"Supercity" redirects here. For other uses, see Super City. Show
A megalopolis () or a supercity,[1] also called a megaregion,[2] is a group of metropolitan areas which are perceived as a continuous urban area through common systems of transport, economy, resources, ecology, and so on.[2] They are integrated enough that coordinating policy is valuable, although the constituent metropolises keep their individual identities.[2] The megalopolis concept has become highly influential as it introduced a new, larger scale thinking about urban patterns and growth.[3] Etymology and earlier definitions[edit]The term megalopolis, also sometimes spelled megapolis,[citation needed] is described as being of Greek origin—where it was in reported use by ancient philosophers, with regard to the "world of ideas"—by Jean Gottmann, a professor of political science at the University of Paris, and member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, who in the late 1950s and early 1960s directed "A Study of Megalopolis" for The Twentieth Century Fund.[4] Specifically, the term has earlier, specifically geographic definitions dating to 1832, when its meaning was "a metropolis," that is, "a very large, heavily populated urban complex", which is noted to derive from the Greek mégas, meaning "great", and pólis, meaning "city".[5][6] The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that the term was used "in classical times as an epithet of great cities (Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria)", that is, for the large cities of that day, and that it was the "name of a former city in Arcadia".[5] Gottmann, in his extensive studies, applied the term megalopolis to an analysis of the urbanized northeastern seaboard of the U.S., in particular from Boston, Massachusetts to Washington, D.C. (now commonly referred to as the Northeast Corridor).[4][7] He chose the term megalopolis in consultation with classicists, noting earlier usage "with quite different meaning" (besides by the ancients, by Lewis Mumford with regard to the general trend in history and geography "toward large cities").[4] [Mumford, in his The Culture of Cities (1938), describes their formation as the first stage in urban overdevelopment and social decline.][8] In 1994, William S. Ellis and the editors of the National Geographic, writing about the city of Boston, asserted that Gottmann's c.1961 use of the term for the Northeast megalopolis was the first specific use of the term with the refined meaning of an amalgam of multiple urban areas into a larger area.[9] Yoav Hagler, writing in 2009 for the America 2050 project of the Regional Plan Association (RPA) likewise, in introducing the term historically, states megalopolis as the antecedent of the RPA's preferred term for U.S. examples, which is "megaregion"[2] Pedagogically, the term "supercity" has been offered as a synonym for these two terms.[1] According to Syracuse University assistant professor of architecture Lydia Kallipoliti (and her students, citing Volker Welter's Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life), the term megalopolis was coined by Patrick Geddes in his 1915 book, Cities in Evolution,[10][11][12] and that it was then used by Oswald Spengler in his 1918 book The Decline of the West.[13] Modern definitions[edit]A megalopolis and its synonym megaregion, following the work of Gottmann, refer to two or more roughly adjacent metropolitan areas that, through commonality of systems—e.g., of transport, economy, resources, and ecologies—experience a blurring of the boundaries between the population centers,[2] such that while some degree of separation may remain, their perception as a continuous urban area is of value, e.g., "to coordinate policy at this expanded scale".[2] Simply put, a megalopolis (or a megaregion[14]) is a clustered network of big cities. Gottmann defined its population as 25 million,[15] while Doxiadis defined a small megalopolis a similar cluster with a population of about 10 million.[14][16] America 2050,[17] a program of the Regional Plan Association (RPA), lists 11 megaregions in the United States and Canada. Megaregions of the United States were explored in a July 2005 report by Robert E. Lang and Dawn Dhavale of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech.[18] A later 2007 article by Lang and Nelson uses 20 "megapolitan" areas grouped into 10 megaregions.[19] The concept is based on the original "Megalopolis model".[16] Modern interlinked ground transportation corridors, such as rail and highway, often aid in the development of megalopolises. Using these commuter passageways to travel throughout the megalopolis is informally called megaloping, a term coined by Davide Gadren and Stefan Berteau.[20] In Brazil, the term megarregião has a legal meaning, different from the English word megaregion: mesoregions of Brazil (mesorregião) and microregions of Brazil (microrregião). In China, the official term corresponding to the meaning of "megalopolis" is '城市群' (chéngshì qún), which literally means "city cluster". City cluster '城市群' is defined as "[a]n area in which cities are relatively densely distributed in a certain region".[21][22] Until 2019, and the publication of National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) guidelines, there was no clear distinction between "megalopolis" and "metropolitan area" (都市圈) in China.[23] Africa[edit]Egypt[edit]
South Africa[edit]
Morocco[edit]
Kenya[edit]
Asia[edit]East Asia[edit]China[edit]In July 2012, the Economist Intelligence Unit brought out a report that described 13 emerging megalopolises in China, highlighting the demographic and income trends that are shaping their development.[28] Eleven Chinese megalopolises (not necessarily drawn from the preceding source), are:
Japan[edit]Japan is made up of overlapping megapolises. The Taiheiyō Belt megapolis itself includes both the Greater Tokyo Area and Keihanshin megapoles.
