The Great Reset: What Will It Mean for Jacksonville?

(2) Identifying and Strengthening Jacksonville’s Regional Context

 
Our second problem is that while Jacksonville's local economy, like many other Sunbelt cities, has been hobbled and distorted by the suburban “growth illusion” (see Chapter 14 for the details), we – unfortunately – do not fit the emerging spatial pattern of many other southern cities that, according to Florida, seem likely to evolve into tightly integrated megaregions.  As he outlines in Chapter 18, The Great Resettle, “The future of urban development belongs to a larger kind of geographic unit that has emerged over the last several decades: the megaregion.  People around the globe are crowding into the world’s most promising megaregions – the concentrations of population that encompass several cities and their surrounding suburban rings – that have grown swiftly in recent years.”  (p. 142)

Going on to describe such emerging southern megaregions of Char-lanta (Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham), Dal-Austin (Dallas and Austin), Hou-Orleans (Houston and New Orleans), and So-Flo (Miami, Orlando, and Tampa), the author sets out an extensive and amply documented brief that such aggregations of talented people and new technologies will be the primary engines of economic regeneration in a post reset world.  

If, as Florida suggests, such multi-nucleated, transit-linked megaregions represent the future, what does this mean for Jacksonville?  Lacking the kind of spatial synergy that he sees emerging out of the increasing interconnectedness of the Miami-Orlando-Tampa megaregion, where do we go from here?  The obvious approach, applying the same lessons to our single city-centered region, would be to embark on the very same kind of thoughtful integration of our existing urban center(s) with our suburban hinterland.