User:Korossyl/Northeast Megalopolis

The Megalopolis

The Boston–Washington or Northeast Megalopolis is the heavily urbanized area of the United States stretching from the southern suburbs of Washington, D.C. to the northern suburbs of Boston, MA. As of 2000, the region supported over 17% of the US population on less than 2% of the nation’s soil, with a population density of 931.3 people/mi², compared to the US average of 80.5/mi². French geographer Jean Gottmann coined the term “Megalopolis” to describe a massive urban region in his 1961 book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States, his landmark study of the region. His conclusion was that the various cities contained in the region – most especially Washington, D.C., Baltimore, MD, Philadelphia, PA, New York City, NY, and Boston, MA – are, while discrete and independent, uniquely tied to each other through the intermeshing of their suburban zones, acting in some ways as a unified super-city: a megalopolis. Since the publication of Gottmann’s book, the concept has gained prominence in both popular and academic media.

The megalopolis

In addition to the federal non-state area of Washington, D.C., the megalopolis encompasses some or all of ten states: (from South to North) Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine. It is linked by Interstate 95 and U.S. Route 1, which both start in Miami, FL and terminate at the US-Canadian border. It is home to 55 million people (2006 estimate).

The region accounts for 20% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. Beyond the U.S., only Japan, China and Germany have greater GDP measured by exchange rate, or also India if by PPP. The region is home to the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, the White House and United States Capitol, the UN Headquarters, Comcast, the headquarters of ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, the New York Times Company, and The Washington Post. The headquarters of many major financial companies – such as State Street, Citigroup, and Fidelity – are located within the region, which is home to 54 of the Fortune Global 500 companies. The region is also the center of the global hedge fund industry, with 47.9% of $2.48 trillion of hedge fund assets being managed in its cities and suburbs. Similarly, the majority of the global private equity, venture capital, investment banking, and management consulting industries are centered and/or headquartered in this region.

Academically, the region is home to six of the eight Ivy League universities, as well as many other major universities.

Population

Combined Statistical Areas (CSAs) Within the Megalopolis

Rank (U.S.)	Combined Statistical Area (CSA)	Estimate 2006	Census 2000	Growth 1990s
1	New York-Newark-Bridgeport, NY-NJ-CT-PA CSA	22,154,752	21,361,797	+3.71%
4	Washington-Baltimore-Northern Virginia, DC-MD-VA-WV CSA	8,295,397	7,572,647	+9.54%
5	Boston-Worcester-Manchester, MA-RI-NH CSA	7,514,759	7,298,695	+2.96%
8	Philadelphia-Camden-Vineland, PA-NJ-DE-MD CSA	6,398,896	6,207,223	+3.09%

History of the megalopolis

A satellite view of the megalopolitan region at night. Photo courtesy of NASA.

The Eastern coast of the United States of America, due to its proximity to Europe, was among the first regions of the continent to be widely settled. Over time, the cities and towns founded here had the advantage of age over most other parts of the US. However, it was the Northeast in particular that developed most rapidly, due to a number of fortuitous circumstances.

While possessing neither particularly rich soil nor exceptional mineral wealth, the region is well suited enough to support some levels of both agriculture and mining. The climate is also temperate and not given to hurricanes or tropical storms, which is increasingly the case the further South the colonists went . However, the most important factor was the “interpenetration of land and sea,” which makes for exceptional harbors, such as those of Baltimore in the Chesapeake Bay, New York Harbor, and Boston Harbor. The coastline to the North is rocker and less sheltered, and to the South is smooth and does not feature as many bays and inlets that function as natural harbors. Also featured are a large number of navigable rivers that lead deeper into the heartlands. Therefore, while other parts of the country exceeded the region in raw resource value, they were not as easily accessible, and often, access to them necessarily had to pass through the Northeast first.

