by Robert D. Yaro, President, RPA.
The following essay is the first in a series of background pieces prepared for the 15th Annual Regional Assembly, to be held on Friday, April 29 at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. The Assembly, "Beyond Red and Blue: The Tri-State Region in a Changing National Context," will focus on the Tri-State Region's relationship with the nation in the wake of the 2004 presidential elections. The essay is adapted from a policy roundtable report on national spatial development strategies prepared under the auspices of RPA, the Lincoln Institute and the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.
America is growing. While our fellow developed world nations of Europe and Japan are experiencing flat or declining population rates, in the United States high birth and immigration rates are expected to keep its population rising. In the next half century, the United States is expected to add an additional 140 million Americans. Where will these people live, play and work?
If the trends of the past continue, then about four million of them are expected to come to the Tri-State Region by 2030. Other metropolitan regions are expected to grow even faster. All in all, most of the 140 million additional Americans projected by 2050 are expected to locate in the Northeast and seven other "megalopolitan" regions across the country. If recent growth patterns continue, this would require that we develop four times as much land in the next 45 years as we have in the past 250 years.
Is this what we want to do? Are the growth patterns of the past, which are essentially land consumptive suburbanization, either sustainable or optimal? What are the most stable and prosperous patterns for growth, if we could shape them? This in essence is the question taken up in examining whether the nation should have a more conscious strategy for its growth.
In 2004 Regional Plan Association, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the University of Pennsylvania launched a major research project on how the nation, the Northeast, and other regions across the country could accommodate expected growth by mid-century. Inspired by the European Union's large scale approach to planning for metropolitan growth that spans regional and national borders, the project began with a Penn Graduate Planning Studio that investigated the underlying trends and policy implications and developed county-level population, household, employment and land consumption forecasts through 2050.
Research found that America is experiencing a host of unsustainable growth patterns, which combined with rapid population growth could threaten the nation's competitiveness and compromise our quality of life. Below, briefly discussed are the trends and their implications for the creation of a national growth model, the "New Megalopolis."
The building out of suburban America: Since the 1970s, urban growth in America has largely been focused in the sprawling outer rings of 30 major metropolitan regions. While some cities and inner-ring suburbs are now experiencing infill development and renewed population growth, many others are approaching "build-out," which increases traffic congestion and commuting times, contributes to loss of farmland, and creates conflicts between new development and green infrastructure, such as public water supplies and wildlife habitat.
Uneven and inequitable growth patterns: Most population and economic growth has been in large metropolitan regions, while large rural regions where resource-based economies or groundwater reserves are in permanent decline, left without the means to support even basic services. Meanwhile, large urban centers and second-tier cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis and New Orleans have lost a third or more of their populations since 1960. Even in cities where the outer-ring suburbs have grown, many inner cities and inner-ring suburbs have lost residents, tax base and economic activity, and poverty has become highly concentrated. Many of these places have high concentrations of African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and poor whites who will be increasingly disadvantaged as economic opportunities in these regions decline.
Limited infrastructure capacity: Metropolitan infrastructure of all kinds, most of it built in the last half of the twentieth century, will reach its capacity limits in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Unless new capacity is created in roads, rails, airports, seaports and other systems, the nation's economic potential will be artificially limited. Federal transportation investments over the past decade have been largely focused on maintaining the existing infrastructure, not on expanding the capacity of these systems.
Emergence of the megalopolis: Between now and 2050 more than half the nation's population, and perhaps as much as two-thirds of its economic growth will occur in the places like the Northeast Megalopolis (the Boston-Washington corridor) and seven other emerging megalopolitan regions whose extended networks of metropolitan centers are linked by interstate highway and rail corridors.
The New Megalopolis: The unsustainable nature of these growth patterns points to a new model for cooperation among the cities and regions in the U.S. that are growing together and creating diseconomies in congested transportation networks, which in turn affect the economic vitality and quality of life of these regions. This model is based on the idea that if the cities in these colliding regions work together they can create a new urban form that will increase economic opportunity and global competitiveness for each individual city and for the nation as a whole.
