Foreword thinking

    The best approach in a national framework for accomodating population increases is to plan for where people live -- not where they don't, writes senior fellow Armando Carbonell in the foreword of Megapolitan America: A New Vision for Understanding America's Metropolitan Geography, recently published by APA Planners Press. Co-authors Arthur C. Nelson and Robert E. Lang, both longtime friends of the Lincoln Institute, seek to remake urban and regional planning theory, says Carbonell, with a spatial planning approach somewhat similar to Europe's, at least in terms of the relationships between major metropolitan areas, also known as megaregions. That concept grew out of a studio at the University of Pennsylvania led by Carbonell, Robert Yaro, and Jonathan Bartlett, ultimately leading to the formation of America 2050. In Megapolitan America, Lang and Nelson look at similar clusters of about 20 megapolitan areas -- networks of metropolitan centers fused by common economic, physical, social, and cultural traits. They argue for long-range planning that sheds outdated images -- the notion of America as the land of wide open spaces -- and stokes the nation's economic engines. 
    Meanwhile, former Arizona governor and Interior secretary Bruce Babbitt and Washington environmental attorney Douglas P. Wheeler, both Lincoln Institute board members, reflect on land conservation and open space in the foreword to Southern California Coastal Mountains to the Sea, a celebration of 50,000 acres preserved at historic Irvine Ranch, one of the largest urban open space areas in the U.S., with some three million people living nearby.