ABSTRACT
This chapter began life as a discussion of the papers presented at the conference on “Global City Regions: Their Evolution and Management” held at the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in September 1995, the theme of which can be summarized by reference to two now classic books which appeared in 1991: Joel Garreau’s Edge City and Saskia Sassen’s The Global City, and it is probably right to say that the underlying theme of that conference—and of the research project that preceded it—came from the idea that maybe the two phenomena these books brought to light might be related, and that it was certainly a possibility worth exploring empirically. My discussion here is based on looking across the evidence presented on those cities studied as part of that research project and presented at that conference, trying to generalize from that and tell the “story” that I see emerging from that evidence and which, as I will elaborate below, does not point in the direction of a clear link between edge city and globality.
