Run for Your Lives! It’s Megalopolis!

When I was about 12 or 13 years old–this would have been about 1964 or 1965–my elementary school principal gathered the upper classes into the auditorium and gave a lecture about megalopolis, the huge expanse of urbanized land stretching from Boston to Washington. I don’t know why he did that–as far as I can recall, he never gave a lecture on any other subject while I was at that school–but he was obviously inspired by French geographer Jean Gottmann’s book, Megalopolis.

At 810 pages in length, the book was as massive as its subject, but its thesis was simple. As stated in his introduction, Gottmann held that “The Northeastern seaboard of the United States is today the site of a remarkable development–an almost continuous stretch of urban and suburban areas from southern New Hampshire to northern Virginia and from the Atlantic shore to the Appalachian foothills.” This unique (at least in the United States) area has unique problems, Gottmann contended, including “Transportation, land use, water supply, cultural activities, use and development of resources.” Moreover, because it was chopped into eleven states or parts of states, the region’s residents weren’t able to solve those problems. As a result, he predicted, poverty, resource shortages, and pollution were likely to get worse.

The good news, he added, was that the region, which has since been labeled BosWash, was also populated with some very smart elites. If only they would get together and do some top-down planning over the entire interstate area, he argued, they should be able to solve many of the area’s problems. “Local government powers and planning theory in general are not adapted to deal with the entanglements of the new situation,” Gottmann wrote in a later follow-up book.

Originally published in 1961, the book may have inspired Congress to mandate the creation of metropolitan planning organizations in 1962. It certainly encouraged the federal government to increasingly rely on regional planning to deal with transportation and housing issues.

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Yet Gottmann was completely wrong: the land between southern New Hampshire and northern Virginia is not even close to being fully developed. That was shown in this 1976 density graph that reveals four urban areas, each surrounded by flat (meaning relatively unpopulated) land. It is also shown by more recent data for the four combined metropolitan statistical areas that make up BosWash. Based on county-by-county data from the 2010 census, the counties in those four areas are less than 35 percent urbanized.

Gottmann’s definition of the area (as shown on his map on page 6 of the book) is bigger than those four combined areas; only 30 percent of his region has been developed, while the remaining 70 percent has a population density of about 1 person for every four acres. This is a full half century after Gottmann wrote his book during which the region’s population grew by 50 percent. At the rate it is currently growing, it will take more than another half century for Gottmann’s 1961 claim to come true, and I doubt it will keep growing that fast for that long.

Despite this, the Huffington Post recently published a panicky article saying “New York, Boston And D.C. Could Eventually Be One Gigantic City.” This article is based on a new book, Connectography, that repeats the basic theme of Gottmann’s book: we need to have super-smart elites plan our regions for us because we are incapable of solving problems ourselves. The book’s author fully expects those plans will result in more high-speed rail and urban rail transit, as if they will solve any problems (except how to spend excess money).

Fifty years of regional planning by metropolitan planning organizations haven’t solved any of the region’s (or regions’) problems. The area is more congested than ever. It is less polluted, but that’s thanks to national EPA standards. There’s less crime and fewer slums, but that’s thanks to local efforts. There haven’t been any critical resource shortages thanks mainly to what passes for a free market. All the regional planning has done is create artificial housing shortages and waste lots of money on functionally obsolete transportation systems.

Urban planners often pay lip service to the phrase, think globally, act locally, but it has actually been credited to an anarchist. Instead of worrying about megalopolises that don’t exist and might never exist, we would do better to focus on solving local problems.