The Northeast megalopolis is the most heavily urbanized region of the United
States, running primarily northeast to southwest from the northern suburbs of
Boston, Massachusetts, to the southern suburbs of Washington, D.C., in Northern
Virginia. It includes the major cities of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., along with their metropolitan areas and
suburbs as well as many smaller urban centers.
On a map, the Northeast megalopolis appears almost as a straight line. As of
the year 2000, the region supported 49.6 million people, about 17% of the U.S.
population on less than 2% of the nation’s land area, with a population
density of 931.3 people per square mile, compared to the U.S. average of 80.5 per
square mile 2. America 2050 projections expect the area to grow to 58.1 million
people by 2025. French geographer Jean Gottmann
popularized the term in his landmark 1961 study of the region, Megalopolis:
The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. Gottmann concluded
that the region's cities, while discrete and independent, are uniquely tied to
each other through the intermeshing of their suburban zones, taking on some
characteristics of a single, massive city: a megalopolis.
Region The megalopolis encompasses the District
of Columbia and part or all of 11 states: from south to north, Virginia,
Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode
Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. It is linked by Interstate 95
and U.S. Route 1, which start in Miami and Key West, Florida, respectively, and
terminate in Maine at the Canada–United States border, as well as the Northeast
Corridor railway line, the busiest passenger rail line in the country. It
is home to over 50 million people, and Metropolitan Statistical Areas are
contiguous from Washington to Boston. The region is not uniformly populated
between the terminal cities, and there are regions nominally within the
corridor yet located away from the main transit lines that have been bypassed by
urbanization, such as Connecticut's Quiet Corner.
The region accounts for 20% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. It is home to
the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, the White House and United States
Capitol, the UN Headquarters, and the headquarters of ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox,
Comcast, the New York Times Company, USA Today, and The Washington Post. The
headquarters of many major financial companies—such as J.P. Morgan Chase,
Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae, and Fidelity—are located within the
region, which is also home to 54 of the Fortune Global 500 companies. The
headquarters of 162 of the Fortune 500 are in the region. 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. Academically,
the region is home to six of the eight Ivy League universities.
Population Largest Combined Statistical Areas
within the Northeast megalopolis History
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 by
Europeans. 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, owing to a number of fortuitous
circumstances. While possessing neither particularly
rich soil—one exception being New England's Connecticut River Valley—nor
exceptional mineral wealth, the region does support some agriculture and
mining. The climate is also temperate and not particularly prone to hurricanes
or tropical storms, which increase further south. However, the most
important factor was the "interpenetration of land and sea,"
which makes for exceptional harbors, such as those at Chesapeake Bay, the
Port of New York and New Jersey, the Port of Providence, and Boston Harbor.
The coastline to the north is rockier 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, such as the Delaware River and Connecticut River,
which both support large populations. 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, the region included the only
four U.S. cities with populations of over 25,000: Philadelphia, New York,
Baltimore, and Boston. By 1850, New York and Philadelphia alone had over 300,000
residents, while Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Cincinnati, and New Orleans
had over 100,000: five 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 over the rest of the
nation, which was solidified in 1800 when Washington, D.C., only 38 miles
southwest of Baltimore, was made the capital. 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 farther from the U.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 one-fifth of the total U.S. population, with a
density nearly 15 times that of the national average.
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 U.S. 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–Saint Paul in Minnesota would not be considered a megalopolitan
area since both cities are fairly integrated with each other even though
both cities have distinct city borders and large central business districts.
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 in any way
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, while the major
cities of the Boston–Washington megalopolis all are distinct,
independent cities, they 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 United States or
abroad. In 2010 automobiles carried 80% of Boston-Washington corridor travel;
intercity buses 8-9%; Amtrak 6%; and airlines 5%. 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, Amtrak's Acela Express high-speed rail service from Washington
to Boston, and the Chinatown bus lines, which offer economy transportation
between the cities’ Chinatowns and elsewhere. Other bus lines operating in
the megalopolitan area owned by national or international corporations have also
appeared, such as BoltBus and Megabus. 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.
Among examples of academic acceptance of Gottmann’s Megalopolis concept, 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. Futurists Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener coined the term "BosWash"
in 1967 in their predictions concerning the area described by Gottmann as
"Megalopolis". Use in fiction
The immensity of the megalopolis, and the idea that it might one day form an
actual uninterrupted city, has inspired several authors and has resulted in
extrapolations of the current megalopolis appearing in fiction.
Examples include William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, which envisions a future
Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis known as The Sprawl, and the even larger
Quebec-Florida Mega-City One from the Judge Dredd films and comic book series.
See also Metropolitan Statistical Area
Conurbation Megalopolis
Megaregions of the United States BosWash
Northeast Corridor Northeastern United States
References