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Edge city is an American term for a relatively new concentration of business, shopping and entertainment outside a traditional urban area, in what had recently been a residential suburb or semi-rural community. It has become the standard form of urban growth worldwide, representing a 20th-century version of urbanity, as distinct from the 19th-century version of the downtown. The term was popularized in a 1991 book of that title by American writer Joel Garreau, who invented it while working as a reporter for the Washington Post.
Garreau's classic example is Tysons Corner, Virginia, west of Washington, D.C.. Circa World War II, it was a country crossroads, but it now has more office space than downtown Atlanta, Georgia.
Garreau established five rules for a place to be considered an edge city:
- It must have more than five million square feet (465,000 m²) of office space, which is more than can be found in downtown Memphis, Tenn.
- It must have more than 600,000 square feet (56,000 m²) of retail space, the size of a medium shopping mall.
- It must be characterized by more jobs than homes.
- It must be known as a destination that "has it all" in terms of entertainment, shopping and recreation.
- It must have been nothing like a city 30 years earlier.
Edge cities 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.
See also ring city.
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