as Joel Garreau - who popularized the term 'edge city' with his book of that title - wrote, 30 years ago these places were pasture land... and if memory serves, JG also said that he used the term because they were on the edge of civilization...
in any event, I'm not sure the term 'edge city' or - more importantly - the 'edge city' analysis captures what is happening... JG - among others, I guess his phrase was catchier than Robert Fishman's 'technoburbs' or Kenneth Jackson's 'urban villages' - calls attention to a socio-cultural/infrastructural phenomenon that doesn't fit the core-periphery model...but he/they don't really conceptualize these new settlement spaces that are collages of rural, urban, and suburban elements (KJ's other term 'centerless city' is a bit better)...
missing is a sense of interactivity between 'edge cities'...functionally specialized, folks drive between them as much as they do within them... Orange County, CA is the 'cutting edge' having been transformed from agricultural to post-suburban since WW2...Fairfax County, VA, on the other hand, still has rural-like separation zones between 'edge cities' but Reston, Falls Church, Fairfax, Vienna, and McClean are linked much as are Anaheim, Irvine, Newport, Santa Ana, and Garden Grove - by the auto...and where the auto goes, well, how long before Fairfax County's open space is deveoped as bulldozers uproot trees for shopping centers and roads...not the classic Chicago school concentric-circle formation and expansion, but a decentered/multi-centered 'formless mass' that consumes open space nonetheless...Michael Hoover