Perched on the "edge" of the city of Atlanta, just across the border in Cobb County, is the Cumberland/Galleria/Vinings area, a major conflation of suburban office parks, retail shopping (including Cumberland Mall), and even facilities for the arts (Cobb Energy Centre). All this is bisected by two interstates (I-75 and I-285) and further crossed by major highways, such as Cobb Parkway.
When Joel Garreau described "Edge Cities" in his essay ("Document" 16-1 in the Suburban Reader), he might as well have been talking about the Vinings/Cumberland area in Cobb County. With more than 24 million square feet of office space (said to be more than downtown Miami), the Cumberland/Galleria "edge city" is the very personification of "moving downtown functions into the suburbs." That is, Garreau noted that first homes were moved to the suburbs (especially post-WWII) and then retail establishments (suburban malls replacing the downtown department store) but in recent decades (1980s-present) even many of the jobs have in many cases been moved to the suburbs. The Cumberland edge city includes, for example, offices of the Home Depot (while Rubbermaid is headquartered in Sandy Springs, part of Perimeter Center--Atlanta's largest Edge City). However, it's not just auxiliary offices that have moved to to the edge.
Buildings rise as high as 362 feet (the Riverwood 100 Tower). Most of the Galleria offices are in the 20-story range. And, while a "Downtown Atlanta" booster might be willing to give all this up as just "chump change" compared to the edifices in Downtown Atlanta, there's at least one major defection that threatens Atlanta's role as metropolitan core: the Atlanta Opera in 2008 abandoned its Atlanta Civic Center home for the new Cobb Energy Centre.
Edge cities might have a lot of the functions of downtown areas, but they are organized more like a suburb. The Riverwood 100 building perches awkwardly, surrounded by undeveloped land (it's a 40-foot drop from the edge of the Riverwood 100's ground). Huge areas are devoted to parking. Buildings are widely spaced, often with trees and green paths and places for corporate types to jog/exercise. Display and ostentation are important: fancy signs announcing the development at the entrance; fountains in the front; atria in the lobby. At the Waverly Hotel, the elevator was dressed up like a Christmas gift.
Edge cities differ from regular suburbs in that, instead of being a "bedroom community," they have a larger workplace population than nighttime population. Garreau believes that the single-family housing unit remains the base of them. However, in the Cumberland/Galleria area, large multiunit apartment and condo buildings are quite common, including one perched atop Vinings Mountain.
I would like to mention that this self-taxing CID is advantageously located, just outside the Atlanta city and Fulton county limits. The irony is that there is more development just outside the "city" limits than just inside the city limits!
ReplyDeleteGreat analysis, Robert. I like what you write about Riverwood 100 and how it meets that ground--more generally what you observe about the "edge city" being organized more like a suburb, but at a more intense scale. The defining / distinguishing feature, of course, seems to be design for the automobile.
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