Internship at the Regional Plan Association
This past week I began my four month internship at the Regional Plan Association. Started in 1922, RPA is a not-for-profit planning group that works in the tri-state area. Their mission is to “[improve] the quality of life and the economic competitiveness of the 31-county New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region through research, planning, and advocacy.” Their work has helped shape the region’s infrastructure and land use for decades. They have offices throughout the area, and I am working at their head office in the ConEd Building near Union Square in New York City.
I am a part of the America 2050 project, a collection of planners and policy-makers aiming to develop strategies to ready the country for the growth it will experience in the coming decades. With the United States posed to add 130 million people by 2050, there is an urgency “to meet the infrastructure, economic development and environmental challenges of the nation.” The RPA, along with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, are the heading up the planning for the Northeast megaregion. Interning in this group, my project is the analysis of the Northeast Corridor for the possibility of high speed rail that would meet the growing mobility needs of the densest region of the nation.
I had become interested in the RPA when I was reading up on the latest research on megaregions. The topic of megaregions had interested me since early in my college career when I first read a paper by Dr. Robert Lang at the Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute on the topic of megapolitans. The idea is that cities have grown so much that their borders have started to overlap, and they no longer function simply as metro areas, but as larger regions whose economies are linked with each other. The RPA’s name came up on the lists of groups that are doing the leading research on the topic, focusing on the largest of the identified megaregions: the Northeast. This area runs from Virginia to Maine and includes the cities of Richmond, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelhia, Newark, New York, New Haven, Providence, and Boston. The map below is one representation of the megaregions in the country.
November 25th, 2008 at 3:28 am
Neat map and great post. I can visualize in my head what the tri-state ‘megaregion’ might look like, but then I see a ‘megaregion’ that stretches from Raleigh to Memphis or San Francisco to Reno…and I think “these are really far apart with a lot of empty space in between!”