Edge Cities

Joel Garreau's 1991 book Edge City gave the first critical in-depth account of a phenomenon that had been gradually appearing on the metropolitan landscape since the 1960s. That phenomenon was the clustering of commercial development outside of the central city at the intersection of major highway interchanges, predominantly consisting of office buildings, shopping, and entertainment complexes. Garreau wrote about edge cities in a matter-of-fact way, postulating that the agglomeration of high-rises on the fringes of major metropolitan areas was merely the inevitable future of metropolitan form. Indeed, the edge city phenomenon can be interpreted as logically following on the heels of suburban residential expansion that occurred after World War II. Widespread population dispersal out of the central city was necessarily followed by places that could accommodate individual consumption (shopping malls) and then by jobs for suburban employees in the form of office high-rises. Edge cities now are easily visible as rising clusters of steel and glass buildings outside of virtually every major American city (as well as many cities outside the United States), particularly in northern and central New Jersey, southern California, the San Francisco Bay area, Boston, Detroit, Atlanta, and Phoenix. Wellknown edge cities include Tyson's Corner, Virginia (outside of Washington, DC), and Plano, Texas (outside of Dallas). There are roughly 200 edge cities in the United States.

There are negative consequences to edge city growth, and many see edge cities as an unfortunate outcome of postmodern economic processes. Not only do they detract from the vitality of the original downtown core, pulling jobs and services away from needy populations, but they also represent a form of urban development that is visually confusing, land consumptive, and largely unplanned in any meaningful way. Furthermore, they exist without representational government, except perhaps some regional or county-level control, and thus have been described as “stealth” cities. In addition, edge cities are generally automobile dependent and thus have been attacked as representative of the antithesis of the walkable, diverse, compact urban form characteristic of sustainable metropolitan form. Whereas the notion of an edge city is now a generally recognized phenomenon, recent scholarship has documented alternative suburban forms, notably the edgeless city, which does not go as far as the edge city in terms of agglomeration. Such patterns represent an unorganized and diffuse composition of office space that will be even more difficult to redress than the edge city. In that respect, the edge city may offer some potential for redevelopment and revitalization. Some interpret the edge city as comprising a framework for potential new urban cores. The edge city can be valued as representing a maturation of suburban sprawl, where at least the peripheral spread of post–World War II growth patterns is channeled into dense clusters of regionally distributed office space and accompanying shopping opportunities. All that is needed to make the edge city an actual city, albeit a satellite one, would be to incorporate housing and public services in a more integrative way. This transformation will not be straightforward given that the infrastructure of the edge city, particularly its position relative to highway interchanges, will make such a transformation very challenging.

...