In the early 1990s the journalist and social commentator Joel Garreau coined the term "edge cities" to refer to the growing quasi-urban places that were centered around major suburban freeway interchanges. Some fifteen years later, more and more scholars are interested in the movement towards exurban areas, which in many cases, are further distant than many edge cities. Recently, a team of scholars at The Brookings Institution decided to write a rather compelling report on these fast-growing communities, and this work represents their current thoughts and observations. In this 48-page paper published in October 2006, they present a number of interesting findings based on demographic and economic data from 1990 to 2005. Their findings include a number of geographically informed analyses, such as the fact that the South and Midwest are more exurbanized than the West and Northeast and the residents of the "average" exurb are disproportionately white, middle-income commuters.