An Overview of the Edge City Theory

An Overview of the Edge City Theory There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the earth, moldering in the water, and unintelligible as in any dream. - Charles Dickens on London in 1848; Garreau calls this quote the best one-sentence description of Edge City extant. Theyre called suburban business districts, major diversified centers, suburban cores, minicities, suburban activity centers, cities of realms, galactic cities, urban subcenters, pepperoni-pizza cities, superburbia, technoburbs, nucleations, disurbs, service cities, perimeter cities, peripheral centers, urban villages, and suburban downtowns but the name thats now most commonly used for places that the foregoing terms describe is edge cities. The term edge cities was coined by Washington Post journalist and author Joel Garreau in his 1991 book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. Garreau equates the growing edge cities at major suburban freeway interchanges around America as the latest transformation of how we live and work. These new suburban cities have sprung up like dandelions across the fruited plain, theyre home to glistening office towers, huge retail complexes, and are always located close to major highways. The archetypal edge city is Tysons Corner, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. Its located near the junctions of Interstate 495 (the D.C. beltway), Interstate 66, and Virginia 267 (the route from D.C. to Dulles International Airport). Tysons Corner wasnt much more than a village a few decades ago but today its home to the largest retail area on the east coast south of New York City (that includes Tysons Corner Center, home to six anchor department stores and over 230 stores in all), over 3,400 hotel rooms, over 100,000 jobs, over 25 million square feet of office space. Yet Tysons Corner is a city without a local civic government; much of it lies in unincorporated Fairfax County. Garreau established five rules for a place to be considered an edge city: The area must have more than five million square feet of office space (about the space of a good-sized downtown)The place must include over 600,000 square feet of retail space (the size of a large regional shopping mall)The population must rise every morning and drop every afternoon (i.e., there are more jobs than homes)The place is known as a single end destination (the place has it all; entertainment, shopping, recreation, etc.)The area must not have been anything like a city 30 years ago (cow pastures would have been nice) Garreau identified 123 places in a chapter of his book called The List as being true edge cities and 83 up-and-coming or planned edge cities around the country. The List included two dozen edge cities or those in progress in greater Los Angeles alone, 23 in metro Washington, D.C., and 21 in greater New York City. Garreau speaks to the history of the edge city: Edge Cities represent the third wave of our lives pushing into new frontiers in this half century. First, we moved our homes out past the traditional idea of what constituted a city. This was the suburbanization of America, especially after World War II. Then we wearied of returning downtown for the necessities of life, so we moved our marketplaces out to where we lived. This was the malling of America, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, we have moved our means of creating wealth, the essence of urbanism - our jobs - out to where most of us have lived and shopped for two generations. That has led to the rise of Edge City. (p. 4)

How To Come Up With A Brand Name

How To Come Up With A Brand Name How To Come Up With A Brand Name How To Come Up With A Brand Name By Mark Nichol The art of creating names of companies, services, and products is also an industry and a lucrative one. Brand agencies charge dearly for a list of suggestions for brand identities, but it’s simple to do it yourself. Note that I didn’t use the word easy; the process is fairly straightforward, but it takes a lot of time and effort. But perhaps you’d like to try it on your own. Here are a couple of issues to consider: Evocation Is the word distinctive? Does it encapsulate the essence of the company, service, or product? Does it evoke a positive response? What is the pertinent business or industry? What is the brand’s identity or personality? What is its demographic market? What sets this brand apart from competitors’ brands? Is the brand name already in use in the pertinent business or industry, or in another area? Is it an existing word, or is it similar to an existing word, already in generic usage, and if so, what are the associations with the word? Does it consist of or resemble a foreign term, and if so, what are that term’s associations? What impact will such associations have on use of the brand name? Can it be trademarked, and is it available as a domain name (www.widgets.com) or as the equivalent of a telephone number (1-800-WIDGETS)? Word Formation Various treatments of words are available for producing brand names: A brand may consist of an acronym, a new word or the mimicking of an existing one formed by using the first letter of each word in a phrase (though the first two letters from one or more words may be employed, or a minor word may be passed over, to improve the word’s appearance of make it match an existing word). One example is Saab, from the initials for the Swedish company name Svenska Aeroplan AktieBolage). The brand name might be a compound, a phrase formed from two existing words, as in the case of Band-Aid, or it might be devised (or revised) by clipping, or truncating one or more words, as with FedEx. It could also be a neologism, such as Kodak. A brand name might be a play on words, like a Mexican restaurant called Sir Vesa’s (a homophone of cerveza, the Mexican word for â€Å"beer†). It could be a deliberate misspelling of a known word, such as Tru. Various forms of wordplay are used to coin new words, including alliteration (Burt’s Bees), rhyme (Slim Jims), and reduplication (Ding Dongs). A company may choose a character, like Aunt Jemima or Mr. Clean, to evoke a certain image, or may employ foreign or classical words or syllables that represent a product’s value proposition: Lux, for example, the Latin word for â€Å"light† but also a part of luxury, suggests both illumination and refinement. The Decision If you’re going to create a brand name yourself, refrain from getting carried away by all these possibilities right away. Focus first on the qualities your brand name should convey: Sober, or sassy? Literal, or lyrical? Practical, or personified? Then brainstorm, whittle the list down to a handful of finalists, and test on colleagues, friends, and family and in a focus group. When you make a final decision, let it sit for a while, and then decide whether it will have lasting appeal for you, your business associates, and your clients or customers. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the General category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Inquire vs Enquire26 Feel-Good Words"To Tide You Over"