The case for megapolitan growth management in the twenty-first century

• Author: Edward H. Ziegler
• Position: University of Denver Sturm College of Law, Denver, Colorado, USA

The overriding mandate in urban development today is not the development of efficient solutions to new and pressing city building needs. Rather, it is the colossal task of undoing the negative effects of almost three generations of planning priorities bred in an era that was gripped by great collective delusions about limitless growth. The new efficiency paradigm is aimed at curbing urban sprawl, oil gluttony and material waste, in a drive to offset the sheer momentum of a century of fossil affluence as burning, all encompassing aspiration ( Droege, 2006 ).

Metropolitan areas cannot resolve their challenges alone. Counties, cities, and suburbs operate within a national policy framework, and face challenges [bigger] than their own capacities. What's needed is a new partnership between federal, state, local, and private-sector players to help metropolitan areas build on their economic strengths, foster a strong and diverse middle class, and grow in environmentally sustainable ways ( The Brookings Institution, 2008a ).

1 Introduction

Urban planning and control of land development is largely a function of local government both in the USA and in many (though not all) industrialized countries of the world. The US Supreme Court's early landmark decision in 1926, Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co.¹, gave constitutional sanction to local comprehensive city zoning of urban development. Since that time, cities and counties at the local government level have continued to exercise primary governing jurisdiction in the USA over development of the built environment. This jurisdictional arrangement made eminent sense during most of the twentieth century to nearly everyone involved in the urban development process. Development of the built environment was widely perceived (and still is by many) as largely, if not exclusively, impacting only nearby neighborhoods and local community interests.

This local jurisdictional arrangement is not in place, of course, everywhere in the world, particularly not in Europe. Most recently, China and India have joined other European countries in recognizing the need for adopting a broader sustainable development framework for urban planning. And even in France, long a European stronghold of local prerogatives, there is a movement to put in place a broader, more regional and national sustainable development framework for control of urban development. This broader perspective on the greater “public interest” significance of urban planning and development also may be decidedly changing in the USA².

Most people in the USA do not live in major cities. Most Americans live, work, shop, and play in suburban areas, scattered about a metropolitan landscape far from any downtown urban core. We have become, as other affluent countries in Europe and Asia are becoming, a metropolitan (and increasingly megapolitan) nation. In the USA, the top 100 metropolitan areas are home to 65 percent of the nation's population (including 85 percent of the nation's immigrants and 77 percent of the nation's minorities) and those 100 regions generate two-thirds of the nation's jobs and three-quarters of the nation's economic gross domestic product ( The Brookings Institution, 2008b, p. 4 ).

Those largest 100 metro areas also contain over 9,000 local governments and one-third of these metropolitan areas span state jurisdictional boundaries ( The Brookings Institution, 2008b, p. 6 ). Nearly, all the growth in the years ahead in this country (perhaps 200 million additional people in the next 50 years) will be located in just 20 mega regions of the USA ( Nelson and Lang, 2007 ). Two out of three people in this country will live in these 20 mega regions by 2040 ( Lang and Nelson, 2007 ). While we have become an increasingly megapolitan nation, we are just beginning to focus on addressing a number of serious, complex, and regional sustainable development problems ( Barnett et al., 2007 ; America 2050: Megaregions, 2009 ). This paper discusses the need in the USA for a regional institutional arrangement that implements a megapolitan growth management policy.

As city, state, and national governments, both in the USA and throughout the world, begin to address an array of problematic sustainable development issues, a paradigm shift in the framework of governing responsibilities seems likely to occur. Local urban planning and zoning controls, as well as related public and private infrastructure and transportation investments, are all likely to operate, in the years ahead, within, and in support of, an overriding larger state and national sustainable development policy framework. Attempts at systemic and structural urban planning policy reform at the metropolitan and megapolitan levels seem inevitable. Given the enormous future growth projected for the USA, both in the country's population and in its built environment, questions about broader regional governing arrangements may really be more of merely timing and degree, of the devising and analysis of potential metropolitan institutional forms and arrangements, not if, but simply when and how this transformation occurs.

