Beyond Megalopolis: Exploring America’S New “Megapolitan” Geography Robert E
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METROPOLITAN INSTITUTE CENSUS REPORT SERIES Census Report 05:01 (July 2005) Beyond Megalopolis: Exploring America’s New “Megapolitan” Geography Robert E. Lang Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech Dawn Dhavale Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech “... the ten Main Findings Megapolitans • The Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech identifies ten US “Megapolitan have a Areas”— clustered networks of metropolitan areas that exceed 10 million population total residents (or will pass that mark by 2040). • Six Megapolitan Areas lie in the eastern half of the United States, while equal to four more are found in the West. Megapolitan Areas extend into 35 states, France, including every state east of the Mississippi River except Vermont. Sixty Germany, and percent of the Census Bureau’s “Consolidated Statistical Areas” are found in the United Megapolitan Areas, as are 39 of the nation’s 50 most populous metropolitan Kingdom areas. • As of 2003, Megapolitan Areas contained less than a fifth of all land area in combined, the lower 48 states, but captured more than two-thirds of total US population or about with almost 200 million people. 202 million • Megapolitan Areas are expected to add 83 million people (or the current residents in population of Germany) by 2040, accounting for seven in every ten new Americans. By 2040, a projected 33 trillion dollars will be spent on 2005.” Megapolitan building construction. The figure represents over three quarters of all the capital that will be expended nationally on private real estate development. • In 2004, Democratic candidate John Kerry won the Megapolitan Area popular vote by 51.6 percent to 48.4 for President George W. Bush—or almost the exact reverse of the nation as a whole. Kerry received 46.4 million Megapolitan votes, while Bush won 43.5 million. In total, 343 of 435 House seats lie either fully or partly in Megapolitan Areas, which means that almost four in five US House members represent at least a section of a Mega. 2005 METROPOLITAN INSTITUTE AT VIRGINIA TECH § CENSUS REPORT SERIES BEYOND MEGALOPOLIS: EXPLORING AMERICA’S NEW “MEGAPOLITAN” GEOGRAPHY Introduction: From Megalopolis to Megapolitan inventiveness. By the time Gottmann “revisited” the megalopolis in the late 1980s (Gottmann 1987, ...the Megapolitan concept seems to have Gottmann and Harper 1990), he acknowledged popularized the idea that the modern cities are that several other US regions could qualify as better reviewed not in isolation, as centers of a Megapolitan. He noted especially the cases of the restricted area only, but rather as parts of “city- Midwest and West Coast, but also saw a nascent systems,” as participants in urban networks megalopolis forming in the South around Atlanta revolving in widening orbits. (1987). This study identifies ten “Megapolitan Areas,” found in all regions of the country, not just Jean Gottmann (1987, p. 52) in the Northeast. Geographer Jean Gottmann, writing over two Gottmann’s work influenced academics but had no decades after publishing his influential book impact on the way the US Census Bureau defines Megalopolis (1961),1 understood the impact space, probably in part because at the time his that his thinking had on urban theory. Now, work discussed a single, unique region. But the two decades later still, a new trans-metropolitan idea of a functional trans-metropolitan geography geography is emerging that advances many of is one that warrants the Census Bureau’s attention. Gottmann’s ideas. Researchers in the United Regional economies now clearly extend beyond an States and Europe are proposing new methods for individual metro area. The Megapolitan concept classifying and tracking the megalopolis (Faludi recognizes this fact and suggests a new geography 2002 Yaro et al. 2004, Yaro and Carbonell 2004, to show which regional economies are linked. Carbonell and Yaro 2005). And while Gottmann was specifically referring to the northeastern When the Census Bureau formally recognizes a United States, the latest round of research extends geographic concept, it gains power. Consider a the concept to clusters of networked metropolitan recent example. Rural development advocates areas around the world. For example, European lobbied the Census Bureau for years to redefine researchers argue that large-scale urbanized areas more heavily settled rural areas as quasi- are the primary geographic unit for integration into metropolitan places (Lang and Dhavale 2004). In the world economy (Faludi 2002). The European 2003, the US Office of Management and Budget Union [EU] currently has one well-defined “global (OMB), which oversees the Census Bureau, integration zone”—the area inside the so-called responded with the designation “Micropolitan “Pentagon” that runs from London to Hamburg Area.” Now micropolitans are literally on the map. to Munich to Milan to Paris and back to London Businesses, government agencies, and planners (Schon 2002). have new geography to work with. Publications took notice—Site Selection Magazine, for example, This