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Sunday, July 6, 2008
Same old urban policies won’t work in megaregions
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Back in the 1960s, the federal government focused on the needs of cities —- from poverty to housing to transportation.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the suburbs took center stage. More people began moving away from the urban core.
Now a dual phenomenon is under way.
First, people are moving back to urban areas —- driven by higher gas prices, traffic congestion and a desire to live closer to where they work and play.
Second, megaregions are emerging.
Megaregions —- defined as corridors with several major metro areas with economic ties —- have been sprouting throughout our nation and the world.
Metro Atlanta is part of the Piedmont-Atlantic megaregion, which connects Raleigh-Durham to Charlotte to Atlanta and on to Birmingham. The megaregion also includes a host of other cities in the Southeast corridor.
Urban experts now believe the global competitiveness of our regions will depend on how well we provide mobility within these regions and how well we share our limited resources as we grow.
One such expert is Catherine Ross, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development. For the past four years, Ross has been studying megaregions —- both in the United States and in countries throughout the world —- but especially the Piedmont-Atlantic megaregion (PAM) in the Southeast.
“The core that really grounds the Southeast is the four cities of Charlotte, Atlanta, Birmingham and Raleigh-Durham,” Ross said. “It’s a bundling of economic life, commerce, mobility, transportation, finance, telecommunications and other infrastructure. It’s about linking this region to the global economy. It helps us have a strategy to reflect the way the world has changed.”
Our world has been becoming more urban for centuries as people have moved from rural, agricultural economies to service-oriented cities.
Doug Allen, acting dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture, put it this way.
“Rome, in about 300 A.D., reached a population of about 1 million,” Allen said. “As far as we know, there was no other city in the world with 1 million people until London in 1806.”
Today, in China alone, there are 92 cities with more than 1 million people, Allen said. A similar explosion of cities and metro regions is happening around the world. And as those metro areas have grown, they’ve formed the even larger economic engines —- the megaregions.
In the United States, 10 megaregions have been identified —- such as the Northeast megaregion (New York and Boston) or the Midwest (Chicago-Detroit).
A research paper published in the Transportation Research Record last year says that “megaregions are geographic areas that will contain two-thirds of the nation’s population by 2050.”
Ross says development of megaregions will require new investments in infrastructure —- particularly in transportation and commerce.
“We need to increase our capacity to move people and freight in a sustainable way,” Ross said. “We need strategies that recognize climate change. And we need more alternatives. High-speed rail and commuter rail have got to be on the table. The rest of the world —- like China, Europe and South America —-is not wrong.”
Back in 2001, more than a dozen chambers of commerce in the Southeast formed an alliance to push the development of high-speed rail between the major cities. The Southeastern Economic Alliance was housed at the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and provided an unusual level of cooperation among cities that often compete against each other when trying to attract companies.
In the past couple of years, that effort has been dormant as the federal government has been reluctant to make a major investment in high-speed rail.
But that could change after the November elections.
At a speech two weeks ago at the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in Miami, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, spoke of the need to invest in “clusters of growth and innovation” and rebuild the “crumbling” infrastructure of our roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, as well as our electrical grids.
So far, the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, has not released his urban agenda, but he has been more sensitive to environmentally sustainable growth than the current administration.
Such concepts would be welcomed by many who work on the tough policy issues in metro areas. Figuring out how to deal with transportation, water, air quality and other issues is difficult enough when there are multiple cities and counties in the mix. The issues become more complex when the role of the state is included.
And megaregions will require cooperation among many states (six in the Southeast) to tackle those issues on such a large scale. It’s essential that the federal government play a role in helping states work together on regional issues.
“We are going to have to figure out how we can coordinate so we can remain globally competitive,” said Chick Krautler, director of the Atlanta Regional Commission. “Atlanta is going to be a big player in how to build linkages with Raleigh, Charlotte and Birmingham, as well as with Savannah and the coast. In the future, our planning is going to look outward. It’s a huge challenge.”
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