Edge Cities

On the outskirts of traditional cities in the United States, people are increasingly working and shopping in urban centers that the journalist Joel Garreau has called edge cities. Edge cities tend to be in outer suburban areas, but they contain all the services and functions of a big city. They are primarily middle-class epicenters in which people live, work, play, shop, attend school, and do everything else that they formerly traveled into a conventional downtown area to accomplish.

Garreau introduced the concept of the edge city to a broad readership in his 1991 book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. In that book, he described the new way in which Americans were building cities. Every large city in the United States, according to Garreau, was growing with multiple urban cores, which he called edge cities. These settlements have achieved economic, social, and geographic independence from the metropolitan centers that spawned them. They differ from traditional downtown areas and do not meet popular preconceptions of what a city should be. Edge cities are a result of advances in transportation and communications that have freed people from the need to be located in central cities. Most have emerged near beltways surrounding major metropolitan complexes. In the past, there would be a metropolitan center ringed by suburbs, with people commuting from the suburbs into the central city to work; in the new model, areas that were traditionally suburban have become self-sustaining entities of commerce, industry, residence, and recreation. With the rise of edge cities, the commute between suburban homes and workplaces is much shorter.