To facilitate the development of megalopolitan areas, the U.S. could focus on creating a truly intermodal network linking rail, highway and air transportation. Such connections will relieve congested airports and provide greater options for freight movement, and the resulting transportation flexibility will be less vulnerable to terrorist attacks and disaster. Furthermore, regional infrastructure and development focused around rail stations will shape and redirect urban growth in more efficient, less sprawling patterns.
Already six distinctive regions can be identified based on common history, geographic location, and topography: the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, South, Midwest, Southwest and West. Most of the nation's rapid population growth, and an even larger share of its economic expansion, is expected to occur in eight emerging networked metropolitan areas spread over thousands of square miles and located in every one of these regions. These megalopolitan areas are becoming America's economic engines: centers of technological and cultural innovation where the vast majority of immigrants who are driving population and economic growth will assimilate into the economic and social mainstream.
Over the past generation, the European Union has provided an example of this could be done by initiating a new large-scale approach to planning for metropolitan growth, mobility, environmental protection, and economic development. Europeans use the umbrella term "spatial planning" to describe this process, involving plans that span regional and national borders and encompass new "networked cities" spread out over hundreds of kilometers. The EU is also mobilizing public and private resources at the continental scale, with bold plans and investments designed to integrate the economies of, and reduce the economic disparities between, member states and regions, and to increase the competitiveness of regions and the whole continent in global markets.
Though the United States has not attempted a national policy addressing land use on this scale in recent years, there are important historic precedents for a federal role in shaping national and regional growth. National development and conservation strategies were prepared by President Thomas Jefferson and President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1807 and 1907, respectively. These plans stimulated the major infrastructure, conservation and regional economic development strategies that powered America's economic growth in its first two centuries.
Today, these systems are approaching their capacity limits. Consequently, a new strategy for America's third century is urgently needed to create the foundation for the nation's future competitiveness and quality of life. As America begins the 21st century, it has the opportunity to set a bold and progressive framework for itself that matches some of its past more ambitious and successful plans.
Robert Yaro will lead a panel discussion on this topic at the Regional Assembly, featuring: Armando Carbonell, Senior Fellow and Co-chairman, Department of Planning and Development, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; Robert E. Lang, Director, Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech; Mark Pisano, Executive Director, Southern California Association of Governments; and Catherine Ross, Director, Georgia Tech Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development.
The following essay is the first in a series of background pieces prepared for the 15th Annual Regional Assembly, to be held on Friday, April 29 at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. The Assembly, "Beyond Red and Blue: The Tri-State Region in a Changing National Context," will focus on the Tri-State Region's relationship with the nation in the wake of the 2004 presidential elections. The essay is adapted from a policy roundtable report on national spatial development strategies prepared under the auspices of RPA, the Lincoln Institute and the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.
America is growing. While our fellow developed world nations of Europe and Japan are experiencing flat or declining population rates, in the United States high birth and immigration rates are expected to keep its population rising. In the next half century, the United States is expected to add an additional 140 million Americans. Where will these people live, play and work?
If the trends of the past continue, then about four million of them are expected to come to the Tri-State Region by 2030. Other metropolitan regions are expected to grow even faster. All in all, most of the 140 million additional Americans projected by 2050 are expected to locate in the Northeast and seven other "megalopolitan" regions across the country. If recent growth patterns continue, this would require that we develop four times as much land in the next 45 years as we have in the past 250 years.
Is this what we want to do? Are the growth patterns of the past, which are essentially land consumptive suburbanization, either sustainable or optimal? What are the most stable and prosperous patterns for growth, if we could shape them? This in essence is the question taken up in examining whether the nation should have a more conscious strategy for its growth.
In 2004 Regional Plan Association, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the University of Pennsylvania launched a major research project on how the nation, the Northeast, and other regions across the country could accommodate expected growth by mid-century. Inspired by the European Union's large scale approach to planning for metropolitan growth that spans regional and national borders, the project began with a Penn Graduate Planning Studio that investigated the underlying trends and policy implications and developed county-level population, household, employment and land consumption forecasts through 2050.
Research found that America is experiencing a host of unsustainable growth patterns, which combined with rapid population growth could threaten the nation's competitiveness and compromise our quality of life. Below, briefly discussed are the trends and their implications for the creation of a national growth model, the "New Megalopolis."
