This article was originally published on Common Edge as "Living on the Edge."
I am on the edge. Not emotionally or psychologically—although this could be the case—but literally, physically, spatially, geographically. As I write this, I am sitting on the balcony of a hotel room in Miami Beach, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Behind me is the whole State of Florida and, indeed, the entire North American continent. In front of me: the boardwalk, a narrow beach, and then a lot of water—and not much else between here and Mauritania, a distance of more than 4,400 miles.
This is what urban designers call an “edge”—a transition between, you might say, something and nothing. Urban designers think constantly about things like edges, nodes, paths—anything, as the brilliant urban designer Kevin Lynch showed us in his classic book