Edge City

Edge City in Popular Culture

Edge city is everywhere. The Edge City Review is billed as the “world's only conservative literary magazine, featuring New Formalist Poetry, fiction, and book reviews.” Edge City View is a website that features articles on “Waco, Vince Foster, and the Secret War” and a review of the Mexican foto-novela genre Mascaras en Accion. Edge City is a cyberpunk game in which characters battle it out for control of Edge City: “Enter Edge City as the ultimate hacker, a Data Ripper, and jack into an exciting future. Battle Body Rippers in the apocalyptic Sprawl.” Goodbye to the Edge City is a 2001 recording by indie rock band Preston School of Industry, described as similar to early-period alternative or post-pop bands in a review of Laconic's Funhouse compact disc. The Edge Cities Network is a business resource website including links to municipalities on the suburban fringe of European cities (e.g., Croydon–London, Espoo–Helsinki, Fingal–Dublin, Kifissia–Athens, Loures–Lisbon, Nacka–Stockholm, and Horth Down–Belfast) and notes that “the Edge Cities forums are in place to encourage discussion and interaction between the various Edge Cities' partners and businesses.”

The Edge City Collective in Philadelphia— offering improvisational music from beyond the new frontier—pays direct homage to Joel Garreau:

Garreau's Edge City

Most urbanists are familiar with the ideas presented in Garreau's Edge City (1991). The edge city represents the third wave of urban history, pushing us into new frontiers at the edge of the metropolis. Garreau analyzed urban development across the United States and identified 123 places as true edge cities and another 83 up-and-coming or planned edge cities across the country. This first list included some two dozen edge cities in Los Angeles, 23 in Washington, D.C., and 21 in the greater New York City region. The edge city is [Page 242]distinguished by a number of features, including the following:

• 1.
  The area must have more than 5 million square feet of office space (about the space of a good-sized downtown).
• 2.
  The place must include over 600,000 square feet of retail space (the size of a large regional shopping mall).
• 3.
  The population increases every morning and decreases every afternoon (i.e., there are more jobs than homes).
• 4.
  The place is known as a single end destination (the place “has it all”: entertainment, shopping, recreation, etc.).
• 5.
  The area must not have been anything like a “city” 30 years ago (cow pastures would have been nice).

Garreau goes on to identify three distinct varieties of edge city: boomers (the most common type, which develop around a shopping mall or highway interchange); greenfields (master-planned new towns on the suburban fringe); and uptowns (activity centers that have been built over an older city or town). The last two types are in opposition to the five distinguishing features in the previous list: Greenfields that are master-planned new towns include residential areas as well as entertainment and shopping and will not suffer the morning increase and afternoon decrease in population; uptowns that have developed from earlier satellite cities were, in fact, suburban cities at some earlier point in time.

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