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The Great Lakes megalopolis is a hypothetical urban agglomeration encompassing the southern Great Lakes Region of the United States and Canada. In the mid-twentieth century, futurists and urban planners envisioned, based on economic and population trends at the time, that by the year 2000 a continuous metropolitan area would stretch from the Twin Cities of Minnesota in the west to Toronto and Pittsburgh in the east and be home to many tens of millions of people.[1][2]
The concept is particularly associated with the writings of urban planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis, who prepared a planning study for Detroit in 1966, envisioning that city as the centrally-located "hub" of the megalopolis, with the associated metropolitan area home to some 15 million people.[2] Doxiadis' ideas were elaborated upon in a subsequent paper, which projected a population of 39 to 52 million in the "main" (Chicago to Pittsburgh, excluding Canada) portion of the megalopolis by 2000.[3] However, in the ensuing decades, the region's population growth proved far more modest than Doxiadis predicted (by 2020 the entire population of Michigan was only a little over 10 million [ ]), and deindustrialization and centralization of agriculture led to depopulation of the urban cores and rural areas of the region, respectively. [ ] Today the concept of a "Great Lakes megalopolis" has little recognition, though the region does contain many large metropolitan areas including Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Buffalo, and Toronto.
History of the concept
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The region was partially outlined as an emergent megalopolis in the 1961 book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States by French geographer Jean Gottmann, who predicted the growth of the Northeast Megalopolis of the United States. A few years later, futurist Herman Kahn, sociologist Daniel Bell, and historian Stephen Richards Graubard similarly predicted a megalopolis stretching from Chicago to Pittsburgh.[1] The idea then reached its fullest development in the writings of Doxiadis, but fell from favor following Doxiadis' 1975 death.
Several decades later, the Regional Plan Association released the America 2050 report, identifying eleven "megaregions" with interdependent economies and infrastructure, with emphasis on transportation and land-use planning. [ ] Among these was the so-called "Great Lakes Megaregion", though the UPA avoided the term "megalopolis" and specifically stated the megaregions were defined based on "layers of relationships that together define a common interest", and not on actual existence of continuous urban development.[5][A]
References
[edit]- ^ a b Bell, Daniel; Stephen Richards Graubard (1997). Toward the year 2000: work in progress. MIT Press. p. 87. ISBN 0-262-52237-3.
- ^ a b "Capital for the New Megalopolis". Time. New York, NY: Time USA. 4 Nov 1966. Retrieved 2 Nov 2024.
{{cite magazine}}: Check|archive-url=value (help) - ^ Doxiadis, Constantinos (2005). "The Emerging Great Lakes Megalopolis". Ekistics. 430–435: 167–188. Retrieved 2 Nov 2024.
- ^ "Megaregions - America 2050". Archived from the original on 2018-08-09. Retrieved 29 April 2023.
- ^ America 2050: Megaregions: Great Lakes. Archived 2020-02-20 at the Wayback Machine Regional Plan Association.
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Category:Megapolitan areas of the United States Category:Metropolitan areas of Canada Category:Midwestern United States Category:Great Lakes region (U.S.) Category:Geographic regions of Ontario Category:Chicago metropolitan area Category:Regions of Illinois Category:Regions of Ohio Category:Transborder agglomerations