It is almost 20 years since William H Whyte in City, his study of the exodus of corporate headquarters from downtown Manhattan, suggested that a corporation that is tired of Manhattan is tired of life. Whyte plotted the movement of executive jobs from the city streets to isolated corporate campuses in the 1960s and 1970s and he explored the worrying tendency of such companies to implode shortly afterwards.

He pointed to Union Carbide and American Can in particular that built themselves new corporate palaces that won architectural awards, but marked the last stage of their existence. The exurban location, he suggested, had the effect of isolating corporations from the face to face economy of the city, and thus further weakened companies that were already vulnerable. And he made a comparison with those companies that stayed

behind and flourished, or even those who did make the move, but left behind a vestigial front office that grew more and more crowded as those executives who could, made the decision to stay. He could equally well have been talking about London, or Paris which experienced precisely the same movement as corporations attempted to capitalise on the land value of their city centre buildings.

Whyte was describing an economy, and a city landscape that has changed beyond recognition in many significant aspects. But he posed a critical question about the relationship between the city, in its role as an accumulator of wealth, and its physical form. The Greenwich Stanford corridor – where so many of those corporations that resisted the tax incentives offered by a rattled New York City to stay ended up moving to – must be understood as just as much a part of the wider urban region of New York as Lower Manhattan. But in its physical form it is entirely different: low density, and with little physical infrastructure to permit the casual interaction which is the traditional quality of the city. In Whyte’s view then, the exurban form is not one that can be said to sustain job creation in the sense that the dense urban model can. The developers who built the business parks were building jobs not cities. If they had built genuine cities, as it is arguable was the case in Canary Wharf, in London, then they might have built more long term jobs.

Of course there are celebrated examples in other urban regions in which exurban agglomerations have turned into the kind of innovative clusters that have indeed generated jobs. Silicon Valley was the classic example. The reality is that a city as large and as complex as New York experiences both phenomena simultaneously. It has areas of exurban growth where companies go in search of space that costs less than the prime business areas of downtown. And even these areas could well learn from Whyte by exploring ways in which the physical structure might be modified so that it could begin to replicate at least some of the traditional qualities of urbanism that encourage those face to face transactions encouraged by the traditional city. But it also has areas in the inner core, such as the Garment District and Silicon Alley, which have proved important incubators for the growth of new jobs. However, this process has itself put at risk some of the traditional employment generators in these areas, especially those which have historically offered jobs within reach of the newcomers to the city, a segment of New Yorkers ever growing in its numbers.

Author: Deyan Sudjic