America 2050:

A National Strategy for Prosperity, Equity and Sustainability

Concept Paper

I. Problem Statement:

America is growing. While our fellow developed-world nations of Europe and Japan are experiencing flat or declining population rates, the population of the United States is rising because of high birth and immigration rates. By 2050, theU.S. population will grow to 430 million, a 40 percent increase over current levels.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, this growth will be concentrated in 8-10 emerging “mega-regions” – large, connected networks of metropolitan areas like the Northeast Mega-Region, which extends from Virginia to Maine and encompasses the metropolitan areas of WashingtonD.C., Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Seventy percent of nation’s population growth, and 80 percent of its employment growth, is expected to occur in these emerging mega-regions spread over thousands of square miles in every corner of the nation (see Figure 1).

These mega-regions 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. Similar mega-regions in Asia and Europeare being seen as the new competitive units in the global economy, and major public and private investments are being made in high-speed rail, broadband communication and other infrastructure to strengthen transportation and economic connections between their component cities. Without these investments, mega-regions in Americawill face common problems associated with the rapid influx of population, and fail to capitalize on their potential for economic growth. A national strategy to prepare for the nation’s growthshould address fivekey economic, demographic and spatial trends that are shaping America in coming decades:

- Rapid population growth

- Thebuilding-out of suburban America

- Uneven and inequitable growth patterns within and between regions

- Infrastructuresystems that are reaching capacity

- The emergence of the mega-region

America 2050 aims to meet the challenges of accommodatinggrowth in metropolitan areas that are already choking on congestion and approaching build-out under current trends and policies. It does so by identifying the mega-region as the unit in which to make strategic investments nationwide to enhance capacity for growth and ensure competitiveness on a global scale. It will improve the competitiveness and livability of our emerging constellations of networked cities by strengthening connections between the cities’ economies. And if successful, thisinitiative hasthe potential to reduce the growing disparities in wealth and population between the fast growing coastal regions, vast interior rural areas and declining industrial cities throughout the United States.

Figure 1: Emerging Mega-Regions in the United States

University of Pennsylvania/Regional Plan Association 2004

II. National Precedents

The last two hundred years of America’s development were guided by national policies prepared by President Thomas Jefferson and President Theodore Roosevelt, completed in 1807 and 1907, respectively. These plans stimulated the major infrastructure, conservation and regional economic development strategies that powered America’s economic growth. Other major strategies and investments promoted in the administrations of Presidents Lincoln, Franklin, Roosevelt and Eisenhower, ranging from the MorrillActLandGrantUniversity system, the Homestead Act, and creation of the national rail and Interstate Highway systems, also had a profound impact on the nation’s development. Today, these systems are approaching their capacity limits. The Interstate Highway system, which fueled the housing boom that shaped post-war America, is now reaching its limit. Consequently, a new strategy for America’s third centuryis urgently needed to ensure the nation’s future competitiveness and quality of life.

III. The Case for Mega-Regions

The mega-region is a 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 mega-regions, 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.

In Asia andEurope similar network cities are already being seen as the new competitive units in the global economy. National governments in China and Japan, as well as the European Union, are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in new intermodal transportation and communication links and other infrastructure to underpin the capacity, efficiency and livability of these regions. In all of these places, new high-speed rail networks are integrating the economies of formerly isolated regions.

Ideally, America 2050 will emerge as a “bottom-up” movement of mega-regions across the country, composed of networks of interconnected regional strategies. Once established, the federal government could play a role in incentivizing further investments at the mega-region scale, but rely on local and regional initiatives to drive each mega-region’s own strategies.

IV. Objective and Work Plan:

The goal of America 2050 is to convene and support a broad-based, national conversation on growth trends in America over the next 50 years and create a national strategy for increasing America’s competitiveness in the global economy. Regional Plan Association (RPA) will carry out this work at two levels. Nationally, RPA will convene a National Steering Committee for America 2050 composed of academics and practitioners of regional planning, which will contribute research and form consensus on national policy recommendations and coordinate mega-regional studies. In the Northeast, RPA will research and produce a Northeast Corridor Regional Survey, which will serve as a prototype for the mega-regional surveys to be conducted across the country. Together, these surveys and the strategies that emerge from them will begin to define a national strategy for the country’s future development.

America 2050 will encompass long-range strategies to achieve five broad national goals.

  1. Facilitate the emergence of 8-10 new mega-regions that can compete with similar emerging networks of cities in Europe and Asia.
  2. Create capacity for growth and improved global competitiveness in the nation’s transportation and other infrastructure systems.
  3. Provide resiliency, redundancy and capacity in the nation’s infrastructure to respond to national security needs.
  4. Revitalize bypassed urban and rural regions.
  5. Protect and reclaim important nationally significant natural resource systems and promote less land-consuming patterns of growth.

Our current direction is heading towards a country whose competitiveness is threatened by inefficient urban forms and declining rural communities. The mega-region concept points us in a different direction, one in which urban areas and their surrounding regions work together on a larger scale to address common concerns and share their complementary strengths. This new model would produce an America that is environmentally sustainable, socially equitable, and competitive in an increasingly global economy.

This concept paper was adapted from the article, “American Spatial Development and the New Megalopolis” by Armando Carbonell and Robert D. Yaro, which ran in Landlines: Newsletter of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, April 2005.

Regional Plan Association (RPA) is an independent, not-for-profit regional planning organization that improves the quality of life and the economic competitiveness of the 31-county New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region through research, planning, and advocacy. For more than 80 years, RPA has been shaping transportation systems, protecting open spaces, and promoting better community design for the region’s continued growth. Regional Plan Association anticipates the challenges the region will face in the years to come, and mobilizes the region’s civic, business, and government sectors to take action.

For more information on America 2050, contact Robert D. Yaro, President, at 212-253-2727 x361 or .