CIP Niagara conference: Building the Regional City
Tags: cascadia, CIP, megacities, Melbourne, metro vancouver, Niagara Falls, philippines, regionalism, Vancouver
This afternoon in Niagara there are a variety of mobile workshops and concurrent sessions. I’m at a “Building the Regional City” panel featuring Vancouver’s Ann McAfee, as well as Kathryn Friedman, Deputy Director of University of Buffalo’s Regional Institute, and Francis Gentoral, Regional Manager for the Canadian Urban Institute in Southeast Asia. This panel is focusing on regional cities that cross municipal, state/provincial, and even international boundaries.
McAfee compares Vancouver and Melbourne as examples of liveable cities but has different governance structures. The Vancouver has 22 municipalities. Metro Melbourne has a larger regional population and 32 municipalities, but an older built environment and a smaller downtown population. Melbourne’s limiting factor is water.
Unlike Vancouver, Melbourne has no metro government and the state presents regional plans without public engagement. But, both regions have similar goals, namely to diversify the economy, nurture local business, and to retain industry. Both regions also elevate land use above transportation in order to promote active transit and save in infrastructure costs. The regions have social programs like affordable housing and new development pays for growth. In the central business district, both Vancouver and Melbourne redevelop brownfields with residential and commercial space. The more suburban areas tend to offer low density residential areas that uses regional town centers and transit oriented development to make transit feasible. These new town centers are making higher density more attractive in Vancouver as the city requires new development to provide amenities and offer a mix of housing. Finally both Melbourne and Vancouver have growth boundaries, with Vancouver’s being natural and international borders.
Vancouver’s boundary segways well to the next speaker, Kathryn Friedman. She points out that the US has three megaregions, Cali-Baja, Cascadia, and the Toronto-Buffalo megaregions. Development in these regions is mostly limited by governance. In Cascadia, collaboration occurs at the state and provincial level. In Cali-Baja, collaboration is at the county, city, and municipal level.
The challenges to multinational or mega-regions include lack of defintion of the region, lack of regional-scale of government in each side of the border, and lack of political will to work together with specific goals in mind. Successful megaregions have a reason to work together, a governance mechanism, and collaboration between he private, public, non-profit, and academic sectors. Scale and sectr seem to be quite important issues for megacities.
Francis Gentoral is speaking about Vancouver’s assistance to Metro Iloilo Guimaras, which is made up of 11 municipalities. Philippines has a super region strategy since 1991, which means that the country advocates regional governance. The region has mostly benefitted from knowledgensharin and technical assistance. In fact, all of the megaregions benefit from partnerships and the collaborative sharing of information.
Surprisingly, besides Gentoral, the speakers didn’t really talk indepth about benefits of regional governments, such as watershed management, food provision, regional transportation, and other aspects of sustainability that regional governments may have an advantage in.
