaukee Road in 1909. In part, that was because of the rise of a new transformative technology: The one millionth Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1915.
8 Moore‘s Law would have been revolutionary enough if chip power had leveled out in the 1980s after 14½ doublings — comparable to that of the railroads over 85 years. Our world today, marked by ubiquitous personal computers, would have ensured that. But The Curve did not stop. The computer industry still regularly beats its clockwork-like 18-month schedule for price-performance doubling. Another way of expressing Moore‘s Law is far more recognizable to many people: The price of any given piece of silicon can be expected to drop by half every 18 months. Who hasn‘t eyed a whiz-bang $2,000 computer as a Christmas present, only to see an equivalent machine drop in price to $1,300 by the next holiday? Before 10 Christmases pass, the gift becomes a ghost. It has been cast aside. Not because it doesn‘t work – it chugs along just fine. But we have changed. It now seems so clunky. The power that could have only been bought with $2,000 10 years before can be expected to be available for $31.25, according to Moore‘s Law. By then the power is so unremarkable that you can get it for free with a subscription to The Economist. Of course it no longer sits on a desktop. It has disappeared into watches, cell phones, jewelry and even refrigerator magnets with more power than was available to the entire North American Air Defense Command when Moore first prophesied in 1965. In some cases that power seems to dissolve into pocket lint—so unremarkable you don‘t even register that it‘s there. It essentially disappears. Take smart cards. You may have some and not even know it. They frequently look like credit cards. But they have chips in them, so they have significant powers. They allow you to enter especially secure buildings or store your medical records or pay for your subway fare. Passports come equipped with them.
9 Full-blown versions are tiny computers without a keyboard or a screen. By 2002 those smart cards matched the processing power of a 1980 Apple II computer. By 2006 they matched the power of a 386-class PC, circa 1990. Before 2010 they will have Pentiumclass power. All for less than $5 apiece. Think about that—a $4 Pentium. Retail items such as disposable razors increasingly come with radio frequency identification chips, smaller than a grain of rice, which deter shoplifting. Those chips have the power of the state-of-the-art commercial computers of the 1970s. They cost pennies. They are designed to be thrown away. The effect of Moore‘s Law on the built environment is profound. For example, will we ever need offices outside our homes? After all, haven‘t we all heard plenty about telecommuting? Sure, but how many of us have discovered with some chagrin that the most productive five minutes of our work day has occurred around the shared printer? Somebody asks what we‘re working on. Conversations ensue. ―Oh really? Did you know that Jane was working on something like that?‖ ―There‘s this guy you‘ve got to talk to; I‘ll send you his phone number as soon as I get back to my desk.‖ ―I was just reading about that very subject; I‘ll ship you the name of the book.‖ This kind of casual face-to-face contact is irreplaceable no matter how cheap or immersive video technology gets. Humans always default to the highest available bandwidth that does the job, and face-to-face is the gold standard. Some tasks require maximum connection to all senses. I don‘t know whether we trade pheromones or viruses or whether it simply allows us to read the other person‘s expressions and body language with the greatest precision. But when you‘re trying to build trust, or engage in
10 high-stress, high-value negotiation, or determine intent, or fall in love, or even have fun, face-to-face is hard to beat. This would seem to argue that some old patterns endure, and that‘s true. But think of the twists this new premium on human basics suggest. Suppose you decided that you could get all the face-to-face you needed two days a week. Would that influence where you lived? Would the mountains or the shore start looking good to you? Suppose you decided that you could get all the face-to-face you needed three days a month. Would the Caribbean start looking good to you? Residential real estate is being transformed for these reasons. In the U.S., the explosive growth is in places far beyond any metropolitan area, like the Big Sky Country of Montana, the Gold Country of the California Sierras, the Piedmont of North Carolina, and the islands of South Carolina and Georgia. For eons, when we‘ve visited a nice place on vacation, we‘ve asked ourselves, ―Why am I going back?‖ Now, however, we have a new question: ―Why am I going back?‖ Santa Fe is more than 800 miles from Los Angeles, yet it is only semi-jokingly referred to as L.A.‘s easternmost suburb. To find out why, check out the airport any Monday morning. If we accept that many rich people are going to find attractive this scenario of dramatically different settlement patterns that feature new aggregation – widely dispersed – the question then becomes whether information technology will ever become a global influence on the built environment, shaping the way the middle class and even the working class live, the way railroads, jets, and automobiles did.
