There is no better place to think about the American landscape and what it is turning into than in Orange County, where brand-new suburbs sprawl across the land with such intensity that Los Angeles, by comparison, seems almost an old-fashioned, traditional city.
Paul Goldberger, New York Times, Dec. 11, 1988

Looking at the new forms and modes of development of urban space, we come across a remarkable episode, a showcase of city planning that gives concrete form to the last frontier of the American dream.

In Orange County, on the southern edge of the conurbation of Los Angeles, the orange groves have been replaced by the largest theme park in the world. The earthly paradise where a providential big brother, the Irvine Company, is indefatigably planning and building spaces for working and living in the best of all possible worlds (and countries). A new and marvelous setting where the beauty of the natural landscape forms a backdrop to subtly impressive office complexes, an international airport, residential communities in the garden-city style, an important university, and gigantic shopping centers. All this on an extraordinary scale: in a list of national economic capacities the county (with a gross domestic product of 60 billion dollars in 1989) would come in the top thirty countries in the world, ahead of Argentina, Austria, or Denmark. Today Orange County, with 21.1 million square feet of office space, has the third largest downtown in California and is coming up fast behind San Francisco, where 26.8 million square feet of space are used by the service sector. But the most interesting aspect of this phenomenal concentration is that we are dealing with a unit of territory whose spatial and socioeconomic characteristics are neither those of the city nor those of traditional suburban models. Whether you choose to call it "Edge City" or "Postsuburbia," Orange County, and the Irvine area in particular, is the most substantial example of a mode of settlement typical of the postindustrial era. The gigantism and distinctive character of Irvine make it the most sensational episode, a hyperbolic hypothesis that has taken on concrete form thanks to a different level of identity and of awareness of its own nature.

On the Margins of the City
In both the United States and Europe, metropolitan sprawl condenses into concentrations that assume imposing economic and demographic levels, and that therefore attain an economic and social autonomy that dissolves their ties of dependence on the metropolis. Aggregations that become rivals of the cities, as a consequence of their capacity for production and the quality and quantity of their services, as well as of the methods and values that guide their development. As opposed to the concentration, plurality, and complexity of the fixed stage of the urban theater, what we find here is the dissemination, segregation, and standardization of the metropolitan landscape, as well as its dissolution (into interminable panning shots). These aggregations condense into hybrid landscapes in which models derived from the professional habits of the planners, the entrepreneurial policies of the promoters, and the requirements dictated by company strategies are superimposed and blended. These components find their point of synergy in an aggressive and sophisticated approach to marketing that creates the place's identity, diffuses its image on the market, and selects its clientele on the basis of strict demographic, economic, and cultural parameters.

Beyond the American Provinces
"It's a theme park-a seven-hundred-and-eighty-six-square-mile theme park-and the theme is-'you can have anything you want.' It's the most California-looking of all the Californias: the most like the stories, the most like the dream. Orange County is Tomorrowland and Frontierland, merged and inseparable.

Eighteenth-century mission. Nineteen-thirties art colony. Nineteen-eighties corporate headquarters. There's history everywhere: navigators, conquistadors, padres, rancheros, prospectors, wildcatters. But there's so much Now, the Then is hard to find. The houses are new. The cars are new. The stores, the streets, the schools, the city halls-even the land and the ocean themselves look new.

The temperature today will be in the low eighties. There's a slight offshore breeze. Another just-like-yesterday day in paradise.

Come to Orange County. It's no place like home."

Since 1971 Irvine has been a city in Orange County, but above all it is a product, the product of a great enterprise, the Irvine Company, which is responsible for the planning, construction, and management of an area now inhabited by 121,000 people, and in which about 180,000 people work. For this reason Irvine is at one and the same time factory and product, geopolitical, urbanistic, and structural reality and image designed to suit lifestyles and political and social values, the promised fulfillment of a perfect and uncontaminated American dream. Irvine's strong points are the beauty of its nature, the homogeneity and safety of its society, the efficiency of its services, the dignity and restraint of its residential villages, and the dynamic character of its service and manufacturing activities with their high technological content linked to data processing, telecommunications, and scientific research.

Joel Garreau is the main exponent of the extremely popular slogan "Edge City," a place where history is forgotten and anything can happen. In his book entitled Edge City. Life on the Netv Frontier, Garreau carries out a far-reaching investigation of the new forms of the American suburbia. On his journey through the immense metropolitan outskirts he came across Irvine. Thus his description is the account of a traveler, a modern citizen of the East Coast (Garreau is from Virginia) once again repeating the astonishing experience of the discovery of the West. In Irvine Garreau encountered the living image of "life on the new frontier," a hyperrealistic representation of Edge City set in the most beautiful of American landscapes: "Irvine is part of the Los Angeles Basin, the birthplace of the American landscapes and life styles that are the models for Edge Cities worldwide, Moreover, Irvine, thirty-five miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, is at the center of a development of staggering proportions.

Originally a Spanish land-grant ranch, the hundred-square-mile holdings of the Irvine Company span Orange County, that vast jurisdiction between San Diego and Los Angeles that in the 1980s was the fastest growing part of Southern California. The Irvine Company controls sixty-four thousand acres of land, much of which stretches past the incorporated city of Irvine. Some of those acres sell for $1 million apiece. Irvine is not just another Levittown, a suburb from which people can find work only by commuting somewhere else.

The stages of Edge City growth that took two generations elsewhere were collapsed into a third of a lifetime here. The Irvine area is now so big that it can be described as encompassing all or part of three job-rich Edge Cities. The two middle-sized ones are known as Irvine Spectrum and Newport Center-Fashion Island. But the third, the size of downtown Seattle, is named after John Wayne. Actually the area's continental-connection airport is named after John Wayne. And the Edge City, which includes the Costa Mesa-South Coast Plaza complex, has become known after the name of the airport. But it w as only a matter of time before it came to something like this.

Orange County, the birthplace of Richard Nixon, has such a reputation for conservatism that a politician once only half kidded about joining the John Birch Society in order to capture the middle-of-the-road vote, The Irvine area's rapidly growing population, meanwhile, already approaches 200,000, with a high technology job base of 150,000. The Irvine Company's spread is so big- stretching from the Pacific Ocean to as much as twenty miles inland-that its tentacles ensnare an entire University of California campus and two Marine bases. Irvine, moreover, is the test version of the Southern California dream. This makes it a prototype of great importance. Irvine is only ten miles from Disneyland in Anaheim. Disney produced such resonant dreams that people carry them around in their heads all over the globe. His Main Street is a more real crystallization of an idealized community for more people than any actual nineteenth-century small American town. And Irvine is deep kin to this ideal. It is full of newcomers who are still reaching out to find why they came, what they lost, and who they are." (Alessandro Rocca)

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