America 2050

Megaregions of the United States are clustered networks of US-American cities, the population of which currently ranges or is projected to range from about 57 to 63 million by the year 2025.

America 2050, a project of the Regional Plan Association, lists 11 megaregions in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Megapolitan areas were explored in a July 2005 report by Robert E. Lang and Dawn Dhavale of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. A later 2007 article by Lang and Nelson uses 20 megapolitan areas grouped into 10 megaregions. The concept is based on the original megalopolis model.

A megaregion is a large network of metropolitan regions that share several or all of the following:

A megaregion may also be known as a megalopolis or megapolitan area. More than 70 percent of the nation's population and jobs are located in 11 megaregions identified by the Regional Plan Association (RPA), which is an independent, non-profit New York-based planning organization. Megaregions are becoming the new competitive units in the global economy, characterized by the increasing movement of goods, people and capital among their metropolitan regions. "The New Megas," asserted Richard Florida (2006), "are the real economic organizing units of the world, producing the bulk of its wealth, attracting a large share of its talent and generating the lion's share of innovation."

The megaregion concept provides cities and metropolitan regions a context within which to cooperate across jurisdictional borders, including the coordination of policies, to address specific challenges experienced at the megaregion scale, such as planning for high-speed rail, protecting large watersheds, and coordinating regional economic development strategies.

The American-based Regional Plan Association recognizes 11 emerging megaregions:

The Regional Plan Association methodology for identifying the emerging megaregions included assigning each county a point for each of the following:

This methodology was much more successful at identifying fast-growing regions with existing metropolitan centers than more sparsely populated, slower growing regions. Nor does it include a distinct marker for connectedness between cities. The RPA method omits the eastern part of the Windsor-Quebec City urban corridor in Canada.

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