The Coronavirus Pandemic Makes a Case for Megaregions
As U.S. states move into the next phase of the coronavirus crisis, they may not be getting all the help they want from the federal government, but they won’t be alone. In at least three parts of the country, states have banded together to coordinate changing public health measures and recovery efforts as they consider timelines for lifting lockdowns, knowing that neither the outbreak nor modern-day regional economies adhere to jurisdictional boundaries set long ago.
The foundation of these three multistate compacts — seven Northeast states, from Delaware to Massachusetts; the West Coast including California, Oregon, and Washington; and seven Midwestern states radiating around Chicago — is a once little-known planning framework, known as megaregions, that shows just how much big chunks of the country are interlinked.
The pandemic, it turns out, is exactly the kind of massive but geographically clotted crisis that reveals what Europeans have called “territorial cohesion.” Some parts of the country are taking it slow, while others — such as Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina — are moving faster to reopen.
Most may think of three basic levels of government — federal, state, and local — but planners have long recognized that much activity actually occurs at the regional scale, across geographically proximate clusters of settlement. People live in one state and commute to a city in another, or live in the city and travel to a second home many miles away if they can.
The megaregion framework has been useful for all kinds of initiatives, whether protecting wilderness and watersheds that similarly cross political jurisdictions, designing transportation policy including inter-city high-speed rail networks, agreeing on carbon emissions reductions, or building more affordable housing across a larger catchment of labor markets (though that last one is very much a work in progress).
States have been working together in some modest ways for years, forming some 200 cross-border compacts or alliances covering everything from infrastructure to regulatory regimes, says Jonathan Barnett, author of Designing the Megaregion: Meeting Urban Challenges at a New Scale. The better-together arrangements can be found at the National Center for Interstate Compacts, part of the Council of State Governments, which provides technical assistance to keep them working. New reasons to collaborate have been steadily emerging, such as the Missouri-Kansas pact limiting tax subsidies as incentives for business relocation.
And now, others who have studied megaregions say, the approach will be well-suited to coordinating reopenings, or continuing closures, as states manage the next phases of the Covid-19 pandemic. If that’s successful, states may use megaregions to make future improvements in housing, transportation, and the environment.