Edgeless Cities: Exploring the Elusive Metropolis
- ISBN-10
- 0815796005
- ISBN-13
- 9780815796008
- Category
- Political Science
- Pages
- 154
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2003-02-25
- Publisher
- Brookings Institution Press
- Author
- Robert E. Lang
Description
Edgeless cities are a sprawling form of development that accounts for the bulk of office space found outside of downtowns. Every major metropolitan area has them: vast swaths of isolated buildings that are neither pedestrian friendly, nor easily accessible by public transit, and do not lend themselves to mixed use. While critics of urban sprawl tend to focus on the social impact of "edge cities"—developments that combine large-scale office parks with major retail and housing—edgeless cities, despite their ubiquity, are difficult to define or even locate. While they stay under the radar of critics, they represent a significant departure in the way American cities are built and are very likely the harbingers of a suburban future almost no one has anticipated. Edgeless Cities explores America's new metropolitan form by examining the growth and spatial structure of suburban office space across the nation. Inspired by Myron Orfield's groundbreaking Metropolitics (Brookings, 1997), Robert Lang uses data, illustrations, maps, and photos to delineate between two types of suburban office development—bounded and edgeless. The book covers the evolving geography of rental office space in thirteen of the country's largest markets, which together contain more than 2.6 billion square feet of office space and 26,000 buildings: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington. Lang discusses how edgeless cities differ from traditional office areas. He also provides an overview of national, regional, and metropolitan office markets, covers ways to map and measure them, and discusses the challenges urban policymakers and practitioners will face as this new suburban form continues to spread. Until now, edgeless cities have been the unstudied phenomena of the new metropolis. Lang's conceptual approach reframes the current thinking on suburban sprawl and provides a valuable resource for future policy discussions surrounding smart growth issues.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2003
- 154 pages
- Paperback
- Brookings Institution Press
Similar books
-
International Handbook of Globalization and World Cities
By Ben DerudderEdgeless cities are as elusive, diffuse and hard to define as urban sprawl, of which they constitute a major part (Lang, 2000). Edgeless cities, along with edge cities, identify a subset of non-CBD office space. As the term implies, ...
-
Cities and Suburbs: New Metropolitan Realities in the US
By Bernadette Hanlon, John Rennie Short, Thomas J. VicinoPhillips, K. (1990) The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath. ... Price, M. and Benton-Short, L. (eds) (2008) Migrants to the Metropolis: The Rise of Immigrant Gateway Cities.
-
The U.S. City in Transition
By Barbara Hahnwhich is why Lang calls them elusive cities. Edgeless cities are defined less by their external form than by their function, i.e. the large number of office workplaces. In the metropolitan areas studied by Lang, offices were ...
-
Cities of North America: Contemporary Challenges in U.S. and Canadian Cities
By Lisa Benton-ShortEdge and Edgeless Cities The term “edge city” was popularized and defined by Joel Garreau in his 1991 book, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. Garreau suggests that an edge city (1) has five million square feet of leasable office ...
-
Liquid City: Megalopolis and the Contemporary Northeast
By John R Short(2006) looked at office development in 13 cities and found that 40 percent of office space was in the form of edgeless cities. Within the four cities in Megalopolis that Lang et al. considered—New York, Boston, Philadelphia, ...
-
Cities in the Third Wave: The Technological Transformation of Urban America
By Leonard I. RuchelmanAs of 1999 , edgeless cities in the thirteen largest metropolitan office markets studied by Lang accounted for more than a third of all office space ( 36.5 percent ) . In some contrast , edge cities accounted for only 20 percent.22 Lang ...
-
Restructuring the Philadelphia Region: Metropolitan Divisions and Inequality
By Carolyn Adams, David Bartelt, David EleshWhile a few edge cities such as Tyson's Corner in suburban Washington, D.C., and King of Prussia in suburban ... rather than sharing space in malls or on Main Streets.29 Edgeless cities are office complexes in places difficult to reach ...
-
Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs
By Ellen Dunham-Jones, June WilliamsonUrban researchers Robert E. Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy argue that edge cities have been leapfrogged by even less compact office complexes that they have dubbed “edgeless cities.” Because office spaces do not require specialized ...
-
Metroburbia, USA
By Paul L. KnoxIn Sprawl and Suburbia, ed. William S. Saunders. ... Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books, 1987. ———. ... Forsyth, Ann. Reforming Suburbia: The Planned Communities of Irvine, Columbia, 204 Bibliography.
-
The American Suburb: The Basics
By Jon C. TeafordThe American Suburb: The Basics is a compact, readable introduction to the origins and contemporary realities of the American suburb.