Megalopolis (city type)

A megalopolis (sometimes called a megapolis; also megaregion, or supercity) is typically defined as a chain of roughly adjacent metropolitan areas. The term was used by Patrick Geddes in his 1915 book Cities in Evolution, by Oswald Spengler in his 1918 book The Decline of the West, and Lewis Mumford in his 1938 book The Culture of Cities, which described it as the first stage in urban overdevelopment and social decline. Later, it was used by Jean Gottmann in his landmark 1961 study, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States, to describe the chain of metropolitan areas along the northeastern seaboard of the U.S. extending from Boston, Massachusetts, through New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and ending in Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia. The latter is sometimes called the "BosWash megalopolis".

Megalopolis is a Western deformation of the Greek word that derived from Greek: μέγας - 'great' and Greek: πόλις - 'city', therefore literally a 'great city'. This term is closer in meaning to megacity. Because in Greek, πόλις is feminine, the correct term is megalopolis.

A megalopolis, also known as a megaregion, is a clustered network of cities. Gottmann defined its population as 25 million. Doxiadis defined a small megalopolis a similar cluster with a population of about 10 million. America 2050, a program of the Regional Plan Association, lists 11 megaregions in the United States and Canada. Literally, megalopolis in Greek means a city of exaggerated size where the prefix megalo- represents a quantity of exaggerated size.Megapolitan areas were explored in a July 2005 report by Robert E. Lang and Dawn Dhavale of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. A later 2007 article by Lang and Nelson uses 20 megapolitan areas grouped into 10 megaregions. The concept is based on the original Megalopolis model.

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