A New Regionalism, The Hourglass 2070 AD

Narrator: A man, age 77, reflecting on his life and speaking to his teenage grandchildren

“I was born in the year of 1993, at the dawn of the digital age. I could've never predicted what was to come. I was of the last of the millennials, and we were the last generation to truly know what it felt like to be disconnected, or ‘off the grid’. As children we left the house with no electronic devices with only our present reality and imaginations to entertain us. Everything changed with the invention of the smartphone… Digital communication went from asynchronous to constant. The internet interconnected the World's population as never before, tearing down cultural barriers and encouraging a sense of global collaboration. The next generation, your parents, grew up in a truly connected world. We had dozens of friends growing up. If we were lucky, they had tens of thousands. They had immediate access to people across the world through social media. At an early age, they were exposed to cultural trends in China, India, and to global conversations and conflicts. As these children grew into adults their perspectives had collectively broadened like no generation before them.

As they came into leadership, the old nationalist system came crashing down like the Berlin Wall as those youth realized that serious global collaboration was the only way to respond to challenges such as climate change, disease, hunger, and poverty. Our world leaders were born digital natives, the oldest of them just barely able to remember artifacts like television sets or laptops. Their digital upbringing radically influenced their conception of identity, devaluing seemingly arbitrary concepts such as ‘country’. They were hungry for change. Their chance came in 2043, when the United States of America finally crumbled under the weight of its national debt. The result was a collapse of the global economic and political system. It was a horrible time for many people, but I guess it did pave the way for a new world order.

In the wake of the Great Collapse the world reorganized as one. The United Nations emerged as the central power structure with a platform of ending poverty, disease and mitigating climate change. This central government now has the mandate to set overarching goals, policy, and strategy, but delegates implementation to a system of regional governance. North America was organized into nine ecologically and culturally defined regions. Funny enough, these regions were loosely based on one of my favorite books, the late Joel Garreau’s The Nine Nations of North America. 

We live in MexAmerica, which stretches from the Pacific Coast of Los Angeles across to Houston and the Gulf of Mexico. The region encompasses a large part of what used to be the land of the desperado, the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. The digital world hasn't yet completely replaced the physical one and the world’s population has almost completely urbanized by now. It’s taken a lot of effort to build our cities into what they are now, but they are incredibly important. No matter how fancy the technology gets, cities are the places where we live our lives. The cities of a region are organized into districts, which are the foundational unit of our representative governmental system.

Our lovely city of San Antonio is in the Gulf of Mexico Hourglass District a.k.a. The Hourglass. The Hourglass has emerged as one of the most powerful areas in the world over the 21st last century. Its name comes from the location of our cities. Dallas, Houston, and Austin make up the top triangle, which then connects down into the southern triangle of San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and Monterrey. It’s a region of great prosperity, but we still face incredible economic disparity and it is starting stir waves of social unrest. Race has remained a barrier to social mobility. Education levels have improved, but unemployment is close to 65%. After all these years, we still haven’t figured out how to adjust as artificial intelligence and advanced robotics reduce the need for human labor. People have called the Gulf of Mexico the Mediterranean of the New World, and I’m afraid we’re starting to look like Rome before it’s fall.”

Regional Economic Development

Relocalism has been the driving economic doctrine in recent decades. The collapse of the global economy in 2043 left millions to starve and there was an immediate call for localized, more resilient economies. The main responsibility of our districts and cities is to develop a robust and diverse regional economic infrastructure that will enable local businesses to thrive. Innovations in agriculture, energy, and manufacturing have allowed each district to produce most of the products it consumes, greatly reducing the need for global trade. The Global Government actively regulates global trade and investment, requiring each region to produce roughly 75% of what it consumes. A major challenge has been workforce development as the need for human labor has been drastically reduced due to automation and artificial intelligence. A global universal income was instituted to help combat the issue, but it hasn’t proven an effective solution in providing the population with a sense of purpose and fulfillment. The universal income varies by region based on regional economic output, which has in a way perpetuated the global wealth disparities of the past.

Communication Networks 

In the first half of the 21st century a digital divide between the wealthy and poor grew to massive proportions. Internet access was dependent on expensive physical broadband infrastructure like fiber-optic cable. Everything changed when satellites began providing widespread low-cost internet. Now free, public access internet is available in every corner of the globe. The network of satellites is funded and operated by the global government as a utility, recognized as necessary because every human, device, and vehicle must be linked to the internet in order to successfully operate in the modern urban environment.

Transportation Systems

Each region is connected by high-speed train networks that link major population, agricultural and manufacturing nodes together. These high-speed rails quickly and efficiently move people and goods throughout the region. Local transportation systems vary by climate, but best practices call for complete street systems that prioritize pedestrians and the multitude of electric small occupancy vehicles shuttling people from place to place. Society has maintained many of the intricate road systems created by past governments, but these are mainly used for the last mile transportation of commercial goods by autonomous electric vehicles. Human-operated vehicles are now highly regulated and mainly serve as novelty collector items. 

Zoning and Land Use

The majority of development is clustered around the network of high-speed rail systems. Land use policy is optimized for density with the goal of leaving the maximum amount of natural landscape to flourish untouched. Human migration patterns are tightly regulated and monitored in order to ensure that housing demand matches supply. In the Texas Hourglass region (and most others), single-family zoning has been long banned. In the years leading up to the Great Collapse of 2043 the rich fled to urban centers, leaving suburban areas to decay. These areas have mainly been redeveloped for density or reclaimed by nature. The widespread use of indoor vertical farming has greatly reduced the land needed for commercial farming.