ABSTRACT
In Garreau's wide-ranging edge city survey the only Ohio metro-politan region examined was Cleveland. Identified as an edge city was the Chagrin Boulevard and I-271 area (east of Shaker Heights); the Rockside Road and I-77 area (Independence) was designated an emerging edge city. The Rockside Road area has been independently classified in this study as an information/producer services suburban downtown. Although the Chagrin Boulevard and I-271 area is in this study classified as a social services edge city, it shares many information/producer services attributes. These characteristics, of course, are not unexpected. Of the criteria Garreau uses in identifying an edge city, the single most important one is that it have more than 5 million square feet of leasable office space. Information pro-cessing and decision making are office-bound functions. Producer services, or business services, tend to have higher ratios of office space to production space than either manufacturing or retailing. So it is not surprising that one of Garreau's Ohio edge cities is of the information/producer services type, and the other exhibits similarities, as indicated by the employment profiles (Figure 8.1).
