Megalopolis Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

Megalopolis was an ancient mainland Greek city, founded in 369 BCE, whose name quite literally means “large city.” In the 20th century, various authors, most notably Lewis Mumford, used the term with the same general meaning as metropolis, a large city and its surrounding suburbs. In the 1950s and early 1960s, however, two authors, the French geographer Jean Gottmann and the Greek planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis, gave the term megalopolis a different and greater meaning, redefining it as an interlocking group of metropolises, forming a polynuclear urban region with at least 20 million inhabitants.

After 5 years of background research, Gottmann’s landmark book Megalopolis of 1961 profiled the 53,000-square-mile urbanized region stretching from southern New Hampshire to northern Virginia and encompassing the metropolises of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., together with many smaller intermediate and surrounding cities and suburbs. This region, sometimes known as BosWash, offered the world’s first example of a true megalopolis. While preparing his study, and more intensively afterward, Gottmann interacted with Doxiadis, who was developing an emerging new academic discipline—”ekistics, the science of human settlements.”

Ekistics provided a comprehensive framework for the spatial and design disciplines—attempting to unify geography, regional science, landscape architecture, architecture, and interior decoration and to encompass economic, social, and environmental aspects of human activity. Doxiadis developed a 15-level scale, stretching from the individual (level 1) to his envisioned, inevitable global city of the future, ecumenopolis (level 15). His model, simultaneously descriptive and predictive, assumed continuing world population growth, economic development, technological advancement, and globalization. He predicted that neighboring metropolises (level 10) would sprawl into conurbations (physically continuous built-up areas) and eventually link into a megalopolis (level 12); neighboring megalopolises would eventually consolidate as urban regions (small eperopolis); urban regions would merge into continental urban systems (eperopolis); and the continental urban systems would eventually link and integrate to form ecumenopolis.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Gottmann’s megalopolis attracted considerable attention from U.S. academics and political leaders, who often cited it in calls for metropolitan and regional government, regionally integrated utility networks, and high-speed intercity rail services. With metropolitan regions increasingly recognized as functional entities often having overlapping commuter fields with adjacent metropolises, Doxiadis launched studies of what he saw as the emerging Great Lakes megalopolis, stretching from Milwaukee and Chicago to Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Toronto, and in some versions all the way to Montreal. Japanese, Chinese, and Western European researchers began to identify megalopolises, most notably between Tokyo and Osaka, and including Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Milan. By the late 1970s, however, enthusiasm for these studies began to diminish. Long-term, grand-scale planning went out of fashion as the Thatcher-Reagan era of neoliberalism and privatization gained momentum. Most important, perhaps, growing pressure for decentralization and community planning, advocated by such authors as Jane Jacobs and Robert Goodman, reflected the power of local identity and the permanence of political boundaries and divisions. Doxiadis and Gottmann’s visions of a long-term upward shift in scale, from local to regional governments and emerging synergies, have yielded, despite globalization, to the reinforcement of local identity.

Bibliography:

Doxiadis, Constantinos A. 1968. Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gottmann, Jean. 1961. Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. New York: Twentieth Century Fund.
Kyrtsis, Alexander A. 2006. Constantinos A. Doxiadis: Text, Design Drawings, Settlements. Athens, Greece: Ikaros.
Mumford, Lewis. 1938. The Culture of Cities. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

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