South Korea[edit]
Taiwan[edit]Satellite view of western Taiwan.
Middle East[edit]Iran[edit]
Turkey[edit]Istanbul, Kocaeli, and Sakarya provinces at night
South Asia[edit]India[edit]
Southeast Asia[edit]
Philippines[edit]Mega Manila area 50,525.48 km2 is made up of 4 Regions:
Regional centers:
Total Population of Mega Manila as of 2015: (40,624,035)[47] Indonesia[edit]
Thailand[edit]
Vietnam[edit]
Europe[edit]The Blue Banana, also known as the European Megalopolis or the Liverpool-Milan axis, is a discontinuous corridor of urbanization spreading over Western and Central Europe, with a population of around 111 million. North America[edit]Canada[edit]
Mexico[edit]
Note: Tijuana, Mexico is part of the Southern California megalopolis. United States[edit]Constituent urban areas of each megalopolis are based on reckoning by a single American organization, the Regional Plan Association (RPA). The RPA definition of the Great Lakes Megalopolis includes some Canadian metropolitan areas with the United States, including some but not all major urban centres in the Windsor-Quebec City Corridor. Note that one city, Houston, is listed in two different Megalopolis regions as defined by the RPA, (the Gulf Coast and the Texas Triangle). 77% of the U.S. population lives in at least one of the megalopolises listed below.[citation needed][51][page needed]
South America[edit]Argentina[edit]
Brazil[edit]
Colombia[edit]The following megaregions in Colombia are expected to have nearly 93% (55 million people) of its population by 2030, up from the current 72%[citation needed]. There are currently four major megaregions in Colombia.
Other sources[56] show that another megaregion may be considered:
Chile[edit]
Peru[edit]
Maracaibo Lake Narrows, the city of Maracaibo connected by bridge to the Eastern Coast cities. Venezuela[edit]
Transnational urban agglomeration[edit]Africa[edit]
Asia[edit]
Europe[edit]Blue, Green and Golden Bananas, Atlantic Axis and Gulf of Finland
North America[edit]
In popular culture[edit]Metropolis[edit]Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist science-fiction drama film directed by Fritz Lang. Written by Thea von Harbou in collaboration with Lang,[68][69] it stars Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge and Brigitte Helm. Erich Pommer produced it in the Babelsberg Studios for Universum Film A.G. (Ufa). The silent film is regarded as a pioneering science-fiction movie, being among the first feature-length movies of that genre.[70] Filming took place over 17 months in 1925–26 at a cost of over five million Reichsmarks.[71] Judge Dredd[edit]In the Judge Dredd (1977) comic book series and its spinoff series, Mega-City One is a huge fictional megalopolis-size city-state covering much of what is now the Eastern United States and some of Canada. The exact geography of the city depends on which writer and artist has done which story, but from its first appearance it has been associated with New York City's urban sprawl; originally it was presented as a future New York, which was retconned as the centre of a "Mega-City One" in the very next story.[72] The Architects' Journal placed it at No. 1 in their list of "comic book cities".[73] Blade Runner[edit]Blade Runner is a 1982 neo-noir science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos. It is a loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). The film is set in a dystopian future Los Angeles of 2019, in which synthetic humans known as replicants are bio-engineered by the powerful Tyrell Corporation to work on off-world colonies. When a fugitive group of replicants led by Roy Batty (Hauer) escapes back to Earth, burnt-out cop Rick Deckard (Ford) reluctantly agrees to hunt them down. Sprawl trilogy[edit]In William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, "the Sprawl" is a colloquial name for the "Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis" (BAMA), an urban sprawl environment on a massive scale, and a fictional extension of the real Northeast megalopolis. The Sprawl is a visualization of a future where virtually the entire East Coast of the United States, from Boston to Atlanta, has melded into a single mass of urban sprawl.[74] It has been enclosed in several geodesic domes and merged into one megacity. The city has become a separate world with its own climate, no real night/day cycle, and an artificial sky that is always grey. Further reading[edit]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
External links[edit]Look up megalopolis in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Where is a megalopolis most likely to develop?A megalopolis is most likely to develop where — transportation routes and major economic development have concentrated.
Which factor best explains the movement of people from farms to cities in nineteenth century?The industrial boom of the late nineteenth century led Americans and immigrants from the world over to leave farming life and head to the city.
Which of the following is one factor that contributes to the view that the United States and Canada constitute a single geographic region?Geography Mid-terms. Which cultural group most likely inhabit northern Canada?There are three categories of Indigenous peoples in Canada: Inuit, Métis and First Nations. The Inuit primarily inhabit the northern regions of Canada.
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