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The "Edgeless City"
and other tales of
metropolitan dispersal
By C. Kenneth Orski
Thirteen years ago,
reporter Joel Garreau enriched the literature and vocabulary of urban
planning with his concept of the "Edge City." To Garreau, edge cities
represented suburbia's future. They sprung on the metropolitan
periphery, often at a major highway intersection, offering suburban
residents an alternate destination to the traditional downtown for
office location, shopping, upscale dining, entertainment, medical care,
and professional services.
By the end of the century, edge cities in the top 13 metropolitan
office markets contained a total of 533 million square feet of office
space, or almost 20 percent of total office space in those metro
areas. Some edge cities came to compete with traditional downtowns in
terms of their scale and economic activity. Houston's edge cities,
including its giant Post Oak development, contain 62.5 million square
feet of office space, compared to Houston downtown's 38 million.
Metropolitan Washington D.C.'s Tysons Corner, and other satellite edge
cities, have come close to matching the downtown's 79.7 million square
feet. Today, each of the top six edge cities is bigger than the
downtowns of Detroit and Miami.
To many smart growth advocates and New Urbanists, edge cities
represented a hopeful alternative to continued sprawl. While ideally,
smart growthers would have preferred to see people and employment move
back to and revitalize traditional cities - they were prepared to
embrace the edge cities as a suburban surrogate. Many planners and
urbanists hoped that edge cities would progressively grow denser,
become more pedestrian-oriented, embrace the best of urban design,
become linked to metropolitan transit networks, and eventually become
true suburban-based city centers.
Unfortunately, as demographer Robert E. Lang observes in his newly
published book, the vision of edge cities gracefully maturing into
true city centers is increasingly overshadowed by a new phenomenon,
the "Edgeless City." (Edgeless Cities: Exploring the Elusive
Metropolis, Brooking Institution Press, 2003). Edgeless cities,
writes Lang, do not have the density or cohesiveness of edge
cities. They are made up of free-standing buildings, office parks, or
small clusters of buildings of varying densities, strung along
suburban interstates, and major arterials. Unlike edge cities, their
edgeless counterparts are not seen as a destination, although they may
include shopping malls and big-box outlets. "Perhaps most important,"
writes Lang, "edgeless cities are not edge cities waiting to
happen. Instead, they represent a concurrent, competing and more
decentralized form of office development." In other words, edgeless
cities are a 21st century form of sprawl.
While the growth of edge cities appears to have slowed down,
edgeless cities keep on expanding. In sheer amount of office space,
they dwarf edge cities, and most traditional downtowns (the exception
being New York City and Chicago). As of 1999, edgeless cities in the
13 largest metropolitan office markets studied by Lang, accounted for
more than a third of all office space (36.5 percent). By contrast,
edge cities accounted for only 20 percent. (Black's Guide to
Office Leasing, cited in Lang, Table 4-2, Summary of Office Space
in Thirteen Metropolitan Areas, 1999).
As Lang observes, edgeless cities represent the newest,
"post-polycentric" phase in the continuing decentralization of the
modern metropolis. Does this mean that traditional downtowns will
decline to the point of irrelevance? Not necessarily. Lang says:
"People still need to be in the middle of the action, and that means
that at least some players in information-intensive industries will
remain downtown." Similarly, industries such as fashion,
entertainment, advertising, and publishing, which draw heavily from
diverse subcultures, will thrive only in large, dense cities. In other
words, large downtowns may be expected to continue playing an
important role in the social and economic life of the nation. However,
edgeless cities - aka sprawl - will likely come to dominate the
geography of the suburban-oriented metropolis.
The Twilight of Maryland's Smart Growth Policy
In 1997, then-Governor Paris N. Glendening unveiled a new statewide
growth policy. His initiative quickly gained national attention, and
was praised as "the most promising new tool for managing growth in a
generation." ("Maryland's Smart Growth Policy," Innovation
Briefs, Nov/Dec 1998). The intent behind the Smart Growth Areas
Act, as the legislative initiative was named, was simple: public funds
should not be used to fuel development in areas that are not served by
public infrastructure.
Under the law, counties were to submit plans to the state showing
where they want growth to occur. The designated "priority funding
areas" would be eligible for state infrastructure financial
assistance. Projects that fell outside the boundaries of these areas
would not be eligible for support.
The policy was hailed as a milestone and a national model of an
antidote to sprawl. But, what looked good in concept, has proved to be
a lot tougher in practice. As investigative reporter Peter Whoriskey
reported in a recent series of articles in The Washington Post,
Glendening's bold initiative, enacted seven years ago, has yet to make
a significant dent in Maryland's sprawling land use patterns. "A
review of key state and local planning records shows no significant
shifts in Maryland's development patterns since the passage of
Glendening's smart growth package. Growth still takes place where
there was nothing, rather than where it has gone before," Whoriskey
wrote.
In 2001, 75 percent of the land consumed by home building in
Maryland was cut from pastures, woods and other parcels outside the
smart growth areas - almost exactly the same percentage as before the
program began, according to Maryland Department of Planning records.
Glendening's own planners confirmed this lack of progress in a private
memo to the team of incoming Gov. Robert Ehrich Jr.: "The rate at
which farm and forest land is being developed has not slowed" they
wrote (Peter Whoriskey, "Investing in Sprawl: The Limits of Smart
Growth," The Washington Post, August 10, 2004, page A01).
One reason given for the failure of Glendening's smart growth
policy was that it lacked teeth. The state could only refuse to fund
the necessary public infrastructure, but could not veto a project.
However, large developers and retail giants such as Wal-Mart did not
need the State's money. They could - and did - finance the necessary
roads and sewers themselves. As long as developers were paying their
own way and the projects benefitted the local economy, local officials
refused to stand in the way. ("Maryland's Smart Growth Policy - A
Paper Tiger?", Innovation Briefs, July/August 2000).
Another reason for the policy's failure was opposition by local
officials, who viewed Glendening's efforts as an unreasonable state
intrusion into counties' power to regulate land use. Perhaps most
importantly, plans to develop designated smart growth areas at higher
densities ran into determined grassroots opposition, wrote Whoriskey.
Citizen opposition was not confined to rural areas and small towns.
Plans for townhouse development around Metrorail stations in
Maryland's suburban Montgomery County - considered logical locations
for higher densities because of their proximity to mass transit - have
often been rejected, or scaled back, because of vociferous opposition
from aroused neighborhood residents.
Maryland's smart growth law is still on the books, and Governor
Erlich continues to pay lip service to its underlying mission to
preserve open spaces, and encourage redevelopment of older
communities. But clearly, the lack of any measurable progress has
been a disappointment to the program's authors. While some of the
program's defenders still argue that it may be premature to declare
Maryland's smart growth initiative a total failure, most planners are
privately conceding that, based on Maryland's experience, one would
have to conclude that Glendening-type smart growth policies have
little power to channel metropolitan development, or arrest suburban
sprawl.
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