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Is America ready for the rise of the megaregion?
Is America ready for the rise of the megaregion?
April 15, 2015
By Matt Hansen
Read More: http://theweek.com/articles/549127/a...ise-megaregion
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Though the concept has existed in academia for decades, planners are now looking at these dense corridors of population, businesses, and transportation and wondering if the megaregion may, in fact, be the next step in America's evolution. With renewed interest and investment in urban centers and the projected growth of high speed rail, megaregions could easily become home to millions more Americans.
- The Northeast corridor, for example, could receive up to 18 million more residents by 2050, according to estimates from the Regional Plan Association. And the region encompassing major cities in Texas including Houston and Dallas could see a spike from roughly 12 million to 18 million people in that same time, the association says. — And where population goes, economic growth is not far behind. The Northeast corridor would be the fifth largest economy in the world, with the Great Lakes megaregion at ninth and the Southern California megaregion outpacing Indonesia, Turkey, and the Netherlands as the 18th largest, according to 2012 estimates from real estate advisory RCLCO.
- Unlike megaregions in Europe and Asia, for example, the United States has traditionally shied away from large umbrella governing organizations which surpass state borders. "In a lot of other world cities, not only do they think of themselves as part of megaregions, they also have government organizations at the megalevel," said Michaelson of the Regional Plan Association. — The United States, by contrast, has neglected "megalevel" planning organizations, with the possible exception of Amtrak, which operates rail service through many of the proposed megaregions but which struggles to maintain funding levels from the federal government.
- A 2013 Brookings Institution report by scholars Jennifer Bradley and Bruce Katz concluded that major metropolitan areas will be largely left alone to grow and develop their economies as "the U.S. government is mired in partisan division and rancour." With these areas generating 91 percent of the country's GDP, according to the report, metro regions will increasingly become "the engines of economic prosperity and social transformation in the US." — But on a purely practical level, cooperation between cities and states can still be rare today in these large regions that cross state lines, according to David Wachsmuth, a political economist at the University of British Columbia.
- That may be changing. Governor Dannel Malloy of Connecticut, for example, has been vocal about working with state governments throughout the Northeast to widen the congested I-95 corridor that snakes up the East Coast. Even the federal government has acknowledged the inevitability of megaregional planning as it lays out plans for high-speed rail and highway improvements. — And both Wachsmuth and Michaelson acknowledge that much of the hard work of building a megaregion isn't simply about adding faster trains or more durable bridges. Instead, much of it comes from creating a shared identity, something that can only happen organically.
- "If you look at the Gulf Coast, there is already a Gulf Coast identity that crosses city and state lines," Wachsmuth said. "The Atlanta and Charlotte area in the Southeast may see a regional identity there, too. But most people in Boston probably think of themselves as Bostonians. They don't think of themselves as having much in common with someone in Maryland." — Michaelson sees this slowly changing. Even in drought-stricken California, which has traditionally been culturally divided between north and south, mutual concerns have begun to forge a shared regional identity. — "I can imagine people for the first time are aware of the fact that their water needs are connected to water resources elsewhere in their megaregion," she said. And that's one of the keys to megaregional planning, she says.
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