Day 1: Megaregions: A framework for 21st century development
Robert Yaro, Robert Lang, and Mark Pisano provided an overview of some of the different megaregions around the country, examining the issues facing the Northeast, Arizona Sun Corridor, and Southern California megaregions.
Video will be posted soon.
Robert Yaro on the Northeast Megaregion (.ppt, 6.8 MB):
Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, described the Northeast megaregion, saying that the United States needs to “plan at a different scale, act at a different scale, and think at a different scale.” The megaregion is adding millions of people, and it will need lots of infrastructure investments in coming decades. He noted that the Northeast has older infrastructure than the rest of the country, and that its airports are already approaching capacity.
“The Northeast is kind of the granddaddy of the megaregions that was first identified as a new kind of geography,” he said, “this network of five big metropolitan regions with overlapping development patterns, with shared infrastructure systems – rail and highways and so forth – but also big natural systems that overlap. New York City and Philadelphia, for example, both share the water supply with Delaware River, and we haven’t had vehicles for collaboration between regions until now.” The megaregion has 50 million residents and 20 percent of the US economy, and by 2050 it is expected to add another 19 million people.
“In the Northeast, we’ve got 14 states and the District of Columbia,” Yaro said. “There’s not a strong tradition of working together. … It is kind of striking when you go to Europe and you find that the folks who have been at war with each other for the last thousand years are now cooperating across political borders. It’s kind of hard to imagine Dallas and Fort Worth cooperating at the same level that the British and French or the Dutch and the Germans are.” However, he said, if the region can work together, it has 28 US senators to act in its interests.
Robert Lang, Ph.D., on The Arizona Sun Corridor (.ppt, 5.8 MB):
Robert Lang, Research Director at Brookings Mountain West and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, said that the major issues facing the Sun Corridor are water, transportation, and economic development. He said that numerous elected officials and organizations in the megaregion have recognized the need for cooperation. For instance, the University of Arizona and Arizona State University collaborated to build a new medical school in Phoenix, and former governors Janet Napolitano and Jon Huntsman supported the idea of megaregions.
“Phoenix is able to locate world-class firms in solar technology in part because it’s offering Tucson as part of its base of expertise,” he said, despite the fact that the two cities generally dislike each other. “In the global scheme of things, these tiny little fights between Dallas and Fort Worth are completely irrelevant. Dallas and Fort Worth had its fight fixed by the federal government that said, ‘you’re going to get one airport.’ And when they put that airport in between and Dallas rebranded itself as the Metroplex, that’s when that region really took off – when it buried the hatchet. And I think that, to the advantage of the Sun Corridor, that same process is underway.” The area also wants greater integration with Southern California, he said.
Mark Pisano on the Southern California Megaregion (.ppt, 12.6 MB):
Mark Pisano, senior fellow at the USC School of Policy, Planning and Development and the Co-Chair and West Coast Director of America 2050, noted that the Southern California megaregion has grown rapidly in the last several decades, although the growth has slowed recently. “The cities and counties, because of the dynamics in the region – and I’m saying this for a purpose to the Texas Triangle – for a lot of reasons really didn’t listen. And it took us almost two decades to get cities and counties to understand who they truly were competing against. … We aren’t competing with one another. Texas is not competing with Southern California and we’re not competing with New York. We’re competing globally.” Other countries and megaregions in Europe and particularly Asia have developed better technologies, strong educational systems, and better cost structures, he said.
Southern California has a world-class highway, port, and airport system, Pisano said, but it must deal with congestion and air pollution issues as a result. Water supply is also a major issue, he said. “Water is going to become the dominant resource issue in America,” he said, particularly for the Southwest, the Texas Triangle, the Appalachians, and the Southeast.
“The biggest challenge that these megaregions face,” he concluded, “is that they do not have the institutional capacity to, in fact, make coordinated decisions among the cities and to build large-scale infrastructure. Who makes the decision, how the decision is made, is going to become the most difficult issue we face in getting the scale of the megaregion right. And finally, megaregions will never replace the local, city, county building blocks upon which they rest. If those building blocks are not related to the megaregion institutional decision-making, I’m going to suggest, at least based on my experience in Southern California, that we won’t be successful.”
During a moderated discussion following the talks, Petra Todorovich asked if megaregional efforts should be ad hoc or institutionalized. Yaro said that megaregions need government support and incentives, saying that the $787 billion stimulus package was “like chum in the water” and successfully encouraged local and state governments to pursue a variety of projects. Pisano agreed, and Lang added that Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) – such as the Houston-Galveston Area Council, the Capital Area MPO, the North Central Texas Council of Governments, and the San Antonio-Bexar County MPO – tend to be receptive to these efforts.
All three agreed that after high-speed rail, which has received billions of dollars in funding this year, water is the next major megaregional issue.