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Edgeless Cities:The Philadelphia metropolitan region is growing in a very elusive, sprawling way. Philadelphia is second only to Miami in the percentage of office space found in low density, dispersed office parks on the urban fringe. The Philadelphia region is an example of an “Edgeless City.” This article is taken from Lang’s forthcoming Brookings Press book due out in 2003.

EXPLORING THE ELUSIVE METROPOLIS

Robert E. Lang, Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech

“ . . . the bulletin is this: Edge Cities mean that density is back”

Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier

The much-quoted line from Joel Garreau’s influential book, Edge City: Life on the NewFrontier, is often cited with a sigh of relief bythose who hope suburbia is finally growing upand starting to behave itself. Many people inthe smart growth movement, which seeksamong other goals to build higher density,mixed-use suburbs, are especially invested inthe idea that maturing Edge Cities represent a potentially hopeful future. Edge Cities likeTyson’s Corner in Virginia feature a high-density mix of office space, retail, and hous-

METROPOLITAN PRIMARY DOWNTOWN SECONDARY DOWNTOWN EDGE CITY EDGELESS CITY

Area Office Space % of Office Space % of Office Space % of Office Space % of(Square Feet) Metro Area (Square Feet) Metro Area (Square Feet) Metro Area (Square Feet) Metro Area

Total 1,013,603,948 37.7 161,942,689 6.0 532,944,733 19.8 980,993,488 36.5

Atlanta 31,132,327 23.6 13,049,980 9.9 33,501,999 25.3 54,486,457 41.2

Boston 56,666,727 37.4 6,995,406 4.6 28,426,987 18.8 59,345,046 39.2

Chicago 134,285,726 53.9 48,546,947 19.5 66,250,174 26.6

Dallas 30,607,818 20.5 6,779,628 4.5 60,084,103 40.3 51,554,463 34.6

Denver 23,522,232 30.4 3,263,748 4.2 22,753,338 29.4 27,722,095 35.9

Detroit 16,754,461 21.3 31,085,327 39.5 30,813,711 39.2

Houston 38,046,467 23.0 62,557,748 37.9 64,470,742 39.1

Los Angeles 85,037,104 29.8 22,109,801 7.8 72,324,970 25.4 105,412,452 37.0

Miami 12,678,884 13.1 4,374,329 4.5 16,077,609 16.6 63,774,416 65.8

New York 390,143,000 56.7 49,711,600 7.2 43,006,777 6.2 205,503,635 29.9

Philadelphia 54,818,180 34.2 5,196,698 3.2 14,199,849 8.9 85,899,853 53.6

San Francisco 60,114,661 33.9 15,606,968 8.8 24,612,366 13.9 76,968,744 43.4

Washington 79,796,361 28.6 34,854,531 12.5 75,766,713 27.1 88,791,700 31.8

Average 81,872,635 16,543,634 41,620,228 77,208,919

Median 55,742,454 6,995,406 37,046,052 65,360,458

ing. Unfortunately, more recent research suggestsEdge Cities are not as widespread a phenomenon asoriginally thought. Instead, emergence of “EdgelessCities” means that we are moving away from seeingthe high density suburbia that Garreau promises.

“Edgeless Cities” are a form of sprawling office devel-opment and are not mixed use, pedestrian friendly oreasily accessed by public transit. Geographically theyare nearly twice as large as edge cities. Edgeless Citiesare everywhere. No major metropolitan area is with-out them.

The term “Edgeless City” captures the fact that mostsuburban office areas lack a physical edge. In contrastto Edge Cities, which in theory combine large-scaleoffice development with major retail, Edgeless Citiescontain mostly isolated office buildings at varyingdensities over vast swaths of urban space.

Edge Cities do represent a suburban future, but only one future. This study reports on the other newmetropolis to emerge in the past two decades. It covers the alternative suburban future, the post-poly-centric version — that of the Edgeless City.

This piece looks at the 13 largest markets in thecountry, which together contain more than 2.6 billion square feet of office space and 26,000 buildings. The study is not intended as an exhaus-tive statistical analysis — although the findings are often data derived. Rather, the data helpreframe current thinking on the metropolis. Thestudy’s main contribution is conceptual. Just asMyron Orfield’s book American Metropolitics distinguished multiple kinds of suburbs, this book delineates between two types of suburbanoffice development — bounded and edgeless.[Editor’s note: See an excerpt from Orfield’sAmerican Metropolitics on page 10.] And likeOrfield’s work, this study has numerous implica-tions beyond the data. One is that Edgeless Citiesraise an even bigger challenge than Edge Cities forthose who seek to build a less sprawling suburbia.

