Texas Triangle conference a successful beginning

Texas Triangle Megaregion

Steve Hawley, Oct 01, 09.

UPDATE (10/15/09 12:59 PM): The Regional Plan Association, which created America 2050, has a nice wrap-up of the conference at its website. In addition, summaries of all the sessions have been posted to the conference website, and videos should be available shortly.

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Houston Tomorrow and America 2050 hosted a successful conference last week concerning the Texas Triangle megaregion. The conference, Megaregions & MetroProsperity: Sustainable Economics for the Texas Triangle, was the first of its kind in Texas and featured speakers from around the megaregion, as well as several national figures.

Key issues included transportation, food and water, energy, green infrastructure, and social equity. Roughly 120 people, mostly from the Texas Triangle, attended the two-day event. Participants came from a variety of backgrounds, including environmental groups, business, government, and development interests. Roughly one-third of the participants came from nonprofit organizations, with a similar amount coming from business groups. Others included Metropolitan Planning Organizations, Councils of Government, and state and city governments.

Notable speakers included Christopher Leinberger, Stephen Klineberg, Raymond Orbach, Frederick Steiner, Petra Todorovich, and Frank Wilson. The conference concluded with an elected officials panel consisting of Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, Travis County Commissioner Sarah Eckhardt, College Station Mayor Ben White, and Fort Worth City Councilmember Jungus Jordan.

Todorovich, the director of America 2050, noted that megaregions can play a crucial role in creating a national infrastructure plan, and that such megaregions need to organize from the ground up, not the top down. “Megaregions,” she said, “are networks of metropolitan areas connected by overlapping commuting patterns, linked economies, business travel, as well as large environmental resources, like the watersheds where we get our drinking water, and airsheds, as well as shared history and culture. … Overseas, our competitors in Asia and Europe are making investments at the megaregion scale, such as the Pearl River Delta in China, which is about the size of the Northeast megaregion – about 50 million people – and which is spending today the equivalent of 50 billion US dollars on a high-speed rail system that they will complete in the next five years.”

Anonymous electronic keypad surveys on both days revealed that participants believe transportation issues such as high-speed rail offer the best opportunities for collaboration, while water issues are perceived as being the most difficult to address. Overall, respondents were generally optimistic that the megaregion could address its major issues, with the exception of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving social and economic equity. Participants were also generally pessimistic about the state legislature and its ability to address the region’s concerns.

The conference website will be updated during the next two weeks with summaries and videos of all the speakers and panelists.

The conference was sponsored by Arup, Daniel B. Farnham, FAIA, Greenspoint, METRO, Morris Architects, NuRide, the Regional Plan Association, Tony Mandola’s Gulf Coast Kitchen, TREK, and Waterstreet Engineering.

Partners included the Center for Houston’s Future, Envision Central Texas, the Houston-Galveston Area Council, the Texas A&M College of Architecture, the TSU Center for Transportation Planning and Research, the TSU Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, the University of Texas Center for Sustainable Development, and Vision North Texas.

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