Megapolitan America

Arthur Nelson, Robert Lang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351178075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

With an expected population of 400 million by 2040, America is morphing into an economic system composed of twenty-three 'megapolitan' areas that will dominate the nation's economy by midcentury. These 'megapolitan' areas are networks of metropolitan areas sharing common economic, landscape, social, and cultural characteristics.

The rise of 'megapolitan' areas will change how America plans. For instance, in an area comparable in size to France and the low countries of the Netherlands and Belgium – considered among the world's most densely settled – America's 'megapolitan' areas are already home to more than two and a half times as many people. Indeed, with only eighteen percent of the contiguous forty-eight states' land base, America's megapolitan areas are more densely settled than Europe as a whole or the United Kingdom.

Megapolitan America goes into spectacular demographic, economic, and social detail in mapping the dramatic – and surprisingly optimistic – shifts ahead. It will be required reading for those interested in America's future.

1
FROM CITIES TO MEGAREGIONS

A Brief History of the Progression of Thought on How the Built Landscape Is Organized

In this book, we pose a new way of looking at America’s landscape. From its colonial beginnings as a loose confederation of merchant towns, America’s urban landscape has evolved considerably. In this chapter, we synthesize the progression of thought about the urban landscape from the simplistic monocentric urban form to the extended metropolis to megaregions. The next chapter reviews how the Census Bureau has wrestled with defining America’s changing urban landscape in ways useful for its purposes.

We start this chapter with a walk through standard models of city form. We progress to alternative forms that consider how multiple cities create a special region, one that might be called a metropolitan area. As transportation and telecommunication technology has advanced, we find the idea of spatially delimited regions to be anachronistic, so we explore the idea of diffuse regions defined largely by extended commuting sheds. We conclude with concepts of a nation composed of regions defined according to certain shared affinities.

City and Metropolitan Form

Cities are defined by their spatially integrated functions, not by their political boundaries. The suburbs and even exurbs of a city are elements of the city writ large. For instance, the “city” of Atlanta is not the 500,000 people living within its 60-square-mile jurisdictional limits but the extended commuting range, which includes more than 20,000 square miles.

Historically, cities arose because their location gave them least-cost access to farming, or they were at the crossroads of trading routes, or they were least-cost locations from which to ship goods, often by water. Cities arose mostly in isolation from one another, dominating surrounding trade areas. Over time, successful cities grow because of agglomeration and scale economies. Many become major, independent centers of commerce and manufacturing, such as modern-day Atlanta (McCarthy and Knox 2005). Others grow into each other, creating multicity regions that share interdependencies. Jean Gottmann’s (1961) megalopolis, extending from Boston to Washington, D.C.—called “BosWash” by some—is an example.

Cities also sort themselves into a hierarchy of trading areas, with the largest cities being in the center, where they are also closest to all other cities. This is known as the hierarchy of markets comprising a “system of cities,” conceptualized by Christaller (1933) and Lösch (1954). The “system” can be at any scale. For instance, in the Northeast, New York City would be the dominant or “capital” city, while Philadelphia and Boston, both of about equal size and distance from New York, would be secondary or “regional” cities. (This is only a schematic representation, however, since ocean port cities do not extend into the ocean.) For the nation as a whole, New York would remain the capital city in a system of cities, but the major second-tier regional cities across the breadth of the continent would be Chicago and Los Angeles. At a smaller scale, systems of cities form metropolitan areas, usually with a central city at the geographic center of accessibility.

While the hierarchy of cities describes how they arise, how they are organized internally is another matter. We will not review the evolution of city form but instead focus on different conceptualizations of that form since the early 20th century with the advent of modern transportation and telecommunication technologies. There are three general city forms: concentric ring or monocentric, sector, and multinuclear or polycentric.

Concentric Ring or Monocentric City and Metropolitan Form

Park, Burgess, and McKenzie (1925) applied natural ecology to urban areas and created the urban ecology school of thought. Their theory describes what happens when a city grows. Generally, growth results in more activity in the downtown area, pushing it outward. As the downtown area penetrates the next ring, it absorbs or overtakes the business activities, terrain, and population, becoming spatially larger. At the same time, activities in the invaded zone grow because of overall growth and invade the next ring, succeeding uses that were previously there. The overall process extends the city outward and, with modern technology, results in an extensive commuting zone surrounding the built-up area. Figure 1.1 illustrates the theory. In Chicago, the concentric theory of growth seems to explain the distribution of land uses that creates the city’s overall form.

