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:

1. 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.
2. It must have more than 600,000 square feet (56,000 m²) of retail space, the size of a medium shopping mall.
3. It must be characterized by more jobs than homes.
4. It must be known as a destination that "has it all" in terms of entertainment, shopping and recreation.
5. 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.

One of the earliest edge cities may have been Detroit's New Center, developed in the 1920s. Located three miles north of the city's downtown, it has since been annexed by the city proper.

See also ring city .

External link

• Garreau's web site with searchable text of the book