11 I would argue that the answer is yes. ―Jet set‖ used to refer to the wealthy. Horseless carriages were once a luxury. But none of this is any longer true. If it were, planners would not be so upset at the vision of a China full of automobiles. In fact, this ―Santa-Fe-ing‖ pattern of dispersion plus aggregation looks a lot like the behavior of corporations over the last half century. The only difference is that now, due to Moore‘s Law‘s continuing precipitous drop in the price of information technology, the benefits have become affordable to a burgeoning number of individuals. For half a century, corporations have put each piece of their puzzle wherever they find comparative advantage. They figured out that with enough mainframes and toll-free telephone lines, they could put their headquarters one place, their research and development a second place, their factories a third place, their back-shop paper-shuffling a fourth place, their call centers a fifth place, and their salesmen all over the place. This information-technology-driven dispersion contributed hugely to the rise of aggregations we see in the edge cities of places like the Route 128 corridor around Boston, the birthplace of high technology. Talk to corporate location specialists and they will happily tell you that of the top 100 things their clients look for, the first 99 is qualified workforce. If the facility in question is a sneaker factory, that means people who will work for pennies an hour, and the answer is Malaysia. If this means advanced innovation, the answer is places where smart people are willing to cluster, like Silicon Valley – and Bangalore, India. The core premise of the Santa-Fe-ing hypothesis is that this sort of choice is now available to millions, and soon billions. Because of the ability of Moore‘s Law to bring technology to the masses at an accelerating rate, similar choices are now available to
12 individuals, who can look to live, work, play, pray, shop and die wherever they see comparable advantage. They are no longer inextricably tethered to huge, centrally located organizations. At the time of the American Revolution, in the Agrarian Age, more than 95 percent of all people lived outside what then passed for cities, because wresting profit from the land through farming, trapping, forestry and the like was how wealth was created. Today, however, technology has allowed a tiny number of people to farm thousands of acres, and the number of people in these occupations in the U.S. has dropped to less than 2 percent. Similarly, half a century ago, at the height of the Industrial Age, the majority of all Americans were in blue-collar manufacturing jobs. Today it‘s 19 percent and dropping while the number of people in ―service occupations‖ exceed 78 percent. This is not all about a decline in industrial competitiveness. The U.S. steel industry is the most productive in the world. That‘s because it has lowered the number of man-hours per ton of steel to very low rates, by the increasing use of Information Age cleverness to make its product. Even automobile manufacturing has used information technology to redraw
the map of where it builds cars. Who, a generation ago, would have expected Mercedes to locate its U.S. assembly plant in Alabama? There‘s no reason to think the rest of the developing world is not following this pattern. There are already 30 African nations with more cell phones than landlines. If you look at the billboards in a megacity like Lagos, you will be convinced that the three biggest industries in Nigeria are evangelical churches, health food supplements, and cell
13 phones. At this writing, it‘s already been five years since Filipinos ousted a tyrant for the first time using cell phone text messaging to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people for street demonstrations in under an hour. In developing countries the proportion of
people with access to a phone grew an astonishing 25 percent in the 1990s, according to the Worldwatch Institute, an organization devoted to ―an environmentally sustainable and socially just society.‖ One in five of the world‘s population had used a mobile phone by 2002—up from 1 in 237 in 1992. This remarkable pattern fueled connections to the Net. In 1992, just 1 in 7,788 of the world‘s population had used the Internet. In 2002, 1 in 10 had. To be sure, these patterns are not distributed uniformly. In places capable of great technological sophistication, such as China and Russia, governments who fear their own dissidents—and thus try to control information—have attempted to intentionally slow the revolution, the RAND Corporation has noted. Some Middle Eastern societies recoil at dissemination of Western ideas in general, and pornography in particular. Latin America is hampered by low literacy rates. There are some failed places on earth marked by such outrageous politics, pathetic infrastructure, abysmal annual incomes and few cities that it‘s hard to imagine how they will achieve any significant development any time soon. Singapore researchers examining Internet uptake in Asia pointed to a familiar list of failed suspects—Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, Laos and Myanmar, for example. Nonetheless, the gap between the haves and have-nots has hardly proven to be hopelessly rigid, as the migration of software-writing jobs to India has demonstrated. The International Telecommunication Union, tallying broad measures of connectedness
14 worldwide, including affordability, found Slovenia tied with France. Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan were ahead of the United States. In the Caribbean basin, access for the Bahamas, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Costa Rica, St. Lucia and Grenada was ahead of Russia. The Eastern European nations of Estonia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Belarus and Romania were ahead of China. The Singapore researchers found that a lack of English-speakers did not necessarily correlate with poor technology pickup. In a post-literate world—in which the Internet increasingly becomes something you watch and listen to, rather than read—low literacy rates were less a barrier than one might expect, at least in Asia. The digital divide seems to be narrowing, a University of Toronto study says. The demographic lag between those who use the Internet in developing countries and those who use it in the United States was about five years, the Canadian researchers reported. This technology is getting to the masses a lot faster than did electricity, radio, washing machines, refrigerators, television, air conditioners and automobiles. The big difference between information technologies and others separating the haves from the have-nots is price. Because The Curve rules, costs drop dramatically. The transformative stuff quickly becomes affordable and ubiquitous, even in developing countries. How can this not have consequences for our material world? Every urban African I‘ve ever talked to would prefer to be living in his or her village. They say they came to the city for economic opportunity, not out of preference. They return to their villages every chance they get.
15 If, as the price of information technology approaches zero – transforming everything from transportation to markets – at the same time that the problems of megacities become more and more intractable, the value of being someplace that is great for reasons that can‘t be digitized will broaden. If this puts a cap on the growth of megacities by spreading the benefits of urbanity more broadly – the way the automobile drained immigrant ghettos like the Lower East Side of Manhattan into the former cow pastures and potato farms of New Jersey and Long Island during the middle 20th century – I‘m not sure that‘s so bad. What started in Santa Fe could transform the world.
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