Smart growth is an urban planning and transportation theory that concentrates growth in compact walkable urban centers to avoid sprawl. It also advocates compact, transit-oriented, walkable, bicycle-friendly land use, including neighborhood schools, complete streets, and mixed-use development with a range of housing choices. The term "smart growth" is particularly used in North America. In Europe and particularly the UK, the terms "compact city", "urban densification" or "urban intensification" have often been used to describe similar concepts, which have influenced government planning policies in the UK, the Netherlands and several other European countries.
Interstate 85 (I-85) is a major Interstate Highway in the Southeastern United States. Its southern terminus is at an interchange with I-65 in Montgomery, Alabama; its northern terminus is an interchange with I-95 in Petersburg, Virginia, near Richmond. It is nominally north–south as it carries an odd number, but it is physically oriented northeast–southwest and covers a larger east-west span than north-south. While most Interstates that end in a "5" are cross-country, I-85 is primarily a regional route serving five southeastern states: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama.
One of the major subfields of urban economics, economies of agglomeration explains, in broad terms, how urban agglomeration occurs in locations where cost savings can naturally arise. This term is most often discussed in terms of economic firm productivity. However, agglomeration effects also explain some social phenomenon, such as large proportions of the population being clustered in cities and major urban centres. Similar to economies of scale, the costs and benefits of agglomerating increase the larger the agglomerated urban cluster becomes. Several prominent examples of where agglomeration has brought together firms of a specific industry are: Silicon Valley and Los Angeles being hubs of technology and entertainment, respectively, in California, United States; and London, United Kingdom, being a hub of finance.
Urban sprawl is defined as "the spreading of urban developments on undeveloped land near a city." Urban sprawl has been described as the unrestricted growth in many urban areas of housing, commercial development, and roads over large expanses of land, with little concern for urban planning. In addition to describing a special form of urbanization, the term also relates to the social and environmental consequences associated with this development. Medieval suburbs suffered from the loss of protection of city walls, before the advent of industrial warfare. Modern disadvantages and costs include increased travel time, transport costs, pollution, and destruction of the countryside. The cost of building urban infrastructure for new developments is hardly ever recouped through property taxes, amounting to a subsidy for the developers and new residents at the expense of existing property taxpayers.
In urban planning, transit-oriented development (TOD) is a type of urban development that maximizes the amount of residential, business and leisure space within walking distance of public transport. It promotes a symbiotic relationship between dense, compact urban form and public transport use. In doing so, TOD aims to increase public transport ridership by reducing the use of private cars and by promoting sustainable urban growth.
The Upstate is the region in the westernmost part of South Carolina, United States, also known as the Upcountry, which is the historical term. Although loosely defined among locals, the general definition includes the 10 counties of the commerce-rich I-85 corridor in the northwest corner of South Carolina. This definition coincided with the Greenville–Spartanburg–Anderson, SC combined statistical area, as first defined by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 2015. In 2023, the OMB issued its most updated definition of the CSA that coincides again with the 10-county region.
California's major urban areas normally are thought of as two large megalopolises: one in Northern California and one in Southern California, separated from each other by approximately 382 miles or 615 km, with sparsely inhabited (relatively) Central Coast, Central Valley, and Transverse Ranges in between. Other ideas conceive of a single megalopolis encompassing both North and South, or a division of Coastal California vs. Inland California. These regional concepts are usually based on geographic, cultural, political, and environmental differences, rather than transportation and infrastructure connectivity and boundaries.
Greater Pittsburgh is the metropolitan area surrounding the city of Pittsburgh in Western Pennsylvania, United States. The region encompasses Pittsburgh's urban core county and economic hub, Allegheny, and six adjacent Pennsylvania counties: Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Lawrence, Washington, and Westmoreland in Western Pennsylvania, which constitutes the Pittsburgh, PA Metropolitan Statistical Area MSA as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau.
A megalopolis or a supercity, also called a megaregion, is a group of metropolitan areas which are perceived as a continuous urban area through common systems of transport, economy, resources, ecology, and so on. They are integrated enough that coordinating policy is valuable, although the constituent metropolises keep their individual identities. The megalopolis concept has become highly influential as it introduced a new, larger scale thinking about urban patterns and growth.
The Piedmont Crescent, also known as the Piedmont Urban Crescent, is a large, polycentric urbanized region in the U.S. state of North Carolina that forms the northern section of the rapidly developing Piedmont Atlantic megalopolis, a conurbation also known as the "I-85 Boombelt", which extends from the Raleigh area in North Carolina, southwards to Atlanta, Georgia in the southeastern United States.
