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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday October 20 2016, @02:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the should-really-be-in-space-or-undersea dept.

When Apple finishes its new $5 billion headquarters in Cupertino, California, the technorati will ooh and ahh over its otherworldly architecture, patting themselves on the back for yet another example of "innovation." Countless employees, tech bloggers, and design fanatics are already lauding the "futuristic" building and its many "groundbreaking" features. But few are aware that Apple's monumental project is already outdated, mimicking a half-century of stagnant suburban corporate campuses that isolated themselves—by design—from the communities their products were supposed to impact.

In the 1940s and '50s, when American corporations first flirted with a move to the 'burbs, CEOs realized that horizontal architecture immersed in a park-like buffer lent big business a sheen of wholesome goodness. The exodus was triggered, in part, by inroads the labor movement was making among blue-collar employees in cities. At the same time, the increasing diversity of urban populations meant it was getting harder and harder to maintain an all-white workforce. One by one, major companies headed out of town for greener pastures, luring desired employees into their gilded cages with the types of office perks familiar to any Googler.

Rockstar coders don't do suburbs?


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  • (Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Thursday October 20 2016, @07:29PM

    by DutchUncle (5370) on Thursday October 20 2016, @07:29PM (#416895)

    Oversimplified. It's a pendulum effect. When everything was agrarian, there wasn't much as much benefit to cities. Oh, wait, ports grow because you need services for shipbuilding, and there is a lot of commerce and trans-shipping so a lot of people passing through, which means more opportunity for ancillary services, and then all of the services to support all of the people. Then, the more tech things get (and that means RELATIVE tech, not absolute, so advanced forging and pottery and food preservation counts as "tech" to early agrarian society), the more benefit there is to having specialty shops supporting each other close by in a town or city. But yes, the local lord can still live outside. Then you start depending on mill power (whether air or water) and a collection of things have to be near the mill, which is probably along a river somewhere near a river port for shipping raw material and product, and becomes a whole collection of manufacturing along the river (like the building that later became Digital Equipment). And we'll need to import yet more tech people for maintenance.

    When the industrial age happens, the early inventor/owners of machinery would have been AT THEIR COMPANIES keeping watch . . . it's the second generation that goes to their estates out of town. Next level up is when the paperwork starts weighing more than the industry. Office work requires people to be in proximity in offices, and even to have multiple offices in the same industry in the same place because they interact so much. (All before electronic communication of course.) So just as mill power clustered along a river, banking happens in clusters, and insurance happens in clusters, and printing and even entertainment happen in clusters. And again, the original founders have to be RIGHT THERE where things are happening, because they're the ones making it happen.

    Suburbs were an attempt to lower the bottom edge of "rich lifestyle". They were *designed* to require individual cars, as a de-facto segregation by income.

    Look at all of the tech companies setting up in New York City today. Yes, they want a critical mass of people from which to select the best, and they want an existing support network of food and entertainment and everything else that goes with it, and most important - just like Digital Equipment making computers in an old mill - they can get a lot of cheaper office space by taking over volume emptied by paperwork companies that moved to the suburbs thanks to electronic communication . . . and slowly find themselves out of work because they don't need to push as much paper any more.

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