21st Century (2000–present)

San Antonio SA Tomorrow

2016 · United States · North America · Transit-oriented urbanism and corridor planning · Planned by City of San Antonio

Aerial view of San Antonio, Texas, the city guided by the SA Tomorrow comprehensive plan. · CC BY-SA 2.0

Core idea

Centers/corridors + VIA Primo

Why it matters

Growth management with equity

Description

SA Tomorrow, adopted by the City of San Antonio in 2016, is a three-part comprehensive plan—covering land use, sustainability and multimodal transportation—for one of the fastest-growing large cities in the United States. Its spatial strategy channels growth into designated regional centres and transit corridors, coordinated with VIA Metropolitan Transit's Primo enhanced bus services, and is elaborated through a rolling programme of sub-area plans. Equity in the distribution of growth and investment is an explicit organising theme.

Significance

SA Tomorrow exemplifies the centres-and-corridors comprehensive planning model adopted by many Sun Belt cities in the 2010s, and is notable for foregrounding equity in a majority-Latino city with stark historical patterns of segregation and disinvestment. Its reliance on enhanced bus services rather than rail also makes it a useful case in debates on affordable transit-oriented growth management.

What shaped it

Transit-oriented development (TOD) (1993)
Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) (1974)
The compact city (1973-1990s)

Sources

Open it on the interactive timeline →

hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.