Boomburbs: The Rise of America's Accidental Cities

Chapter 8: Emerging Urban Realms and the Boomburbs of 2030

This final chapter looks at two related issues—the emergence of new boomburbs and the division of metropolitan areas into subregional geographic areas called urban realms. Each decade, a new group of cities crosses the 100,000 population mark that the census uses as an informal threshold for big places. The majority of these cities, as this book shows, are in fact overgrown suburbs. The chapter ends with a look beyond 2030 and a short discussion on what forces may constrain the future development of boomburbs. The new boomburbs of 2030 will mostly be found in rapidly expanding parts of major metropolitan areas. The biggest metropolises have grown so large that they have multiple subregions. Development in some of these urban realms is just taking off. These emerging metropolitan spaces serve as boomburb incubators. Regions often have both built-out urban realms and barely built ones. The following section looks at the future of boomburbs in different types of urban realm and finds that the fate of boomburbs is closely linked to that of its metropolitan subregion. Maturing realms feature slower growing boomburbs, while emerging ones should give rise to new boomburbs by 2030. Population projections to 2030 are drawn from Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas.1 All three metropolises have multiple boomburbs and urban realms. These regions also sprawl to such enormous size that each maintains a bigger local identity than the one anchored by the principal city. Greater Los Angeles is referred to more broadly as the Southland; Phoenix, the Valley of the Sun; and Dallas, the Metroplex. These alternate names 8 Emerging Urban Realms and the Boomburbs of 2030 162 hint that a single place, even one of the nation’s biggest cities, is too small to properly identify all the urban space in its region. At this regional scale, urban realms become evident. Understanding Urban Realms The idea of urban realms is well established in geography, starting with James Vance in 1964. Vance argued that major American metropolitan areas had grown so decentralized, due to dispersal of population and economic activity, that they had become a series of semiautonomous subregions, or “urban realms.”2 To Vance, urban realms are natural outcomes when cities grow “one stage beyond that of a metropolis.”3 The core-periphery relationship weakens, as realms become more equal. And the region grows more cooperative as the shared urban and cultural identity of the urban realms creates what Vance calls a “sympolis,” rather than a metropolis. Vance identified realms based on several criteria. One is the size of the region—the bigger the metropolis, the more differentiated the realms. Physical features such as mountains, bays, and rivers also serve to delimit realms by directing the spread of urbanization into geographically defined areas. Realms can also be distinguished by either an overriding economic identity, such as the Silicon Valley in California, or shared employment centers as identified by commuter sheds. The regional geography of transportation , as originally recognized by Homer Hoyt, also plays a role in separating urban realms.4 This process began with trolley cars but is now centered on interstate highways, in particular metropolitan beltways. Beltways can either define the boundary of an area, as is reflected by the expression of one being located “inside the Washington beltway,” or unify a realm, as in the case of the LBJ Corridor in North Dallas. The urban realm idea relates to other concepts that describe regional variation and integration.5 One of these is the notion of a favored quarter, the wedge of a metropolis that contains a large share of its region’s wealth.6 The concept is adapted from Homer Hoyt’s sector hypothesis, which holds that both wealth and poverty spread from the center to the edge, in quarters .7 Most large U.S. metropolitan areas have an easily identified favored quarter—the north sides of Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas; the west sides of Washington and Los Angeles; and the northeast corner of Phoenix. Urban realms have their own subregional identities, such as South Coast (or Orange County) and the Inland Empire (Riverside and San Bernardino Counties) in the Los Angeles region. The realms around Los Angeles are so distinct that South Coast and the Inland Empire have their own subregional EMERGING URBAN REALMS AND THE BOOMBURBS OF 2030 163 newspapers and airports. On a smaller, but emerging, scale, the East Valley of Phoenix (with...