Nearly a half-century ago, the French-trained geographer Jean Gottmann coined the term and concept of “Megalopolis” to describe the new postwar super-metropolitan urban region extending along the northeastern seaboard of the United States from north of Boston to Washington, D.C. In broad outline, Megalopolis was proposed to represent a new stage in human settlement geography characterized by: high average population densities; high volumes of internal and external flows of people, goods, funds, and information; blurring of urban and rural land uses; and a dominant role in the national and world economies. Gottmann’s term Megalopolis was quickly established in the lexicon and theory of urban geography and planning as well as in the general media, with some public policy outcomes. Amtrak’s “Metroliner” service between Boston and Washington was said to be inspired by the new awareness of the U.S. northeastern seaboard as an elongated urban region. The term later was applied to describe comparable urban agglomerations elsewhere, such as Tokyo-Yokohama-Kyoto-Osaka in Japan and London-Birmingham-Manchester in Great Britain. Recently, ten “megaregions” have been identified within the United States by Robert Lang and Dawn Dhavale (“America’s Megapolitan Areas,” Land Lines [Newsletter of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy], July 2005).

Now, John Rennie Short, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, has revisited and updated Gottmann’s original Megalopolis formulation in his elegant and thought-provoking book Liquid City: Megalopolis and the Contemporary Northeast (Resources for the Future Press, 2007, $70/$28.95). Short explains the metaphor behind his book as follows:

Metropolitan growth has a liquid quality; it is constantly moving over the landscape, here in torrents, there in rivulets, elsewhere in steady drips. . . . Metropolitan growth possesses an unstable quality that flows over political boundaries, seeps across borders, and transcends tight spatial demarcations; it is a process, not a culmination, always in motion, never at rest (pp. 14–15).

In such felicitous prose, Short emulates Gottmann’s own tendency to embellish dry statistical analysis with flights of rhetoric, as in the latter’s rather grandiloquent description of Megalopolis as “a stupendous monument erected by titanic efforts” whose fortunate inhabitants he deems to be “the richest, best educated, best housed, and best serviced in the world.” Gottmann supported his assertions with nearly 800 pages on settlement history, economic geography, demography, land use, and related topics. But despite his blizzard of statistics, Gottmann begged at least two questions: By what criteria was the geographic area of Megalopolis defined, and why is Megalopolis significant as a region, as distinct from the principal city-regions that it contains?

Short candidly admits that Gottmann’s original definition of Megalopolis was “neither consistent nor clear” and provided “no consistent demarcation or empirical base to build upon” (pp. 9–10). Nevertheless, Short gives it a try. Admitting to an element of subjectivity in his own selection process, Short drops a few of Gottmann’s peripheral counties and adds several others, yielding a new map of Megalopolis that includes 124 counties in 12 states with a population of 48.7 million (as compared with 31.9 million in Gottmann’s original study area).

Appropriately, the question begged by Gottmann is explicitly raised by Short: “Having defined the region, what does it mean? In what sense is Megalopolis a region?” But to confront that question is not necessarily to answer it. Like Gottmann, Short resorts to assembling a vast array of spatial data ranging across demography, employment, housing, crime, farming, bank deposits, and other variables tabulated by the census. These data are not explicitly set forth in Liquid City but are posted as an online “Electronic Atlas of Megalopolis” (http://www.umbc.edu/ges/student_ projects/digital_atlas/index.htm [accessed 25 August 2009]) containing sixty maps of social and economic data for the counties in the updated list. (The atlas was compiled in collaboration with Thomas D. Rabenhorst and UMBC geography students. I found it graphically inviting but a bit random in the selection of variables included.) The remainder of the book draws extensively on selected subsets of these variables to attempt to define what Megalopolis means today.

Short provides a much more nuanced analysis than Gottmann of the demography and economy of Megalopolis. For example, Gottmann dismissed race and poverty with cavalier disdain, observing that Megalopolis “attracts large numbers of in-migrants from the poorer sections . . . especially Southern Negroes and Puerto Ricans, who congregate in the old urban areas and often live in slums.” By contrast, Short compares available census data on race and ethnicity, finding not surprisingly that the white population of central cities within Megalopolis declined from 83 percent in 1960 to 42 percent in 2000, while suburbs, or at least some of them, have gradually become more ethnically diverse since 1960. The white-black dichotomy of Gottmann’s era has now been supplanted by a more complex mosaic of whites, blacks, Hispanics (white or black), and Asians. Foreign-born immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America account for most of the population growth of Megalopolis since 1950.

