Edge city


An edge city is a concentration of business, shopping, and entertainment outside a traditional downtown or central business district, in what had previously been a suburban, residential or rural area. The term was popularized by the 1991 book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau, who established its current meaning while working as a reporter for The Washington Post. Garreau argues that the edge city has become the standard form of urban growth worldwide, representing a 20th-century urban form unlike that of the 19th-century central downtown. Other terms for these areas include suburban activity centers, megacenters, and suburban business districts. These districts have now developed in many countries.

Definitions

In 1991, Garreau established five rules for a place to be considered an edge city:
  • Has five million or more square feet of leasable office space
  • Has 600,000 square feet or more of leasable retail space
  • Has more jobs than bedrooms
  • Is perceived by the population as one place
  • Was nothing like a "city" as recently as 30 years ago. Then it was just bedrooms, if not cow pastures.
Most edge cities develop at or near existing or planned freeway intersections, and are especially likely to develop near major airports. They rarely include heavy industry. They often are not separate legal entities but are governed as part of surrounding counties. They are numerous—almost 200 in the United States, compared to 45 downtowns of comparable size—and are large geographically because they are built at automobile scale.

Types of edge cities

Garreau identified three distinct varieties of the edge city phenomenon:
Additional terms are used to refer to edge cities, such as suburban business districts, major diversified centers, suburban cores, minicities, suburban activity centers, cities of realms, galactic cities, urban subcenters, pepperoni-pizza cities, superburbia, technoburbs, nucleations, disurbs, service cities, perimeter cities, peripheral centers, urban villages, and suburban downtowns.

Density and cityscapes

Spatially, edge cities primarily consist of mid-rise office towers surrounded by massive surface parking lots and meticulously manicured lawns, almost reminiscent of the designs of Le Corbusier. Instead of a traditional street grid, their street networks are hierarchical, consisting of winding parkways that feed into arterial roads or freeway ramps. However, edge cities feature job density similar to that of secondary downtowns found in places such as Newark and Pasadena; indeed, Garreau writes that edge cities' development proves that "density is back!".

History

Garreau shows how edge cities developed in a U.S. context. Starting in the 1950s, businesses were incentivized to open branches in the suburbs and eventually in many cases, leave traditional downtowns entirely, due to increased use of the automobile and move of middle and upper class residents to suburbs, which in turn led to frustration with downtown traffic and lack of parking. Escalating land values in central downtown areas, and the development of communications also enabled the trend.
Despite early examples in the 1920s, it was not until car ownership surged in the 1950s, after four decades of fast, steady growth, that it was possible for edge cities to emerge on a large scale. Whereas virtually every American central business district or secondary downtown that developed around non-motorized transportation or the streetcar has a pedestrian-friendly grid pattern of relatively narrow streets, most edge cities instead have a hierarchical street arrangement centered on pedestrian-hostile arterial roads, making most of this generation of edge cities difficult to get to and get around with public transportation or by walking, although transit was sometimes added in later decades, such as the Silver Line metro linking Downtown Washington, D.C., with Arlington and Tysons edge cities, and government-planned edge cities in London and Paris integrated transit from the start.
The first edge city was Detroit's New Center, developed in the 1920s, three miles north of downtown, as a new downtown for Detroit. New Center and the Miracle Mile section of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles are considered the earliest automobile-oriented urban forms. However the two were built with radically different purposes in mind. Garreau's classic example of an edge city is the information technology center Tysons, Virginia, west of Washington, D.C.

Outside the U.S.

Garreau shows how edge cities have also developed in other countries, specifically citing Canada, Mexico, Australia, and cities such as Paris, London, Karachi, Jakarta, and Tianjin. In the cases of London and Paris he notes how these edge cities developed with government planning and with integrated public transportation.

Problems

Mobility

Edge cities planned around freeway interchanges have a history of severe traffic problems if one of these freeways goes unbuilt. In particular, Century City, a pioneering 1960s edge city built on a former 20th Century Fox backlot in western Los Angeles, was built with long-term plans for access via an urban rail system and the planned Beverly Hills Freeway. Neither project ever came to fruition, resulting in massive congestion on the surface streets connecting Century City to existing freeways, every two miles distant. More than a half-century later, the D Line subway extension will finally provide rail access, with Century City station planned to open in 2025.

Sustainability

As recently as 2003, some critics believed that edge cities might turn out to have been only a 20th-century phenomenon because of their limitations. The residents of the low-density housing areas around them tend to be fiercely resistant to their outward expansion, but because their internal road networks are severely limited in capacity, densification is more difficult than in the traditional grid network that characterizes traditional CBDs and secondary downtowns. As a result, construction of medium- and high-density housing in edge cities ranges was perceived to be "difficult to impossible". Because most are built at automobile scale, it was felt that "mass transit frequently could not serve them well". Pedestrian access to and circulation within an edge city was perceived to be impractical if not impossible, even if residences are nearby. Revitalization of edge cities was seen to be "the major urban renewal project of the 21st century".

In the 21st century

Densification

Today, many edge cities have plans for densification, sometimes around a walkable downtown-style core, often with a push for more accessibility by transit and bicycle, and addition of housing in denser, urban-style neighborhoods within the edge city. For example, at Tysons, in the Washington, D.C., metro area, the plan remains to see the city become the downtown core of Fairfax County. To this point "…eight districts have been delimited, with four centered on new metro stations being transit-oriented development districts". Future plans to transportation around the area continue to be made, the accessibility of the area is on the rise with many forms of transportation being formed. "The aims of the plan are for 75% of development to be within half a mile of metro stations, an urban center of 200,000 jobs and 100,000 residents, a jobs balance of 4.0 per household".

Outside North America

Despite the lessons of the American experience, in rapidly developing countries such as China and India and the United Arab Emirates, the edge city is quickly emerging as an important new development form as automobile ownership skyrockets and marginal land is bulldozed for development. For example, the outskirts of Bangalore, India are increasingly replete with mid-rise mirrored-glass office towers set amid lush gardens and sprawling parking lots where many foreign companies have set up shop. Dubai offers another example.

Impact

Relation with metropolitan area

The emergence of edge cities has not been without consequences to the metropolitan areas they surround. Edge cities arise from population decentralization from large major core cities and has been ongoing since the 1960s. Shifts in socioeconomics in metro areas, location of metro industrial areas, and labor competition between edge cities and their more central neighbors have been attributed to their development and continued expansion. There has been a considerable debate among economists as to whether "jobs follow people or people follow jobs," but in the context of the edge city phenomenon, workers have been drawn from metropolitan business hubs in favor of the edge city economy. Developers of edge cities have been shown to strategically plan expansion of such business areas to draw workers away from more dense port cities and thereby keep profits from surrounding interests.
Edge cities contribute greatly to urban development by creating new jobs by attracting workers from the metropolitan areas around it. Also as a result of the rise of edge cities, more department stores, hotels, apartments, and office spaces are created. There are more edge cities than their downtown counterparts of the same size. Garreau states one reason for the rise of edge cities is that, "Today, we have moved our means of creating wealth, the essence of urbanism - our jobs - out to where most of us have lived and shopped for two generations. That has led to the rise of Edge City." In comparison with urban centers edge cities offer global corporations many advantages: cheaper land, security, efficient land communications, advanced technological installations, and a high quality of life for their employees and executives. The appeal of edge cities attract large corporations as well, boosting the already growing city.