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Megalopolis
An Enduring Enigma
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 generalmedia, 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 (Washington, D.C., Resources for the Future Press, 2007, pp. xii+185, $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...