Megalopolis: An Enduring Enigma

"Megalopolis" originated as a term and concept in Jean Gottmann's seminal 1961 book of that title, which so described the metropolitan corridor extending from Boston to Washington, D.C., as a new stage of human-settlement geography. The term eventually became a generic descriptor for multi-nodal urban agglomerations around the world. Liquid City: Megalopolis and the Contemporary Northeast, by John Rennie Short, re-examines Gottmann's original Megalopolis formulation using a broad range of statistical indicators and variables. Short provides a more nuanced analysis of the internal heterogeneity of the region in question, but he leaves unanswered two questions that Gottmann begged: 1) By what criteria was/is the spatial extent of Megalopolis delineated? 2) What is the significance of Megalopolis beyond that of its constituent city-regions, namely Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.? Is the whole more than the sum of its parts?