Episode Details

More than a century ago, Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago offered a bold idea: that cities should be planned not just block by block, but as regions, weaving beauty, infrastructure, and growth into a single vision. That ambition spread quickly, as planners grappled with sprawl, coined new ways to measure metropolitan scale, and experimented with governance models that could coordinate transport, housing, and services across fragmented jurisdictions. In this episode, we explore why regional planning has always been so hard to govern, from two-tier systems to single-purpose agencies, and how tools like greenbelts and urban growth boundaries aim to contain expansion. As cities fuse into conurbations, megalopolises, and today’s megaregions, the story asks whether planning at ever-larger scales can finally bring coherence to the urban landscapes we’ve created.

Abbott, Carl, 'Metropolis and megaregion', City Planning: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (New York, 2020; online edn, Oxford Academic, 22 Oct. 2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780190944346.003.0006