Edge City

Edge City describes the outward shift of urban growth from an old downtown toward large commercial clusters served by highways. In Atlanta, the pattern gives shape both to decades of expansion and to Charlie Croker’s ambition: he understands the new geography, then bets that its next center will be his. Croker Concourse makes the distinction between recognizing a trend and correctly timing it painfully visible.

The Model and Atlanta’s Expansion

In 1991, another developer gave Charlie a copy of Joel Garreau’s book Edge City. Although Charlie was not much of a reader, he found its account of highway-served commercial clusters compelling because it put words to a pattern he and other developers had already sensed. The center of growth, in this model, was no longer necessarily the old Downtown or Midtown; it was moving toward the metropolitan edge.

The city’s population and its wider region made that outward movement striking. Fewer than 400,000 people lived within Atlanta’s limits, almost three-quarters of them Black, and the city’s population had declined slightly over the previous decade. Meanwhile, Greater Atlanta had grown to more than 3.5 million people as hundreds of thousands of people—most of them white—settled in the leafy communities surrounding the city. From the air, Charlie could see the highways that made the new pattern possible: Spaghetti Junction, where Highways 85 and 285 met in a complex of ramps and overpasses, and Georgia 400 crossing 285 near Perimeter Center.

The sequence of development gave the model local landmarks. Commercial Buckhead, once regarded as suburban, had become Atlanta’s first Edge City. Perimeter Center followed, growing around an office park that Mack Taylor and Harvey Mathis had built far from Downtown despite the venture’s initial risk. The Galleria and Cumberland Mall formed another center near the meeting of Highways 75 and 285. Further outward, new clusters were forming around Spaghetti Junction and Gwinnett Place Mall, while Forsyth County was changing from a rural outback into a fast-growing landscape of subdivisions. The pattern was not a single new center but a succession of commercial nodes reaching farther into the trees.

Croker’s Bet on the Next Center

Charlie projected the pattern forward. He envisioned an Edge City in Cherokee County, due west of Forsyth County and north of the Galleria, and imagined it bearing his own name. The ambition took material form in Croker Concourse: a tower, mall, cineplex, hotel-and-apartment complex, and a vast parking area set apart from the established city. From above, however, the asphalt looked conspicuously empty. The complex appeared less like a settled center than an island waiting for the metropolitan edge to reach it.

The project’s timing was the wager. Charlie believed that someone would eventually make a fortune from what he had built once the outer perimeter highway was constructed. For the present, Croker Concourse stood too far north and too far from the old city. The same outward movement that made Charlie’s forecast plausible also exposed the gap between a future growth corridor and a commercial center able to attract people now.

The dome atop the tower concentrated that ambition in a conspicuous emblem. It housed a planetarium and the Cosmos Club, whose astronomical light-show system had been developed by the Henry Beuhl, Jr., observatory at Carnegie-Mellon University. Charlie had put $8.5 million into the club, but customers did not want to drive to Cherokee County for lunch beneath artificial stars. The expensive club became a failure within the larger development, turning the promise of an Edge City into a visible measure of how badly investment could outrun demand.

Growth, Power, and Public Benefits

The metropolitan pattern also sits within a politics of negotiated growth. Wes Jordan describes Atlanta as a small Black political core surrounded by millions of mostly white residents in North Atlanta and the surrounding counties. In his account, the city’s Black voters hold decisive power within city limits, while suburban growth and business investment extend across a much larger region. Development therefore depends not only on roads and commercial real estate but also on bargains between business interests and the communities whose cooperation they need.

Wes illustrates that arrangement with the airport’s billion-dollar expansion under Mayor Maynard. Business interests were offered a major project, but 30 percent of it was assigned to minority contractors; Maynard later took pride in the Black millionaires the project had helped create. Wes presents this exchange of contracts and economic benefits for political support as a characteristic Atlanta practice, rather than simply as a question of whether development happens.

A proposed highway through South Atlanta makes the bargain more explicit. White developers, contractors, and union representatives approached Isaac Blakey about opposition to the road. Blakey’s response, as Wes recounts it, was to press for money and community resources. Wes distinguishes this from bribery: neighborhood support could be sought through such benefits as day-care and youth centers, health clinics, parks, and swimming pools. The episode shows that highways linking growth centers can be politically contested, and that the costs and returns of metropolitan expansion are negotiated across communities.

The Concept’s Narrative Significance

Edge City is both a useful name for Atlanta’s changing form and the framework through which Charlie recognizes his own ambition. The view from his G-5 makes that double meaning concrete: highways and established commercial centers testify to the success of outward growth, while Croker Concourse appears isolated among the trees. Charlie has correctly identified the direction of expansion, but the empty parking area and failed club reveal that a sound regional pattern cannot guarantee the success of any one development.

That tension links the city’s boom to Charlie’s predicament. After a bruising meeting with PlannersBanc, he insists on continuing to use his G-5 and refuses to let the bank dictate his movements; at the same time, he admits to himself that he is avoiding a return to his office at Croker Concourse. The tower named for him, once an assertion of place in the expanding metropolis, becomes the setting he cannot yet face. Edge City thus carries both the confidence of Atlanta’s outward-building business culture and the vulnerability of a developer whose forecast may be right in the long term but costly in the present.