The 1980s saw an explosion of edge city development on the fringe of most U.S. metropolitan areas. These new urban centers were distinguished from their suburban neighbors by major office complexes, regional retail centers, a commuting labor force often equal to the edge city's residential population, and a new urban identity. Research on two California edge cities, Walnut Creek and San Ramon, reveals that long term implementation of California's general plan law, and the development of new political and professional roles for planners were essential to the completion of the cities. Closer examination of these individual edge cities provides important insights into the new roles planners are taking in large scale developments, and the long term consequences of California's mandatory general plan legislation.
Edge cities in the United States now number as many as 181, and are a dominant element of most metropolitan landscapes (Garreau 1994-1). These new centers represent a further fragmentation of our metropolitan regions, and increasingly challenge the economic, social and cultural vitality of the central cities. The stories they tell are of magnificent planning successes of economic development and urban design at the local level, with disastrous transportation, urban abandonment and affordable housing consequences at the regional level. The research reported here links those successes and consequences to the implementation of California's system of mandatory comprehensive land use planning at the local level. Planners used that cutting edge legal device and the newest tools of their profession over more than three decades to shape these new edge cities, and to meet the needs of their clients, local government. This research raises the policy issues of the regional consequences of successful local land use planning and the implementation of an advanced state policy of mandatory general plans designed to remediate urban sprawl. That linkage between local practice and regional policy suggests that planners should more carefully consider the broader consequences of their new roles within the political economy of land use, and in their professional relationships with private developers. This study also raises important policy questions about both the appropriate role of public planners in large scale developments, and the usefulness of local control of land use planning in an increasingly regional urban world.
The Choice of A Qualitative Methodology
This study chose a qualitative, in-depth approach to one mature example of each of two edge city templates in the region, rather than a quantitative analysis of large numbers of edge city demographics, real estate development statistics or urban form features. The goal of the research was to first identify a set of urban forms that could be categorized as edge cities, and to then trace the story of their evolution and place the role of planners in that political economy of large scale urban development (McGovern 1994).
Walnut Creek was chosen as the template for edge cities built on existing suburban downtown grids with access to rail transit. San Ramon's Bishop Ranch was chosen as typical of sprawling, suburban office campuses built on virgin agricultural land. In addition to meeting those urban form requirements, Walnut Creek was the product of a suburban city government, while San Ramon revealed the role of a county government planning an unincorporated area which later became a city.
Site visits, photographs and examination of centers, and reviews of planning records were used to review a larger number of candidate cities, and complete the selection process. Once the two cases were chosen, more extensive site visits and document searches were conducted. Those documents included general plans, planning department files for edge city buildings, government board meeting records, and various other planning reports on the site or the projects.
Interviews were selected as the principal method of telling the story of the development of these edge cities. Lengthy, narrative interviews were conducted with planning professionals, government officials, developers, environmentalists, politicians and others who had direct participation in the process in each community. Local newspapers were also consulted to verify dates and actors. Because the largest local newspaper, the Contra Costa Times, was published by a vocal proponent of growth in the region, it provided thorough --- though opinionated --- coverage of growth throughout the last two decades.
This holistic approach, while limited by the number of cases investigated so far, challenges the results of more quantitative studies of local planning. That quantitative work concludes that local planners in California have frequently been the victims of "agency capture" by more powerful development interests (Dalton 1989). Those studies are based on an analysis of formal actions by planners and their governing boards, as well as formal applications by developers. The research approach taken here has revealed new consensual roles of planners that occurred outside the formal approval process examined by earlier work. This holistic qualitative approach has penetrated the new informal arena of planning, revealing both new roles for planners and enhanced power in determining the final form of edge cities.
The Walnut Creek and San Ramon Edge Cities
The case studies, Walnut Creek and San Ramon, are part of a set of five edge cities in Contra Costa County and the adjacent community of Pleasanton in Alameda County. All are connected by either a freeway system or the Bay Area Rapid Transit rail system. (Figure 1) The five communities constitute the core of the Interstate 680 corridor that saw a suburban office boom of striking proportions, growing from 3.8 million square feet of office space in 1980 to 32.5 million by the end of the decade (Sedway 1992). Three high-rise, downtown urban centers are found at BART stations, along with freeway access, at Walnut Creek, Concord and Pleasant Hill BART. The high rise centers consist of six to ten story office towers, renting Class A office space to professional and corporate tenants. Two sprawling campus developments at San Ramon and Pleasanton are composed of three to five story complexes, which house corporate headquarters and major backoffice operations. Both are located along freeways with no transit service, although an extension of BART to the Pleasanton center is currently under construction.
Walnut Creek and San Ramon are the two most fully developed and prototypical edge cities in the region. Walnut Creek is a template for high rise, transit oriented office development
Figure 1. Map. Contra Costa County Edge City locations. (not loaded, available from author)
in an existing suburban downtown, sited near a rapid transit station. San Ramon is a typical suburban office campus center, located along an interstate highway, housing backoffice operations for major regional and national corporations like Pacific Bell and Chevron Oil. Each is the most developed example of its type in the region.
Although written initially for the popular market, the work of Garreau (1991) has framed the national debate over edge cities, and the criticism of the role of planning in their development. Garreau's definition of an "edge city" includes a minimum of five million square feet of office space, six hundred thousand square feet of retail space, more jobs than bedrooms, and a perception of it as a single place in a community that was not a city thirty years earlier. Testing those criteria on the case studies in Figure 2 results in exceeding both the office and retail space thresholds. Substituting Garreau's measure of "more jobs than bedrooms" with the ratio of jobs to population also produces a fit. Last, both Walnut Creek and San Ramon were tiny rural outposts thirty years ago which have become well known urban centers in the Bay Area region, meeting the last two criteria.
Figure 2. Comparison of Edge City parameters.
(Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier)
Comparisons of Garreau standard, San Ramon, and Walnut Creek
Office space:
Retail space:
"More jobs than bedrooms"
Perceived as a single place.
Was not perceived as a "city" thirty years ago.
The overwhelming majority of the edge city growth in these two communities occurred in the short period between 1982 and 1986. The new jobs, office space and retail space represented more regional relocation than actual growth of the Bay Area economy. Thus, most of the office jobs were relocated from buildings in the San Francisco Financial District or Downtown Oakland, as were many of the new retail uses.
This short burst of urbanization subsided by the late 1980s, when growth control politics prevailed in both communities, and when it became apparent that the region's suburban office market had been overbuilt. Those factors, together with the general recession in California, stopped employment and retail growth. Nevertheless, both edge cities continued to expand through the early 1990s with the addition of cultural, entertainment, medical, and educational facilities, competing with San Francisco and Oakland on new and more troubling levels. When viewed together with other Bay Area edge city developments in the Silicon Valley, the Peninsula area, and Marin County, (Garreau 1994-2) it becomes clear why the central cities of the region, particularly Oakland, have suffered substantial erosion of their employment and retail bases, and are now facing loss of other important urban functions.
The Role of the California General Plan Law
The California general plan law was an essential element in the planning of these edge cities. Planners used gener>