Edge City

Definition

Edge City is Joel Garreau's term — coined and trademarked in Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (1991) — for the new office-and-retail concentrations that have become the workplace-hearths of metropolitan America. Garreau's five criteria: an Edge City "(1) has 5 million square feet or more of leasable office space – the workplace of the Information Age; (2) has 600,000 square feet or more of leasable retail space – the equivalent of a fair-sized mall; (3) has more jobs than bedrooms; (4) is perceived by the population as one place; and (5) was nothing like 'city' as recently as thirty years ago" (Garreau, quoted in Soja 2000, p. 244). By the Edge City News's count there were nearly 200 Edge Cities in the USA, containing two-thirds of the nation's office space, up from roughly 25 percent in 1970; "Every single American city that is growing, is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles, with multiple urban cores" (Garreau, quoted p. 243). Garreau's typology: "Uptowns" (renewed older nodes), "Boomers" (the classic mall-at-freeway-intersection form — the Strip, the Node, the Pig in the Python), and "Greenfields" ("figuratively built 'at the intersection of several thousand acres of farmland and one developer's monumental ego'" — Irvine being the prime example).

Soja's audit is double. As description, the Edge City is the Exopolis's most visible landmark and a genuine datum of the postmetropolitan transition. As theory, Garreau "fundamentally ignores the explanatory arguments of the industrial urbanism discourse and rarely speaks of globalization except to intone connections to the New Information Age" — inventing his own causal nexus ("the empowerment of women"; the new black middle class) and "rarely speak[ing] of manufacturing at all" (p. 245, n. 9). His rhetoric is boosterist: the Edge City as "another Garden … the best of both worlds," "a new Eden," "the search for Utopia at the center of the American Dream" (p. 245) — the "Pied Piper of Postsuburbia" with his local spin-doctor network (Leinberger's "urban villages," Kotkin and Friedman's "declinism" crusade against the UCLA school's negativity). The corrective reading runs through Mike Davis ("the Suburban Nightmare," the "political middle landscape" of aging suburbs "trapped in the same downward trajectory, from garden city to crabgrass slum") and Greg Hise (Fordist edge cities as labor-demand nucleations).

Key Thinkers

• Joel Garreau (referenced, not paged — see log) — Edge City (1991); The Nine Nations of North America (1981); the Pied Piper of Postsuburbia.
• Edward W. Soja — the concept's critical cartographer: the criteria, the typology, the booster audit, and the off-the-edge correction (pp. 243–246, 259–263).
• Greg Hise (referenced, not paged — see log) — Magnetic Los Angeles: the Fordist antecedents of the edge-city form.
• Mike Davis (referenced, not paged — see log) — "The Suburban Nightmare": the geographical class war between "new pariah" suburbs and "predatory" edge cities.
• Christopher B. Leinberger & Joel Kotkin (referenced, not paged — see log) — the urban-village/booster lineage Garreau's optimism feeds.

Related Concepts

• exopolis — the discourse the Edge City illustrates; the inside-out city's landmark form.
• post-suburbia — the wider postsuburban literature the Edge City crystallized.
• polycentrality — the multi-core structure Edge Cities instantiate ("multiple urban cores").
• urban-sprawl — the negative name for the fabric Edge Cities celebrate ("buildings rarely rise shoulder to shoulder").
• neoliberal-metropolis — the office-and-FIRE economy the Edge City concentrates.
• metropolitan-hybrids — Luna's programmed alternative to the mono-functional edge-city cluster.
• new-urbanism — the Garden-City allusions both share (Howard via Leinberger's "urban villages").

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — "Edge Cities and the optimistic envisioning of postmetropolitan geographies" (pp. 243–246): the criteria and typology, the frontier rhetoric, the empowerment-of-women and black-middle-class causal claims, the Leinberger/Kotkin network, and the declinism counterattack.
• Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — the 'new urban paradigm' and its purest type, the edge city (City Post Oak, Tysons Corner, Buckhead, Las Colinas), combining high-rise, mall, and hotel at a density between suburb and downtown, defined by 'making the city safe for the middle class' (pp. 169–70).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

• source-notes/baudrillard-1994-simulacra-and-simulation

Open Questions

• Garreau: "Industrial and warehouse space does not create anything urbane. No dense centers ever evolve" (quoted p. 245, n. 9) — Soja flags this as the concept's weakest joint; does the industrial-urbanist counter (Hise; the technopole) refute the Edge City's optimism or refine its geography?
• The Edge City "frontier" rhetoric recycled the Garden City and Edenic fantasies — is the trademarked term now simply the branding of a real form (the office-mall node), and what would a de-branded vocabulary (Outer City, technopole, activity center) change?
• Does the wiki's missing-middle-housing and post-suburban-densification register describe the retrofit of the Edge City — and can an Edge City become a "real" city, or is job-bedroom asymmetry structural?