ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates selected edge city environments on the peripheries of four medium-sized Ohio cities: Dayton, Akron, Columbus, and Youngstown. The approach goes somewhat contrary to traditional views of edge cities as the illegitimate “interstate high-way” children of huge metropolitan areas. Realistically, the uniquely American edge city sprawl has come about with the implementation of new transportation technologies. As such, new trends in city growth in the 1980s and 1990s are much more pervasive than popular wisdom may be dictating. Just as old county history compilations often inaccurately show only the most prominent people, more universal urban patterns are left in the obscurity cast by those more commonly portrayed as influential. Contrary to Garreau's image, edge cities are not the by-products of only the largest and most visible urban networks but are present at all levels of the North American urban hierarchy.