Census Report updates Gottmann’s started a list of “Top Micropolitans” in which to megalopolis to current trends in American locate businesses (Starner 2005). trans-metropolitan development.2 Gottmann’s original study of the northeast’s megalopolis Megapolitan Areas (or “Megas”) have a similar (1961) held that the region was unique in several potential. Once Megas are officially recognized, ways, including its large size and commercial private industries and government agencies would 2005 METROPOLITAN INSTITUTE AT VIRGINIA TECH § CENSUS REPORT SERIES 2 BEYOND MEGALOPOLIS: EXPLORING AMERICA’S NEW “MEGAPOLITAN” GEOGRAPHY embrace them.3 And there are clearly cases Regionalists saw a radical shift in metropolitan where the Megapolitan scale is the most logical structure, away from a monocentric metropolis one at which to address problems. Consider the and toward a more dispersed network of cities recent debate over the fate of Amtrak—America’s and villages arrayed across a vast—although National Railroad Passenger Corporation. The integrated—space they called the “urban region” Bush administration wants to eliminate all Amtrak (Fishman 2000). After the mid 20th century, most funding in the 2006 federal budget. Defending this new urban growth occurred outside the regional action, the US Secretary of Transportation, Norman core, which fueled the development of sprawling Mineta, wrote in the New York Times that “The and often connected metropolitan areas. The problem is not that Americans don’t use trains; proposed “urban region” concept is thus the it is that Amtrak has failed to keep up with the progenitor of the Megapolitan Area. times, stubbornly sticking to routes and services, even as they lose money and attract few users” In the year following the Mumford-Adams debate, (2005, p. A19). Amtrak is a national rail system urban sociologist R.D. McKenzie (1933) published with a profitable line connecting big Northeastern The Metropolitan Community. This book formally cities that offsets losses on service to remote rural laid out the regionalist’s thinking. McKenzie locals. As illustrated below, Megapolitan Areas argued that American metropolitan development: have two qualities—concentrated populations and often corridor form—that make them excellent ...is tending to concentrate more and more geographic units around which Amtrak could be in large regional aggregates. In every such reorganized. aggregate, the population tends to subdivide and become multinucleated in a complex of centers The Evolving Megapolitan Idea that are economically integrated into a larger unity (p. 1). The concept of a large-scale, trans-metropolitan urban structure has been debated among planners According to Thomas (2000), Gottmann’s since the early 20th century. The idea can be Megalopolis: “effectively completed the analysis traced to a famous exchange in the pages of of metropolitan regionalism undertaken by R.D. the New Republic during the summer of 1932 McKenzie three decades earlier” (p. 50). Like between noted theorist and critic Lewis Mumford McKenzie, Gottmann emphasized economic and Thomas Adams, director of the Region Plan integration. of New York and Environs (now the Regional Plan Association, or RPA).4 The debate pitted RPA’s Second Regional Plan in the 1960s (the first what Fishman (2000) calls “regionalists” (led appeared in the 1920s under Adams) produced a by Mumford) against “metropolitanists” (led by series of reports on growth patterns in the New Adams). Metropolitanists believed that 20th York metropolitan area. One document titled century cities would maintain their 19th century The Region’s Growth (1967) contained a section form even as they grew to 10 or 20 million on what it called “The Atlantic Urban Region” residents and extended 50 or more miles from (RPA 1967).5 This region stretched from Virginia the center (Thomas 2000). They also argued by to Maine and covered essentially the same area extension that most investment should go to fixing as Gottmann’s megalopolis.6 The RPA report the metropolitan core. 2005 METROPOLITAN INSTITUTE AT VIRGINIA TECH § CENSUS REPORT SERIES 3 BEYOND MEGALOPOLIS: EXPLORING AMERICA’S NEW “MEGAPOLITAN” GEOGRAPHY extended Gottmann’s work by including new outside academic geography (Baigent 2004, p data analysis to show regional integration. It 687). But that is now starting to change. The also projected the spread of urbanization to the current RPA president Robert Yaro has kept the year 2000 (which looks very similar to current idea of the megalopolis alive in recent years. patterns).7 The RPA report featured an aerial Yaro argues that Americans should do large-scale photo portrait that documented variation in growth European-style “spatial planning” (Yaro et al 2004, patterns from the cores to the edges of the region. Yaro and Carbonell 2004). To that end, Yaro and Armando Carbonell from the Lincoln Institute of Interestingly, The Region’s Growth appeared Land Policy organized a meeting at the Rockefeller just before the explosion of suburban office Brothers Foundation headquarters in Tarrytown, development occurred in the early 1970s (Garreau NY to begin a coordinated effort at advancing this 1991, Lang 2003, Lang et al 2005).