Gottmann borrowed a Greek “big city” for the BosWash strip
A megalopolis—or megaregion—is a chain of metros felt as one continuous urban system through shared transport, economy, and media. The Greek compound “big city” named Arcadia’s Megalopolis; Jean Gottmann reused it in the late 1950s for the U.S. Northeast corridor.
The Arcadian town founded in the 4th century BC took the name as an aspiration, and English geographers were using it by 1832 for any huge, crowded urban complex. Gottmann's study for the Twentieth Century Fund described the corridor from Boston to Washington as a world of ideas. He set the threshold at 25 million people, while the planner Doxiadis counted a cluster of about 10 million as a small megalopolis. The member cities keep separate identities, but they are knit tightly enough that coordinating policy across them pays off.
American researchers have mapped the idea repeatedly. A July 2005 report by Robert Lang and Dawn Dhavale at Virginia Tech explored national megaregions, and a 2007 follow-up grouped 20 megapolitan areas into 10 of them; the Regional Plan Association's America 2050 program lists 11 across the United States and Canada. Riding the rail and highway links that bind such regions has even been nicknamed megaloping. China's official equivalent, chengshi qun, means city cluster; a 2019 planning guideline distinguished it from the smaller metropolitan area, and the older translation agglomeration has been dropped.
Because countries define urban areas inconsistently, a proposed Urban Metric System models every resident and job as exerting equal attraction and repulsion, using a single parameter to classify areas up to megalopolis scale. It has been tried on Canadian cases since 2018.
Fiction loves the form. Judge Dredd's Mega-City One sprawls over much of the eastern United States, topping one architecture journal's list of comic book cities. William Gibson's Sprawl stretches from Boston to Atlanta under grey geodesic domes, Francis Ford Coppola's 2024 film imagines an architect building a future city inside New Rome, and Dune's Harkonnens ruled Arrakis from the megalopolis Carthag.
Source: Megalopolis