The building out of suburban America: Since the 1970s, urban growth in America has largely been focused in the sprawling outer rings of 30 major metropolitan regions. While some cities and inner-ring suburbs are now experiencing infill development and renewed population growth, many others are approaching "build-out," which increases traffic congestion and commuting times, contributes to loss of farmland, and creates conflicts between new development and green infrastructure, such as public water supplies and wildlife habitat.
Uneven and inequitable growth patterns: Most population and economic growth has been in large metropolitan regions, while large rural regions where resource-based economies or groundwater reserves are in permanent decline, left without the means to support even basic services. Meanwhile, large urban centers and second-tier cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis and New Orleans have lost a third or more of their populations since 1960. Even in cities where the outer-ring suburbs have grown, many inner cities and inner-ring suburbs have lost residents, tax base and economic activity, and poverty has become highly concentrated. Many of these places have high concentrations of African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and poor whites who will be increasingly disadvantaged as economic opportunities in these regions decline.
Limited infrastructure capacity: Metropolitan infrastructure of all kinds, most of it built in the last half of the twentieth century, will reach its capacity limits in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Unless new capacity is created in roads, rails, airports, seaports and other systems, the nation's economic potential will be artificially limited. Federal transportation investments over the past decade have been largely focused on maintaining the existing infrastructure, not on expanding the capacity of these systems.
Emergence of the megalopolis: Between now and 2050 more than half the nation's population, and perhaps as much as two-thirds of its economic growth will occur in the places like the Northeast Megalopolis (the Boston-Washington corridor) and seven other emerging megalopolitan regions whose extended networks of metropolitan centers are linked by interstate highway and rail corridors.
The New Megalopolis: The unsustainable nature of these growth patterns points to a new model for cooperation among the cities and regions in the U.S. that are growing together and creating diseconomies in congested transportation networks, which in turn affect the economic vitality and quality of life of these regions. This model is based on the idea that if the cities in these colliding regions work together they can create a new urban form that will increase economic opportunity and global competitiveness for each individual city and for the nation as a whole.
To facilitate the development of megalopolitan areas, the U.S. could focus on creating a truly intermodal network linking rail, highway and air transportation. Such connections will relieve congested airports and provide greater options for freight movement, and the resulting transportation flexibility will be less vulnerable to terrorist attacks and disaster. Furthermore, regional infrastructure and development focused around rail stations will shape and redirect urban growth in more efficient, less sprawling patterns.
Already six distinctive regions can be identified based on common history, geographic location, and topography: the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, South, Midwest, Southwest and West. Most of the nation's rapid population growth, and an even larger share of its economic expansion, is expected to occur in eight emerging networked metropolitan areas spread over thousands of square miles and located in every one of these regions. These megalopolitan areas are becoming America's economic engines: centers of technological and cultural innovation where the vast majority of immigrants who are driving population and economic growth will assimilate into the economic and social mainstream.
Over the past generation, the European Union has provided an example of this could be done by initiating a new large-scale approach to planning for metropolitan growth, mobility, environmental protection, and economic development. Europeans use the umbrella term "spatial planning" to describe this process, involving plans that span regional and national borders and encompass new "networked cities" spread out over hundreds of kilometers. The EU is also mobilizing public and private resources at the continental scale, with bold plans and investments designed to integrate the economies of, and reduce the economic disparities between, member states and regions, and to increase the competitiveness of regions and the whole continent in global markets.
Though the United States has not attempted a national policy addressing land use on this scale in recent years, there are important historic precedents for a federal role in shaping national and regional growth. National development and conservation strategies were prepared by President Thomas Jefferson and President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1807 and 1907, respectively. These plans stimulated the major infrastructure, conservation and regional economic development strategies that powered America's economic growth in its first two centuries.
Today, these systems are approaching their capacity limits. Consequently, a new strategy for America's third century is urgently needed to create the foundation for the nation's future competitiveness and quality of life. As America begins the 21st century, it has the opportunity to set a bold and progressive framework for itself that matches some of its past more ambitious and successful plans.
Robert Yaro will lead a panel discussion on this topic at the Regional Assembly, featuring: Armando Carbonell, Senior Fellow and Co-chairman, Department of Planning and Development, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; Robert E. Lang, Director, Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech; Mark Pisano, Executive Director, Southern California Association of Governments; and Catherine Ross, Director, Georgia Tech Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development.
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