An aerotropolis is a metropolitan subregion whose infrastructure, land use, and economy are centered on an airport. It fuses the terms "aero-" (aviation) and "metropolis". Like the traditional metropolis made up of a central city core and its outlying commuter-linked suburbs, the aerotropolis consists of 1) the airport's aeronautical, logistics, and commercial infrastructure forming a multimodal, multifunctional airport city at its core and 2) outlying corridors and clusters of businesses and associated residential developments that feed off each other and their accessibility to the airport. The word aerotropolis was first used by New York commercial artist Nicholas DeSantis, whose drawing of a skyscraper rooftop airport in the city was presented in the November 1939 issue of Popular Science. The term was repurposed by air commerce researcher John D. Kasarda in 2000 based on his prior research on airport-driven economic development.
The Northeast megalopolis, also known as the Northeast Corridor, Acela Corridor, Boston–Washington corridor, or BosWash, is the world's largest megalopolis in terms of economic output and the second-most populous megalopolis in the United States with approximately 50 million residents as of 2020.
The Great Lakes megalopolis consists of the group of metropolitan areas in North America largely in the Great Lakes region. It extends from the Midwestern United States in the south and west to western Pennsylvania and Western New York in the east and northward through Southern Ontario into southwestern Quebec in Canada. It is the most populated and largest megalopolis in North America.
The Piedmont Atlantic Megaregion (PAM) is a neologism created by the Regional Plan Association for an area of the Southeastern United States that includes the Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Memphis, Nashville, Research Triangle (Raleigh-Durham), and Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point metropolitan areas. The megaregion generally follows the Interstate 85/20 corridor. According to Georgia Tech, PAM represents over 12 percent of the total United States population and covers over 243,000 square miles (630,000 km2) of land.
The megaregions of the United States are generally understood to be regions in the U.S. that contain two or more roughly adjacent urban metropolitan areas that, through commonality of systems—of transport, economy, resources, and ecologies—experience blurred boundaries between the urban centers, such that perceiving and acting as if they are a continuous urban area is, for the purposes of policy coordination, of practical value. The antecedent term, with which "megaregions" is synonymous, is megalopolis, which was coined in relation to the Boston through Washington, D.C., corridor in the Atlantic Northeast, by Jean Gottmann in the mid-twentieth century. America 2050, a project of the Regional Plan Association, lists 11 megaregions encompassing urban regions in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. As of December 2000, these clustered networks of American cities contained an estimated total population exceeding 280 million persons
The Arizona Sun Corridor, shortened Sun Corridor, is a megaregion, or megapolitan area, in the southern area of the U.S. state of Arizona. The Sun Corridor is comparable to Indiana in both size and population. It is one of the fastest growing conurbations in the country and is speculated to double its population by 2040. The largest metropolitan areas are the Phoenix metropolitan area – Valley of the Sun, and the Tucson metropolitan area – The Old Pueblo. The regions' populace is nestled in the valley of a desert environment. Similar to Southern California, the urban area extends into Mexico, reaching the communities of Heroica Nogales and Agua Prieta.
The Front Range Urban Corridor is an oblong region of urban population located along the eastern face of the Southern Rocky Mountains, encompassing 18 counties in the US states of Colorado and Wyoming. The corridor derives its name from the Front Range, the mountain range that defines the western boundary of the corridor which serves as a gateway to the Rocky Mountains. The region comprises the northern portion of the Southern Rocky Mountain Front geographic area, which in turn comprises the southern portion of the Rocky Mountain Front geographic area of Canada and the United States. The Front Range Urban Corridor had a population of 5,055,344 at the 2020 Census, an increase of +16.65% since the 2010 Census.
An industrial corridor is a package of infrastructure spending allocated to a specific geographical area, with the intent to stimulate industrial development.
The Northern California megaregion, distinct from Northern California, is an urbanized region of California consisting of many large cities including San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Oakland. There are varying definitions of the megaregion, but it is generally seen as encompassing the San Francisco Bay Area, the Sacramento area, northern San Joaquin Valley, and the Monterey Bay Area.
Catherine L. Ross is an American educator and author. She is the Harry West Professor of City and Regional Planning, the Director of the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, and the Deputy Director of the Center for Transportation System Productivity and Management at Georgia Institute of Technology.
United States