megalopolis
Birth Date: 10/7/06
Late Update: 10/7/06
Site By: Gregory Martin

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Megalopolis and Megapolitan Video

I took a course at the Northern Virginia Community College during the fall 2005 semester. I really enjoyed the course, Geography 210, "People and the Land: Introduction to Cultural Geography." I attended all classes but one, a class I missed while I was in Italy in November. The students were supposed to present that day on various topics, so knowing of my absence, I filmed my presentation, which I now post here. I can't claim that everything in this presentation is perfectly accurate, and I certainly don't cite my sources for graphics in the video, but just for fun, here is my video and a transcript that I typed after the class (I was adlibbing while I videotaped myself with a digital camera). Click on the banner to launch the video, which runs under eight minutes. The video is my low-resolution version, an 11.5 megabyte 320x240 Windows Media Video file.

So I'm on my way to Italy when you see this which is why I videotaped this little thing, plus I just got video software on my computer and I wanted to test it out.

Anyway, Jean Gottmann was a French geographer who in 1961 wrote "Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States." Gottmann didn't come up with the word "megalopolis," in fact it's from the Greek word "polis"—"city" and then "mega"—"very large," so it means "very large city," and in fact, there was a group of ancient Greeks in the fourth century who were going to construct a huge city to serve as the capital of a federation of city states. Their plan didn't work out but Megalopolis does exist now as a city in Greece, though it's only, I think, 5,000 people live there.

Megalopolis has now been turned into a common word meaning an area with ten million or more people, and it also has been used in some odd ways, such as Japanese films for one. Gottmann researched what he ended up terming "megalopolis," this urbanized northeastern seaboard area along the Atlantic Ocean, using 1950 Census data, so he studied this in the fifties and then put out his book in 1961. The interesting thing about this area was that in 1960, right before the book came out, 20% of the total American population was in this area. Nowadays there are 44 million people in this area, which is now 16%, instead of 20%, but in both cases this was a lot of people living in only 1.5% of the United States land area. More than 90% of the population of this megalopolis area lives in actual urban areas, and that percentage is increasing now as suburban development fills in the somewhat rural spaces in between cities.

You may have seen these neat NASA maps taken at night of light emitted from the United States, and here it's really easy to tell where the megalopolis is, and you can also identify the two other megalopoli that Gottmann labeled, which are the ChiPitts and SanSan areas. The SanSan of course goes from San Francisco to San Diego, and the ChiPitts goes from the Great Lakes area and Chicago to Pittsburgh and the Ohio River. Now this term megalopolis has now been used internationally in parts of Canada and especially in the Tokyo area.

Some people say three characteristics define this megalopolis region. One is the high population density. Another is that major urban centers are growing towards each other. And the third is that there's a large demand for goods that are brought in from other regions. With goods brought in from other regions, this is very evident in terms of produce grown within sixty to a hundred miles from the megalopolis area, such as Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, or many parts of New Jersey, which of course is the Garden State.

It's easy to see how the megalopolis was formed given that Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and then New York as well, were some of the most important cities in early Colonial America, and then once the capital was built starting in the late eighteenth century, Washington, DC also became very important. Many immigrants entered the United States through the megalopolis region, so there's a varied population mix within the states that make up this area. Gottmann wrote that the megalopolis "provides the whole of America with so many essential services of the sort a community used to obtain in its ‘downtown' section, that it may well deserve the nickname of, ‘Main Street of the Nation.'"

Last week in class we were all concerned about why Gottmann was writing this about the megalopolis or why he labeled it as such, and I do think that it was not a critique, in fact he thought the megalopolis could work very well, and he thought that each city could be unique in its own right, even though it was part of this huge system.

I found a July 2005 paper by the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, and it's going off the megalopolis idea in defining megapolitan areas. These are sort of a vernacular term of megalopolis now. These are clustered networks of metropolitan areas that exceed ten million total residents. According to the Virginia Tech paper, these ten areas contain less than a fifth of all the land area of the lower 48 states, but they capture more than two-thirds of the total U.S. population, with almost 200 million people. Four out of five United States Representatives are from these megapolitan areas.

Looking at the map you see that the section labeled Northeast is what Gottmann's megalopolis was; the NorCal and Southland make up the SanSan region; and the Midwest is ChiPitts. They've added seven more areas. Gottmann wrote about 25 years after his initial book came out, revisiting the megalopolis idea, and in that he labeled this area that the Virginia Tech study has called Piedmont as an up-and-coming area that could qualify as a megalopolis.

When you see a map with the cities labeled, and then the transportation networks, it's easy to see because of the interstates that connect these cities, why such growth has occurred in between them. The Virginia Tech paper gives some interesting statistics about these megapolitan areas, such as the fact that five fairly much vote Republican, five vote generally for Democrats. Say, the Cascadia region, their signature industry is aerospace, whereas the Gulf Coast region—Louisiana, Houston—their signature industry is energy.

I believe that one of the goals of this Virginia Tech paper is to get this megapolitan term sort of formalized and adopted by the people, because they claim that when the Census Bureau identifies an area with a certain term, it becomes easier for policymakers to study the area and it becomes more standardized.

Well, I guess that's it. I hope you learned a little bit about megalopoli and this new Virginia Tech term, the megapolitan areas. See you in two weeks.