Edge city: life on the new frontier

TLDR

The United States is undergoing a radical transformation in urban development, with growing metropolitan areas sprouting unfamiliar “Edge Cities” that dominate our lives yet remain largely unrecognized because they defy traditional city norms. The book examines how Edge Cities reshape everyday life, influencing where we live, travel, work, and socialize. The book systematically analyzes Edge City characteristics—job types, social viability, and everyday infrastructure—while providing a glossary of key terms such as pavement deficiency, pedestrian walkway, street furniture, streetscape, and supercommuter. Readers are prompted to rethink their identity in light of the influence of Edge Cities.

Abstract

We Americans are going through the most radical change in a century in how we build our world, and most of us don't even know it. From coast to coast, every metropolis that is growing is doing so by sprouting strange new kinds of places: Edge Cities. Most of us now spend our entire lives in and around these Edge Cities, yet we barely recognize them for what they are. That's because they look nothing like the old downtowns; they meet none of our preconceptions of what constitutes a city. This book explains how these Edge Cities are dramatically changing the way most of us live our lives--our homes, our transportation, our jobs, our social lives. Everything is examined, from the kinds of jobs Edge Cities generate to whether they will ever be good places to fall in love or hold a Fourth of July parade. We are challenged to reconsider who, exactly, we are. A glossary is provided. Among its many definitions are the following: pavement deficiency - a pothole; pedestrian walkway - a sidewalk; street furniture - everything exposed to the weather put there by the hand of man, not counting roads, buildings, and plants; streetscape - a road on which sufficient design review has been expended such that the Street Furniture, Signage, and Luminaires all match and/or are festooned with flags; supercommuter - a person whose round trip to work exceeds a hundred miles each day.