By 1800, there were four cities in the US that had populations of over 25,000: Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and Boston, all within the region. By 1850, New York and Philadelphia alone had over 300,000 residents, while Baltimore, Boston, Cincinnati, and New Orleans had over 100,000: four were within one 400-mile strip, while the last two were each four hundred miles away from the next closest metropolis. The immense concentration of people in one relatively densely-packed area gave that region considerable sway through population density alone over the rest of the nation, which was solidified when Washington, DC, only 35 miles Southeast of Baltimore, was made the capital in 1800. According to Gottmann, capital cities “will tend to create for and around the seats of power a certain kind of built environment, singularly endowed, for instance, with monumentality, stressing status and ritual, a trait that will increase with duration.” The transportation and telecommunications infrastructure that the capital city mandated also spilled over into the rest of the strip.

Additionally, the proximity to Europe, as well as the prominence of Ellis Island as an immigrant processing center, made New York especially but also the cities nearby a “landing wharf for European immigrants,” who represented an ever-replenished supply of diversity of thought and determined workers.. By contrast, the other major source of trans-oceanic immigrants was China, which was significantly farther from the US’s West Coast than Europe was from the East, and whose ethnicity made them targets of racial discrimination, creating barriers to their seamless integration into American society.

By 1950, the region held over a fifth of the total US population, with a density nearly 15 times that of the national average.

Megalopolis as a concept

Jean Gottmann wrote his most famous work, Megalopolis, around the central theory that the cities between Washington, DC and Boston, MA together form a sort of cohesive, integrated “supercity.” He took the term “Megalopolis” from a small Greek town that had been settled in the Classical Era with the hopes of spanning all of Greece in a massive urban sprawl; though it still exists today, it is just a sleepy agricultural community. The dream of the founders of the original Megalopolis, Gottmann argued, was being realized in the Northeastern US in the 1960s.

Gottmann defined two criteria for a group of cities to be a true megalopolis: “polynuclear structure” and “manifold concentration:” that is, the presence of multiple urban nuclei, which exist independently of each other yet are integrated in a special way relative to sites outside their area.

To this end, “twin cities” such as Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota would not be considered a megalopolitan formation, as the boundary between them is arbitrary and they are not truly separate urban areas. Large communities on the outskirts of major cities, such as Silver Spring or Bethesda in Maryland outside of Washington, DC, are clearly distinct areas with even their own downtowns. However, they are not truly independent of their host city, being still considered suburbs that would almost certainly not have developed in the ways that they have without the presence of Washington.

On the other hand, the major cities of the Boston-Washington Megalopolis all are distinct, independent cities, yet are closely linked by transportation and telecommunications. Neil Gustafson showed in 1961 that the vast majority of phone calls originating in the region terminate elsewhere in the region, and it is only a minority that are routed to elsewhere in the US or abroad.. Business ventures unique to the region have sprung up that capitalize on the interconnectedness of the megalopolis, such as airline shuttle services, that operate short flights between Boston-New York and New York-Washington that leave every half-hour; and the Chinatown bus lines, which offer economy transportation between the cities’ Chinatowns and elsewhere. Other bus lines operating exclusively in the megalopolitan area owned by national or international corporations have also arisen in recent years, such as BoltBus and Megabus. The National Railroad Passenger Corporation, Amtrak, offers high-speed service only from Washington to Boston, on its Acela line. These ventures indicate not only the dual “independent nuclei”/“interlinked system” nature of the megalopolis, but also a broad public understanding of and capitalization on the concept.

The academic community has been broadly accepting of Gottmann’s Megalopolis. John Rennie Short authored a major update to Gottmann’s book in 2007, Liquid City: Megalopolis and the Contemporary Northeast. The National Geographic Society released a map in 1994 of the region at the time of the Revolutionary War and in present day, which borrowed Gottmann’s book’s title and referred to him by name. Senator Claiborne Pell wrote a full-length book entitled Megalopolis Unbound in 1966, which summarized and then expanded on the original book to outline his vision for a cohesive transportation policy in the region (of which his state, Rhode Island, is part of). Futurists Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener coined the term “BosWash” in 1967 as a replacement for “Megalopolis.” While the new name has gained some popularity, being featured in Newsweek,. the Random House Dictionary, and study materials published by The Princeton Review,, it is still largely absent from public vocabulary, unlike the term “Megalopolis,” which was plucked from ancient obscurity by Gottmann and is a common term today.