Joel Garreau

Contact Joel Garreau

Journalist, author, professor, Joel Garreau’s cutting-edge work on American culture and values has earned him a reputation in corporate, government and academic circles as something of a guru. As author of the best-selling 'Edge City: Life on the New Frontier', Joel invented a now-familiar term to describe the huge, pulsating and sometimes daunting new urban cores like Silicon Valley, that are the new modern city.

Before that, in his first best-seller, 'The Nine Nations of North America', Joel explained how North America really works – not as three countries but as nine separate civilizations whose boundaries are demarcated not by legal borders but by the shared beliefs and values of their citizens. The book was made into a one-hour PBS special.

As a television and radio personality, Joel has made over 1,000 appearances, including The Today Show, Good Morning America, The NBC Nightly News, The CBS Evening News, ABC World News, PBS' All Things Considered and The Larry King Show.

An international speaker and consultant, Joel’s clients range from the American Marketing Association, to The Prudential, to Brown University, to CB Commercial, to the Federal Reserve.

Joel is in charge of cultural revolution reporting at The Washington Post, through which he explores global culture, values, and change. As a reporter for the Washington Post, Joel has been nominated six times for the Pulitzer Prize.

He is a senior fellow at The Institute of Public Policy at Virginia’s George Mason University, where he conducts graduate and faculty seminars; he has recently been teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of Global Business Network, which has pioneered scenario planning, a tool designed to help anticipate the future.