The
Problem with Edge Cities
Ray
Hutchison
Urban and Regional Studies
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
Abstract
There is a spectre haunting urban sociology—the spectre of edge cities. Joel Garreau’s definition of the Edge City refers to areas of commercial and retail development outside of official municipal boundaries. This definition is unsociological at best—indeed, for Max Weber, the defining characteristic of the city is the regulation of markets. Yet the discussion of edge cities has become almost ubiquitous in urban studies; the concept has been used in the popular media, in government reports, and in scholarly research. The presentation of Edge City in current textbooks in urban sociology is studied, and the paper concludes with suggestions of why the concept has become commonplace in the discipline and what must be done to replace it.
The
Problem with Edge Cities
Edge
Cities. Term designating commercial complexes that have grown up on the margins
of large American cities, a development that dates mainly from the 1970s. The
term was coined by Joel Garreau in his book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier
(1991). Sometimes called “technoburbs,” edge cities typically develop at the
intersection of major highways and feature the amenities that serve large
suburban populations in such locations—shopping malls, entertainment centers,
hospitals, schools, regional airports, and the like. These settings have proved
attractive to businesses for corporate headquarters, which are often sited on
appealingly sylvan “campuses,” and for office buildings that can house
smaller companies. With convenient access and pleasant surroundings, edge cities
avoid many inner-city problems. However, critics have noted in them marked class
segregation and a diminished sense of community as well as, increasingly, such
traditional urban ills as congestion and crime. Representative edge cities
include Tysons Corner, Va., Edison Township, N.J., Irvine, Calif., and Plano,
Tex. See study by J. Garreau (1991).
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2001.
Introduction
There is a spectre haunting urban sociology—the spectre of the edge city.
Edge City is everywhere. The Edge City Review is billed as the “World's only conservative literary magazine, featuring New Formalist Poetry, fiction, and books reviews.” Edge City View is a website that features articles on “Waco, Vince Foster, and the Secret War;” a review of the Mexican fotonovela genre Mascaras en Accion, and a link to a page titled “Jackbooted thugs in action” which superimposes photographs of the seizure of Elian Gonzales with an image of the Nazi flag. Edge City is a cyberpunk game where 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.”
The Edge City Café is located in Austin, Texas and is described by an on-line reviewer as “… a tiny haven in the Arboretum, a peaceful escape from the otherwise commercial cluster of shops and restaurants. The cafe's owner likes to think of it as a city within a city.” Edge City pottery in Auckland, New Zealand is the work-place and gallery for New Zealand artists Louise Rive and Chuck Joseph.
Edge City is a film by Alex Cox, which the student film maker describes in the following terms:
You
have to figure that out for yourself. I
think it relates to the anxious mind-set which was quite common at that time.
The knowledge that things were getting worse and worse politically--that
Carter was prepared to risk a nuclear war with Iran.
That the Americans viewed Britain as their private atomic aircraft
carrier. And that--with the coming
of Reagan and Thatch--things would be even worse.
Meanwhile we students lived in "Edge City"--a vile, horribly
polluted megalopolis with no public transport--a happy-faced, police--obsessed
asylum on the edge of Nothing, "Where the Debris Meets the Sea."
The Business Ledger (“The Business Newspaper for Suburban Chicago”) reported that the National Edge City Conference in Schaumburg drew “planners and civic officials from around the nation, primarily from suburbs that grew into commercial and residential centers because of their proximity to a major city.” New Ideas Now—Dayton and the Edge Cities is the website of a community activist group, with the subtitle: A Newsletter Discussing Suburban Sprawl, Downtown and City Abandonment.
The Edge Cities Network is a business resource website including links to half a dozen municipalities on the suburban fringe of European cities (Croydon-London; Espoo-Helsinki; Fingal-Dublin; Kifissia-Athens; Loures-Lisbon; Nacka-Stockholm; Horth Down-Belfast). “The Edge Cities forums are in place to encourage discussion and interaction between the various Edge Cities' partners and businesses.
The band Edge City—which bills itself as “Folk rock with an emphasis on the rock”--originated in Maryland and has released two CDs. Goodbye to the Edge City is a recent (2001) EP by Preston School Of Industry, described as similar to early period alternative or post-pop bands in a laconic Funhouse CD Review. The Edge City Collective in Philadelphia – offering improvisational music from beyond the new frontier -- pays direct homage to Joel Garreau: It's an ironic reference to Joel Garreau's compellingly written, but ultimately disturbing book, Edge City – Life on the New Frontier, which details the seemingly unstoppable trend in our society toward a homogenized quasi-suburban culture. In this world, every place could be anyplace. Minds are numbed by fast food, television, and countless hours spent driving between shopping malls and office parks. And music is shaped primarily by the profit motive and a resulting desire to please the masses. We seek out a different "frontier.”
Edge City has also entered the more general lexicon of scholarship (or perhaps near-scholarship) in urban studies and beyond. Edge City Governance: Implications of Federal Surface Transportation Legislation for Suburban Institutional Arrangements is the title of a working paper from the Institute for Public Policy at George Mason University (Mallett et al., 1992). The Urban Transport Fact Book includes a category titled US Employment Centers: Central Business Districts (Downtown) & Edge City Data.
And
so perhaps it is not surprising that the lead essay to/on Rethinking Los
Angeles
The
problem is that each example lends support to a concept with is fundamentally
un-sociological. Yet Edge City
has also entered the lexicon of urban sociology, being given prominence in a
recent edition of the leading textbook in the field, and being presented in an
uncritical manner in two other textbooks. In
the following sections we will review the original concept of Edge City; discuss
the contradiction of this concept with sociological definitions of the city;
examine the use of Edge City in urban sociology; and offer suggestions at how
urban sociology might regain the ground lost to the edge cities of contemporary
popular culture.
The Edge City
Most urbanists are
familiar with the basic ideas presented in Joel Garreau’s (1991) Edge City.
The edge city, we are told, represents the third wave of urban history,
pushing us into new frontiers at the edge of the metropolis.
Garreau identifies 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.
These areas are distinguished by the following:
1.
The area must have more than five 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
notes that the actual boundaries of the Edge City may be difficult to define,
because they do not have the same look, political organization, or visual cues
as older cities (they are less concentrated, do not have elected officials, and
the semiotics of space and design are different).
Beyond
the classification of place based on physical structure and economic function,
the Edge City is also described as beyond the political boundaries of both the
central city and suburban municipalities: “The reasons these places are tricky
to define is that they rarely have a mayor or a city council” (Garreau, 1991:
6). While this definition sounds in
some ways like the “interstitial areas” that Frederick Thrasher describes in
The Gang, there is nothing sociological in Garreau’s concept. It is, in fact, a
definition which contradicts the way in which cities have been defined by
sociologists for more than 100 years. While
Edge City may be a useful referent for popular culture and business, it should
not be part of our discussions of urban theory.
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