But first, you ask, just what exactly is an edge city? A trendy name for a suburb? A new example of academic language abuse? Or something else?

To my surprise, the answer turns out to be surprisingly prosaic. Garreau provides five concrete prerequisites for an area to be called an edge city, but the most important one by far is this: an edge city must have 5 million square feet of leasable office space. This fundamentally distinguishes an edge city from a simple residential suburb and makes it into a place where people live, work, and shop, just like a traditional downtown.

Or sorta like, anyway. In fact, the conflict between edge cities and densely populated downtown cities (or CBDs--Central Business Districts--as he calls them) runs throughout this book and forms one of the core dilemmas of urban planning in America for the past 50 years. The dilemma looks something like this:

1. Edge cities are sterile and lifeless.
2. To give them more flavor and a better sense of community (i.e., more like an old-time CBD), you need lots of funky shops, used bookstores, ethnic restaurants, mass transit, etc.
3. None of those things make economic sense until a certain density level is reached.
4. However, Americans appear, on a massive level, to dislike the high densities of urban cores.

Thus, the central problem: If a sense of community requires high densities, and Americans don't like high densities, how will edge cities ever gain a sense of community? It's a good question, but if you're looking for an answer you'll have to look elsewhere, because although Garreau reflects intelligently on this question throughout the book he admits that it doesn't look like anyone really has an answer yet. And maybe never will.

However, Garreau does offer some interesting insights into why edge cities have developed so rapidly in postwar America, and the prime one is this: it's not edge cities that are the aberration but the old-time CBDs:

Throughout human evolution, most people lived in the countryside; few in the city. Only in the last century was that order reversed, and cities became top heavy.

Garreau suggests that the extremely dense American urban core was a temporary response to the industrial revolution, with workers swarming into the cities solely because that's where the jobs were, not because it was natural to enjoy being crammed into tenements and apartment high-rises.

What's more, if it was jobs that created our old urban cores, Garreau tells us that it is also jobs that are creating edge cities. Specifically, jobs for women. Edge cities began to take off in the late 70s, which was also the peak year in all American history for women entering the work force:

The spike year was 1978. That same year, a multitude of developers independently decided to start putting up big office buildings out beyond the traditional male-dominated downtown. Land was more abundant and more automobile-accessible in the residential suburbs that had once been condescendingly referred to as "the realm of women." And the new advantage was proximity to the emerging work force. These Edge City work centers were convenient for women. It saved them time. This discovery was potent. A decade later, developers viewed it as a truism that office buildings had an indisputable advantage if they were located near the best-educated, most conscientious, most stable workers--underemployed females living in middle class communities on the fringes of the old urban areas.

On a more practical level, Edge City also provides a primer on the nuts and bolts of how development is done in edge cities and how it all revolves around one fundamental, never changing prime motivator: parking. Yep, parking. "Ample free parking" is the touchstone difference between edge cities and CBDs, and developers have to site the parking for their buildings before they can design the building itself.

And just as there's a dilemma in how to turn an edge city into a genuine community, it turns out that there's a fundamental parking dilemma too. The basic unit of density in an edge city development is the FAR (pronounced eff-ay-are), or Floor-to-Area Ratio, which Garreau describes this way: "It is the developer's fundamental calculation of urban density, hence traffic, hence parking, hence human behavior, hence civilization." FAR is the ratio of the total floorspace of a building to the area of the land the building is on, and it is constrained by the rule of thumb that each worker in an office building requires 250 square feet and each car requires 400 square feet. Thus, an FAR of 0.4 is a crucial breaking point. Here's why:

1. If you have a big plot of cheap land (say, 100,000 square feet), you can build a one-story 40,000 square foot building and a 60,000 square foot parking lot. This is cheap and effective, since a normal flat parking lot costs about $2000 per parking space. However, this density level doesn't make economic sense if the land is expensive.
2. To get a higher FAR, you have to build a parking structure. However, this costs $5000 per space.
3. To get an even higher FAR, you have to build underground parking, and this costs even more: about $20,000 per space. What's more, this also requires a 3-story or higher building, which requires elevators, which requires much heavier construction, which is much more costly.

In other words, there's a gray zone between an FAR of 0.4 and a FAR of about 1.0 where it doesn't make economic sense to build much of anything. And it all hinges on parking.

There are plenty of other interesting tidbits about the realities of development and developers, and Garreau even includes an appendix that lists "The Laws," rules of human nature that developers swear by, having learned them from hard experience, despite the best efforts of academics and urban planners to tell them they're wrong. In fact, Garreau says that one of the things that developers find most perplexing is government bureaucrats and planners: "These people, developers believe...have self-evidently preposterous ideas about how human nature works in the real world."

Here are a few of the laws that Garreau offers up:

• The farthest distance an American will willingly walk before getting into a car: Six hundred feet.
• The function of glass elevators: To make women feel safe. Not to offer a view out. Rapes rarely occur in glass elevators.
• Why elected officials feel they must encourage commercial development or die: For every $1 of tax revenue that comes in from a residential subdivision, as much as $1.22 goes out to provide services, especially schools. By contrast, for every $1 of tax revenue that comes in from commercial development, at most 32 cents is required in expenditures, usually for roads.
• The maximum desirable commute, throughout human history, regardless of transportation technology: 45 minutes.
• The prime location consideration when a company moves: The commute of the chief executive officer must always become shorter. [This is not a joke; Garreau cites a genuine study that strongly suggests it's true.]
• What people who hire commercial real estate salesmen look for in a resume: Background as a jet-fighter pilot. It is an article of faith that the best commercial salesmen are former sky jockeys, although it is the sheerest speculation exactly why that correlation may exist.

And finally, a series of laws that helps explain the lack of mass transit in edge cities and why this will never change:

• The level of density at which automobile congestion starts becoming noticeable in edge city: 0.25 FAR.
• The level of density at which it is necessary to construct parking garages instead of parking lots because you have run out of land: 0.4 FAR.
• The level of density at which traffic jams become a major political issue in edge city: 1.0 FAR.
• The level of density beyond which few edge cities ever get: 1.5 FAR.
• The level of density at which light rail transit starts making economic sense: 2.0 FAR.
• The level of density of a typical old downtown: 5.0 FAR.
• The density-gap corollary to the laws of density: Edge cities always develop to the point where they become dense enough to make people crazy with the traffic, but rarely, if ever, do they get dense enough to support the rail alternative to automobile traffic.

And how does our very own Orange County fare in all this? Pretty well. Garreau identifies no fewer than four edge cities in Orange County and three developing ones. And since the book was written in 1991, it's likely that all seven of these are now full-fledged edge cities:

• North Orange County (Fullerton-La Habra-Brea)
• Central Orange County (Disneyland-Los Angeles Rams Stadium [oops...]-the Santa Ana I-5 Freeway-Santa Ana-Anaheim-Garden Grove)
• Western Orange County (Westminster-Huntington Beach)
• The John Wayne Airport area (including South Coast Plaza-Costa Mesa as well as the bulk of Irvine)
• Newport Beach-Fashion Island (also largely Irvine)
• Irvine Spectrum
• South Orange County (San Clemente-Laguna Niguel)

By my count, that makes Irvine part of three separate edge cities, which must be a record of some sort. And, according to Garreau, Irvine is the holder of another record as well: it's the largest master planned community in the country built by a single company. Kinda makes you feel tingly all over, doesn't it?

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