Metropolitan's

This week’s reading talks about Planning Metropolitan Regions.

Metropolitans are connections of densely populated urban hubs. Both Paris and Sydney are great examples of metropolitans. In Sydney's greater region, there are the hubs of: Penrith, Chatswood, Parramatta and Campbletown. These and most other metropolitan regions have an underlying structure including their own employment and shopping clusters and, often, it takes a car to get between these places as they are separated by roads.

Joel Garreau refers to these hubs as 'Edge Cities' and ''Edgeless cities''.

Paris, a mix of the old and the new

This style of development is called New Regionalism and it emerged ''in response to post-WW2 settlement patterns''.

People say that this kind of development is inefficient and that Greenfield development (for eventual new metropolises) should not be pursued over urban infill, especially since all Greenfield developments need their own new (supporting) infrastructure. Ironically governments tend to be reluctant to pursue urban infill because they too need new (largely transport) facilities in that area to support any change.

Because of the 'small city' nature to each metropolitan, the idea of self-government often gets floated about. This sounds like more than your average government push for community capacity building and would certainly be a more efficient method of management. I like the idea.


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