“Suburbs” of course are no longer the monolithic middle-class white enclaves of “organization men” and their families as documented by William H. Whyte in his classic 1956 study of postwar suburbia, The Organization Man (republished by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2002). “Suburbs” (not a census category) now encompass older inner-ring bedroom communities, impoverished former industrial enclaves, “edge cities,” upscale gated communities, and, on the metropolitan fringe, residual farm villages and rural areas. Short devotes several chapters to examining the changing economies, land use, and demographics outside the central cities of Megalopolis.

Predictably, “decentralization” is identified as the fundamental trend in Megalopolis, in large part oriented to the network of interstate and other limited-access highways which have facilitated urban sprawl and the abandonment of older central city neighborhoods since the 1960s. Another important driver of decentralization is the loss of manufacturing to lower-cost regions of the United States and abroad, with the concomitant decline of industrial and port cities within Megalopolis like Worcester, Camden, Baltimore, and Portland. Suburban office parks and the “edge cities” of Megalopolis and elsewhere reflected the rise of spatially diffuse service industries, such as finance, health, travel, and marketing. With the advent of the internet, those industries are also spreading away from Megalopolis to low-wage urban centers around the world.

Short strives to characterize the “liquid landscape” of Megalopolis through several forms of analysis conducted at different geographic scales. He develops a typology of county units based on their relative affluence and demographic diversity (using “foreign born” as a measure of the latter). A subsequent chapter addresses a finer scale of “urban places” which Short estimates to number 2,353 within Megalopolis, grouping several census categories. This set of places is subject to a withering array of 39 variables employing standard statistical techniques. For good measure, a brief chapter focuses on selected census tracts to represent the variation among “urban neighborhoods” within the Megalopolis cities of Washington, Boston, and Baltimore. The bottom line resulting from these various levels of analysis seems to be that Megalopolis may be more heterogeneous than homogeneous—that its internal diversity overwhelms any sense of unity as a region. I shall return to this matter before concluding.

Turning from the micro to the macro, Short considers the status of today’s Megalopolis in the global context. The preeminence of New York City in world finance and of Washington, D.C., in international relations needs no elaboration. To extrapolate the importance of those cities and their respective metropolitan hinterlands to Megalopolis writ large requires a rhetorical leap of faith, e.g., Gottmann’s famous declaration that Megalopolis is “the Continent’s Economic Hinge.” Short fairly admits that today “The region neither dominates the national economy nor shapes the national identity to the extent that it did in 1950” (p. 23). Late in the book, however, he succumbs to Gottmannesque oratory: “Megalopolis is the world’s most important GCR [global city region] where the different processes of globalization are readily apparent” (p. 141).

This still begs the question that Gottmann himself never addressed: What lends significance to the megaregion as such, as distinct from the important cities that it contains? Specifically, what is so “readily apparent” that makes Megalopolis—as distinct from its principal cities—“the world’s most important GCR”? Apart from those central cities and their respective satellite edge cities and bedroom communities, what is left is a motley assortment of counties in various stages of economic boom or bust (mostly the latter in 2010). Is the whole more (or less) than the sum of its parts?

“Megalopolis” thus remains a semantic and graphic construct, more statistically refined by Short than by Gottmann, but nevertheless enigmatic in its exact extent and significance. As Short admits, Megalopolis is a vast collection of political units that have little in common or concern for each other. There is no Megalopolis government nor is it the perceived “home place” for its 48.7 million inhabitants, most of whom have probably never heard of it. It is fragmented physically by watersheds and mountain ranges, by economic divides between rich and poor and those in between, by cultural divides among sports loyalties, newspaper circulation, political ideologies, religious roots, vernacular cuisine, and so on. Its internal differences seem to outweigh whatever binds it into a single entity. Can Megalopolis, despite its reduced national importance, still be “the world’s most important global city region?” Or is it a geographical fiction and outworn cliché?

Personally, as a disciple of Gottmann myself, I will cling to the terminology and mental map of Megalopolis as a convenient reference to my own home region. And the alliterative resonance makes it a pleasant term to drop in a dinner conversation—unlike “global city region”! John Rennie Short has done a masterful job of revisualizing and documenting how Megalopolis has changed since Gottmann, and I am grateful to him for revisiting this elusive but enduring geographical proposition.

Rutherford H. Platt is emeritus professor of geography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Filed under: Vol. 51 No. 1 (January 2010)