Following office space trends provides a goodmethod for understanding metropolitan changebecause offices are where a large percentage of jobgrowth occurs. In some metropolitan areas, nearlyhalf of all newly hired employees go to work inoffice buildings. 5

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Table 1: National Metropolitan Summary — Downtowns, Edge Cities, Edgeless Cities 1999

Source: Black’s Guide (New York’s primary downtown figure comes from Cushman & Wakefield and the Real Estate Board of New York)

Office Location Types

Large metropolitan areas have long been polycen-tric. But today’s polycentrism is quite different.Whereas factory towns, secondary cities, and even Edge Cities share a spatial logic with big cities(albeit on a smaller scale), Edgeless Cities representa departure. Edge Cities are perhaps the last stop on the road away from traditional urban forms.

The major statistical source for this project isoffice data, or specifically rental office space. Thestandard categories for reporting office data areCentral Business District (CBD) and non-CBD.CBD space refers to downtown office buildings.Downtowns vary in size and scale, but they typically contain the largest single concentrationof a region’s office space. Non-CBD office spaceexists throughout metropolitan areas. Much ofthis space lies in suburbs — even distant suburbs— although much may be found within the central city outside the CBD.

Non-CBD office space varies tremendously in its size, scale, density, location, age and land usecharacteristics. The category non-CBD capturesevery office location from the single low-slungoffice building at the farthest reaches of the metropolitan area, to “uptowns” that arose as secondary business districts within the central city. Non-CBD office space is thus a grab-bag category that captures all office space outside a CBD.

Many observers of suburban office space — Joel Garreau being the most notable example —have assumed that all non-CBD space is locatedin large edge cities such as Tysons Corner, VA and Post Oaks in Houston. This study seeks todetermine exactly how much non-CBD officespace is found in Edge Cities and how much, by contrast, is found in a different category alltogether. I argue that most non-CBD office space is actually located in Edgeless Cities, not Edge Cities.6

“Edgeless

Cities” are

a form of

sprawling

office

development

and are not

mixed use,

pedestrian

friendly or

easily accessed

by public

transit.

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The Era of Edgelessness

Edge Cities may one day be seen as a transitionalurban form; an attempt to build auto-based, low-density downtowns before developers realizedthat cars made such places mostly unnecessary.The new metropolitan form shows up less often in the Post Oaks and Tysons Corners than in the nameless office parks at nearly every exit ramp off the beltway where most of the office spacebuilt outside of downtowns is found.

Perhaps most importantly, Edgeless Cities are notEdge Cities waiting to happen. Instead they repre-sent a competing and more decentralized form ofoffice development. Ironically, Edge Cities face thesame land cost and congestion pressures as old

downtowns, for they too are now central places.Edgeless Cities may be the ultimate result of ametropolitan process that has been tearing apartconcentrated commercial development for the better part of a century.

Nearly three-quarters of all existing suburbanoffice space was constructed in the past twodecades. Before the 1980s only about a quarter of all office space was suburban. Today 42% of the office space in the top dozen markets is foundin suburbs. If we remove Manhattan from the central city totals, the gap between cities and suburbs closes to near parity. Suburbs, once minorplayers in the metropolitan office economy, nowcompete with central cities head to head.

Suburbs,

once minor

players

in the

metropolitan

office

economy,

now compete

with central

cities head to

head.

Philadelphia — The EdgelessMetropolis of the North

“Edgelessness” is a term particularly apropos tometropolitan Philadelphia’s office structure. WhilePhiladelphia still has an average amount of officespace within its primary downtown, more thanhalf (54%) of its metropolitan area office space islocated in Edgeless Cities. Miami, the only otherarea with over half (almost two-thirds) its officespace in edgeless locations, has the lowest amountof space in its primary downtown (13.1%), whichgives it by far the highest disparity between down-town and edgeless office space. Among the 13metropolitan areas in the study, Philadelphia andMiami are at the most advanced stage of officedecentralization.

