Five reasons why megaregional planning works against sustainability

Abstract

regions: epistemology, discourse patterns, big urban business Markus Hesse 3. Megaregions and the urban question: the new strategic terrain for US urban competitiveness David Wachsmuth 4. Beyond globalization: a historical urban development approach to understanding mega regions Alex Schafran 5. Five reasons why mega regional planning works against sustainability Stephen M. Wheeler 6. Conflicting spaces of governance in the imagined Great Lakes mega region Michael R. Glass 7. Brave new 'mega regional worlds'? Reflections from a North European perspective Lukas Smas and Peter Schmitt 8. Globalization and the mega region: investigating the evolution of the Pearl River Delta in a historical perspective Xu Zhang 9. Towards a mega regional future: analysing progress, assessing priorities in the US mega region project Billy Fleming

Megaregions: foundations, frailties, futures

“…Research is already beginning to examine the potential contribution of megaregions to economic development and the objective of smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth (Benner and Pastor, 2011;Fleming, 2015;Marull et al, 2013;Ross et al, 2015;Wheeler, 2009Wheeler, , 2015. Report for 2010-11 they not only gave prominent billing to megaregions, they constructed a very particular discourse around the development opportunities megaregions offered countries across the Global South (UN-Habitat, 2010a).…”

Planning megaregional futures: spatial imaginaries and megaregion formation in China

“…This aligns with developments globally whereby investing in infrastructure to enable supply chain expansion has quickly become the basic principle for planned urban-economic expansion and underpinned the rise of new megaregional spaces of planning and governance (Wachsmuth, 2017). But with it comes a recognition that although infrastructure can unite otherwise disparate actors in collective action at the megaregion scale it is only one activity and the chance of more holistic growth strategies are unlikely to be enabled by megaregionalism (Wheeler, 2015). The rise of megaregions and the notion of planning megaregional futures will likely therefore magnify the planning-growthinfrastructure axis as opposed to adding weight to those arguing -rightly in our view -that there is a purpose for regional planning beyond simply growth and infrastructure roll-out.…”

“…This brings us to our final point which is the question of whether we can even begin to consider planning at the megaregion scale? At one level, planning at the regional level has had a mixed history of success so the idea that we can plan at the megaregional level presents a daunting challenge (Wheeler, 2015). And yet, at another level, this should not be presented as a question but arguably it must be framed as an assertion.…”

Detect Megaregional Communities Using Network Science Analytics

“…One criticism to the present megaregion research concerns the exclusion of rural counties from analysis [47]. This issue is embedded in the built-morphology or urban function-based megaregion demarcation for which minimal thresholds of development density and continuity have to be pre-defined.…”