Filtering by
- All Subjects: Economic development
- All Subjects: Education
- Creators: Anbar, Ariel
- Creators: Hall, John Stuart
Arizona is one of the nation’s most urban states, and now it includes one of 20 “megapolitan” areas in the U.S. People have predicted for 50 years that Phoenix and Tucson would grow together into a giant desert conglomerate. That possibility has been seen as exciting, intriguing, and distressing. While a solid city along Interstate 10 is unlikely given the diverse land ownership in central and southern Arizona, the two metro economies are already merging.
Megapolitan: Arizona’s Sun Corridor, one of the first reports on a single megapolitan area, recognizes a more sophisticated technique for analyzing urban growth—that shared economic and quality of life interests are more important than physically growing together.
Scholars at Virginia Tech defined the megapolitans based on economic and growth patterns.
The Sun Corridor, which cuts across six counties from the border with Mexico to the center of Yavapai County, is the home of eight out of 10 Arizonans. In the next several decades, two out of three Americans will live in a megapolitan accounting for 60% of the population on only 10% of U.S. land.
Megapolitan offers a bold new picture of Arizona’s geography and its future opportunities and “megaton” challenges. This report presents a scenario for 2035 based on current trends. It analyzes the Sun Corridor and provides insights into the region’s global potential, water, governance, sustainability, and “trillion dollar questions.” It discusses the “tragedy of the sunshine” and asks the indispensable question: In 2035, do you want to live in the Sun Corridor?
Ariel Anbar is a scientist and educator interested in Earth’s past and future evolution as an inhabited world, and the prospects for life beyond. His group’s major focus is the chemical evolution of the atmosphere and oceans, as revealed by the development of novel geochemical methods. Trained as a geologist and a chemist, Anbar is a President’s Professor at Arizona State University, where he is on the faculty of the School of Earth & Space Exploration and the School of Molecular Sciences, and a Distinguished Sustainability Scholar in the Global Institute of Sustainability. The author or co-author of over 100 refereed papers, Anbar directed ASU’s NASA-funded Astrobiology Program from 2009 – 2015, and oversees ASU’s new Center for Education Through eXploration. He is a graduate of Harvard (A.B. 1989) and Caltech (Ph.D. 1996). Before coming to ASU he was on the faculty of the University of Rochester from 1996 to 2004. Anbar is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, which awarded him the Donath Medal in 2002. He was recognized as an HHMI Professor in 2014, and elected a Fellow of the Geochemical Society and the European Association of Geochemistry in 2015.