William M. Bowen – författare

In his influential 1991 book Edge City, Joel Garreau argued that every American city "is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles, with multiple urban cores". He named these cores "edge cities" because they perform all of the city functions, but rise in places that were farmlands or villages only decades ago, far from the old downtowns. This new book expands and clarifies Garreau''s pioneering concept as it develops a comprehensive theory of edge city growth and functions. The contributors draw on their expertise as geographers, political scientists, economics planners, and sociologists to offer a wide range of insights and analyses.

In his influential 1991 book Edge City, Joel Garreau argued that every American city "is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles, with multiple urban cores". He named these cores "edge cities" because they perform all of the city functions, but rise in places that were farmlands or villages only decades ago, far from the old downtowns. This new book expands and clarifies Garreau''s pioneering concept as it develops a comprehensive theory of edge city growth and functions. The contributors draw on their expertise as geographers, political scientists, economics planners, and sociologists to offer a wide range of insights and analyses.

This book is premised upon the assumption that the core purpose of universities is to create, preserve, transmit, validate, and find new applications for knowledge. It is written in the perspective of critical university studies, in which university governance processes should take ideas and discourse about ideas seriously, far more seriously than they are often taken within many of to day''s universities, since doing so is the key to achieving this purpose. Specifically, we assert that the best way for universities to take ideas seriously, and so to best achieve their purpose, is to consciously recognize and conserve the entire range of available ideas. Though the current emphasis upon factors such as student headcounts, increased efficiency and job creation are undoubtedly important, far more is at stake in universities than only these factors.

From this premise, we deduce insights and arguments about academic freedom, as well as factors such control and monitoring of the market place of ideas, the structure of information flows within universities, the role of language in university governance, and relationships between administrators, faculty members and students. We identify impediments to achieving the core purpose of universities, including the idea vetting systems of authoritarianism, corporatism, illiberalism, supernaturalism and political correctness. We elucidate how these impediments inhibit successful achievement of the core purpose of the university. In response to these impediments we prescribe relatively autonomous universities characterized by openness, transparency, dissent, and the maintenance of balance between conflicting perspectives, values, and interests.