Building regional prosperity across the Sonoran Desert
As America’s metropolitan areas continue growing in size and population, the economic and cultural boundaries between individual cities in a region blur. “Interlocking economic systems, shared natural resources and ecosystems, and common transportation systems link these population centers together,” driving a need to cooperate and plan regionally.
The 2008 Sun Corridor report describes this “Megaregion” model as it applies to Arizona. Most of the state’s 7 million people live in the Phoenix–Tucson corridor, where collaboration in business, government, and institutions like universities and hospitals already links the city regions together.
Inspired by this 2016 University of Arizona paper, I think it makes sense to expand the Sun Corridor across the border to account for the economic between Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. The wellbeing of people living close to one another is inextricably linked, including across national borders. Adding Sonora to the broad Sun Corridor framework would continue the long trend of increased international cooperation that saw some slowdown following 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and anti-immigrant backlash as embodied in Arizona in SB-1070.
Though much of the megaregion’s people are in urban Arizona, especially metro Phoenix, there are substantial populations in Hermosillo (the state capital of Sonora with around 900,000 people) and border cities, mostly on the Mexico side. Since the original Sun Corridor goes south past Tucson to include Nogales, AZ as a regional hub, it makes sense to consider the other Nogales just over the border with more than ten times the people.
This type of border-straddling metropolitan integration is already visibly pronounced in denser border regions like Los Angeles/San Diego/Tijuana or El Paso/Juárez, where work and family connections knit wide areas together.
Transportation assets are key to cooperative economic expansion across regions. The highway and rail belt extending south Phoenix and Tucson through Nogales is the busiest route for cargo and people across the Arizona-Mexico border, forming an important link in the “CANAMEX Corridor,” the transportation route linking Canada to Mexico under NAFTA.
About 10% of all crossings at Nogales are commercial trucks, and cargo rail accounts for around 35% of trade passing through the border city. The seaport in Guaymas less than 100 miles south of Hermosillo is also an important shipping asset to the transborder region, leading the Mexican government to develop it as an alternative to LA/Long Beach for connections to Asia and South America.
Integrated, cooperative land/water planning and high-capacity transportation like intercity rail for passengers or freight can build on links that already connect and enrich people living in the Arizona–Sonora megaregion to create a more resilient economy for everyone.