Figure 1.1. Concentric ring theory of urban form
Credit: Doug Woodruff

Sector City and Metropolitan Form

Cities are more complex than the simple model conceptualized by Park, Burgess, and McKenzie. To further understanding of city form, Hoyt (1939) conceptualized the sector theory. Generally, cities organize themselves around a center not in concentric rings but in sectors, as illustrated in Figure 1.2. Sometimes this occurs because of geography, but more often it occurs as a natural ordering of land uses based on principal uses. For instance, manufacturing and warehousing might occur along riverfronts (as in early Pittsburgh) or along railroads (as in early Atlanta). Residential areas in particular would sort themselves out demographically by race or socioeconomic class (or both) based substantially on income. Early on, a “favored” sector might emerge. Many factors facilitate the rise of a favored quarter; some important ones include elevation above flood-prone or polluted lowlands, location upwind from manufacturing plants, and the original settlement of upper-class families away from downtown. For instance, in Atlanta, Georgia, there was a settlement north of downtown called Buckhead where business and financial leaders chose to live in the mid-1800s when Atlanta had but a few tens of thousands of residents. Buckhead was a few miles away from the railroads that terminated in downtown (Atlanta’s original name was Terminus) and slightly elevated from downtown itself. Almost two centuries later, Atlanta’s favored sector has created a kind of northern arc that has been dubbed the “favored quarter” in recent times (Leinberger 1995).

Figure 1.2. Sector theory of urban form
Credit: Doug Woodruff

Multinuclear or Polycentric City and Metropolitan Form

As urban areas grow and transportation costs decline, new, satellite suburban centers rise up, leading to multiple centers, or what some call a polycentric city form. Harris and Ullman (1945) were the first to conceptualize this form (Figure 1.3).

Vance (1964, 1977, 1986) expanded on the polycentric form to characterize large urban areas as composed of “urban realms” (Figure 1.4). Vance points out that the large geographic scale of modern urban areas limits personal routine interactions (for shopping, personal services, and social networks) to smaller areas, which he calls “realms.” Realms often have their own large commercial centers and, as we observe, a population base within a defined geography of about one quarter to one million people. The geographic space is defined by terrain and topographic barriers, the overall size of the metropolitan area, the amount and type of economic activity the area can support, and the geography of transportation within the region, such as the presence of transit nodes, freeway interchanges, and the like.

A variant of the polycentric form, and of the urban realm concept, is the edge city (Figure 1.5), popularized by Garreau (1991). Edge cities are seen as completely automobile-driven, suburban activity centers comprising more than five million square feet of office space, more than 600,000 square feet of retail space, having more jobs than bedrooms, perceived by the local population as a definable place, and could not have had any urban features 30 years earlier. Some well-known edge cities include Tysons Corner in suburban northern Virginia, King of Prussia in suburban Philadelphia, the Galleria in suburban Houston, Bloomington in suburban Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Bellevue in suburban Seattle. L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: From Cities to Megapolitans
• 1 From Cities to Megaregions
• 2 Megapolitan Covergence: Soft-Nosed Planning and the New Regional Governance
• 3 Defining What Is Megapolitan
• 4 The Rural-Megapolitan Continuum
• 5 Megapolitan Areas as America’s New Economic Core
• 6 Megapolitan Attractiveness
• 7 Key Population Trends
• 8 Megapolitan Development
• 9 Transportation Planning and the Megapolitans
• 10 Implications of Megapolitan America for Land, Water, and Air Resources
• 11 Cascadia Megapolitan Cluster
• 12 Sierra Pacific Megapolitan Area
• 13 Southwest Megapolitan Cluster
• 14 Mountain Megapolitan Cluster
• 15 Texas Triangle Megapolitan Cluster
• 16 Twin Cities Megapolitan Area
• 17 Great Lakes Megapolitan Cluster
• 18 Florida Megapolitan Cluster
• 19 Piedmont Megapolitan Cluster
• 20 Megalopolis Megapolitan Cluster
• Epilogue: The Megapolitan Century
• Appendix: From Urban to Metropolitan
• Notes
• References and Selected Bibliography
• Index