Questions related to the competence and efficacy of existing institutions and governing arrangements are at the heart of any analysis of sustainable development problems ( Portney, 2003 ; Silberstein and Maser, 2000 ; Tamagawa, 2006 ). Adjustments in institutional governing arrangements related to urban planning, housing, energy, and supporting transit and infrastructure development are now increasingly advocated as an antidote to the problems of automobile-dependent regional sprawl³. Proposals for metropolitan, regionally coordinated (even megaregionally coordinated) approaches to urban planning policy, both in the USA and elsewhere in the world, appear to be based on the following perceptions:

The increasing recognition of the unsustainability of low-density, automobile-dependent regional sprawl.

The increasing recognition that local individual low-density zoning, parking, and growth management programs are a significant cause of regional automobile-dependent sprawl, dominated as they are, especially in the USA, by local parochial not in my back yard (NIMBY) and city fiscal concerns.

An increasing awareness of the critical importance of urban planning and related public and private built environment, transportation, and infrastructure investment decisions to resource and energy consumption ( Beatley, 1999 ; Droege, 2008 ; Ziegler, 2006a, 2008a ; Mogge, 2008 ; Normile, 2008 ; Peirce, 2007 ).

There also is a growing awareness that better-designed and higher-density residential development can have enormous economic benefits in this country⁴. This relates to the emerging role of urban planning as an ever increasing “efficiency link” to the future economic prosperity of the country's metropolitan areas ( The Brookings Institution, 2008b ; Calthorpe and Fulton, 2001 ; Barnett et al., 2007 ; Jackson, 2005 ). As Florida (2008) has pointed out in his recent work:

[O]ur public policy must work toward, not against, density. Nearly, every expert on the subject agrees that innovation and productivity are driven by density. For the better part of a century, we've subsidized suburbanization. That stimulated consumption of cars and appliances, which drove the industrial economy and allowed families to buy affordable homes. But it also diffused the density that is increasingly required for innovation and growth. Of course, every place does not have to be like Tokyo or Manhattan. Silicon Valley-style density would probably be sufficient. We can still have suburbs, but our economic policy has to start to encourage density, not sprawl ( Ziegler, 2008b ).

In short, there is growing awareness of the important role that coordinated urban planning policy at the metropolitan level can play in creating higher-density and prosperous urban core areas as a path to building sustainable communities in the twenty-first century ( Ewing et al., 2007 ; Ziegler, 2008b, p. 8 ).

2 Problems of regional automobile-dependent sprawl

The problems of automobile-dependent regional sprawl were largely perceived during the twentieth-century as “quality-of-life” issues such as the absence of human scale and walkability in our extended built environment, the lack of any real sense of place or of charming public places, the unappealing garage-door architecture and extensive parking lot landscapes, the traffic congestion, the loss of places friendly to children and the elderly, and the loss of nearby open space and wildlife habitat ( Calthorpe, 1993 ; Duany et al., 2000 ; Fishman, 1987 ; Garreau, 1991 ; Kunstler, 1993 ; Burchell, 1999 ; Gallagher, 2001 ; Lewyn, 2000 ; Ortiz, 2002 ). While all of these are problems still associated with sprawl, they now seem only the most obvious in view of the even more serious problems associated with automobile-dependent sprawl in our twenty-first century.

Consider these growing and more serious costs. Scientists now believe that we can expect global warming and devastating climate change during this century, largely due to carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels ( European Spatial Planning, Adapting to Climate Events, 2007 ; Victor, 2004 ). Nearly, all energy in the USA comes from fossil fuels (over 85 percent), primarily oil, coal, and natural gas ( Energy Information Administration, 2007 ; Podobnik, 2006 ). This country has the highest per capita consumption of fossil fuels in the world and fossil fuels, particularly cheap oil, are the primary fuels powering automobile-dependent sprawl in the USA⁵. The per-capita consumption of gasoline in this country is four times...