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Daniel Ibañez, Clare Lyster, Charles Waldheim, and Mason White have just published a book analyzing the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River. It’s called, Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan.
The Great Lakes represent the world’s largest collection of freshwater; a feature that is likely to become only more valuable. Their coastline is longer than the Atlantic and the Pacific coastlines of the US, combined. Hence the name “Third Coast.”
The reason the book is called a “prelude to a plan” is that it doesn’t propose a plan or a path forward. Instead, it is focused on analyzing the current state. Here is an excerpt about the book taken from the Daniels Faculty:
Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan describes the conditions for urbanization across the Great Lakes region. It assembles a multi-layered, empirical description of urbanization processes within the drainage basins of the five Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River. This thick description encompasses a range of representational forms including maps, plans, diagrams, timelines, and photographs, as well as speculative design research projects and critical texts.
I find this topic fascinating and I suspect that many of you might as well. It’s also an important one. So I wanted to get it on your radar. If you happen to be in Toronto next week, the launch/book signing is happening this Tuesday, October 24, 2017.
I’ve written before on how Toronto needs more autonomy and how I think there’s a huge opportunity to create a Third Coast Megaregion spanning from Chicago all the way to Quebec City—a region that could compete with the rising urban agglomerations of Asia and elsewhere.
The central theme around these arguments is that there’s clear evidence in support of a return to city-states.
Today, the 388 metro areas in the United States make up 84 percent of the nation’s population and an astonishing 91 percent of gross domestic product. The top 100 metro areas alone total two-thirds of the U.S. population and three-quarters of GDP.
And the reason why I say “return” is because, if you think about it, this is largely how the world used to operate before the shift towards nation-states.
Ironically, given the nature of our high-tech, super-connected age, the future will look more and more like the city-states that ruled the world for millennia, from the days of Athens, Sparta, Carthage, and Rome, and that were last dominant 500 years ago, in such places as Venice and Florence, before the formation of most modern nation-states. Today, the shining example is Singapore, the city-state of 5.2 million people that, all by itself, has become an Asian tiger. The city-state of the future will not be sovereign, of course, but instead will act largely independently. “What we are experiencing is a metro-centered driving force of change. This is the center of the economic universe,” says James Brooks, program director of the National League of Cities. “The United States is not one national economy but a series of smaller metropolitan economies.”
If you’re interested in this topic, here’s the article by Michael Hirsh from which the above excerpts are taken. It’s called, “The Nations’s Future Depends on Its Cities, Not on Washington.”
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