Philadelphia is proof that the edgeless metropolisis not just a Sunbelt phenomenon. In fact, theregion appears to be the South Florida of thenorth, with the major difference being thatPhiladelphia does have a decent-sized downtown.Both regions also have small, average-sized buildings, which may be related to Edgeless City-oriented growth.

Philadelphia’s two modest-sized Edge Cities arenorth and west of the downtown. Malvern-Paoli-Wayne is along Philadelphia’s “Main Line,” whichrefers to a commuter train that runs through theregion’s older affluent suburbs. The King ofPrussia Edge City is built around a regional mall, near the intersection of the region’s major

interstates. Interestingly, the New Jersey side ofPhiladelphia contains no office cluster that qualifiesas either a downtown or an Edge City. Places suchas Cherry Hill, New Jersey, which features one ofthe oldest enclosed malls in the nation, lacks the sizeto be an Edge City. The old industrial satellite cityof Camden, New Jersey has fallen on hard timesand unlike Newark and Jersey City in the New Yorkregion, has not been redeveloped as a secondarydowntown.

Not only does Philadelphia have large EdgelessCities; they are the fastest growing office develop-ment category. About 70% of the office space addedto the current inventory during the 1990s was inEdgeless Cities. Meanwhile Edge Cities capturednine percent and downtowns another 21%.

In total, Philadelphia’s suburbs gained almost 26million square feet of office space during the 1990s,while the city picked up only 9 million square feet.That helped give the suburbs the majority of officespace in the region by 1999. Almost four-fifths (78%) of the current office space in Philadelphia’ssuburbs was built since 1980.

In total, Metropolitan Philadelphia’s Edgeless Citiesspread over 297 square miles and account for 63%of the region’s office space. The downtown fits injust 4 square miles and contains the other 37% ofoffice inventory. The downtown’s office buildings,averaging over 300,000 square feet, also dwarf thosein Edgeless Cities, which range from 30,031 to71,882 square feet.8

Table 2: Philadelphia’s Office Space Locations

CURRENT BY YEAR BUILT1990-1999 1980-1989 Pre-1979

Square % of Square % of Square % of Square % ofPHILADELPHIA Footage Metro Area Footage Metro Area Footage Metro Area Footage Metro Area

Downtown 60,014,878 37.5 7,317,702 21.4 35,913,222 41.4 16,783,954 42.7

Philadelphia 54,818,180 34.2 6,683,702 19.6 32,389,160 37.4 15,745,318 40.1

Wilmington 5,196,698 3.2 634,000 1.9 3,524,062 4.1 1,038,636 2.6

Edge Cities 14,199,849 8.9 2,987,279 8.8 9,019,918 10.4 2,192,652 5.6

King of Prussia 6,173,563 3.9 1,209,429 3.5 3,776,267 4.4 1,187,867 3.0

Malvern-Paoli-Wayne 8,026,286 5.0 1,777,850 5.2 5,243,651 6.0 1,004,785 2.6

Edgeless Cities 85,899,853 53.6 23,827,588 69.8 41,773,524 48.2 20,298,741 51.7

TOTAL 160,114,580 100 34,132,569 100 86,706,664 100 39,275,347 100

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Implications

The location of office space is critical in a numberof public policy areas. For example, the distributionof new office space can help determine the extent towhich there is a jobs/housing mismatch in a region.It can also influence the spatial mismatch betweeneconomic opportunity and the concentration ofminority households. Office location also impactsurban sprawl. If most new office space is construct-ed at the regional edge, it extends commuter shedsfor many miles into undeveloped rural areas andthereby fuels sprawl. Finally, the geography of officelocation figures prominently in transportation analy-sis. If most new space is built in areas with no publictransit access, then reliance on automobiles will con-tinue to grow.

Even though many practitioners, planners, acade-mics and public officials have focused much of theirattention on the problems of cities, the restructuringand reordering of this very elusive metropolitanform is the great project of the next century. In the19th century, Americans created a vast, coast-to-coast network of cities. By 1900, the core of everymajor American region except for Las Vegas wasestablished. During the 20th century, and especiallyin the postwar years, growth spread out from urbancores giving us the our vast metropolitan forum.The nation now turns to the next phase of develop-ment — bringing order to this growth.

The article above is an edited summary of Edgeless Cities:Exploring the Elusive Metropolis. The book is due out fromBrookings Institution Press in early 2003. Robert Lang is theDirector of the newly founded Metropolitan Institute atVirginia Tech.