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Fun with Megalopolises
I am in the process of writing a book. That probably should not be a surprise considering it’s the twentieth book I have written in the last four years. In a chapter recently in process, a character makes a superlative statement about the city she lives in, and another character makes a qualifying statement about how there are many larger cities, it’s simply that sometimes cities grow into each other until one can no longer tell where one ends and the next begins. When I wrote this, I was specifically thinking of the Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington, DC. That area is sometimes named for Joe Biden’s favorite train and called the Acela Corridor.
Curious, I looked for more information on the area, and found that one of the official names is the Northeast Megaregion, although the more common term for one of these conglomerations globally is a megalopolis. It has about fifty-eight million people in the several cities in that string of beads. Of course, I went looking for more information on megalopolises, because who wouldn’t? (Okay, okay, maybe what my attention is drawn to is not what fascinates the average person. Settle down out there.)
Naturally, I figured that some of the largest megalopolises would be in Asia, and I was not wrong. China has three that are well over a hundred million people in population. One all the way to a hundred-fifty million. There are lots of countries that don’t even have a hundred million people as a total population, and China has three megalopolises that blow right past that number. They have a total of thirteen megalopolises, by the way, with the smallest at over eleven million people.
Elsewhere in Asia, the belt that includes Tokyo in Japan has over eighty-million people. India has three megalopolises, although they only range between twenty-five and forty-six million. I expected more and larger for India. Two other standouts in Asia are the megalopolises that contain Jakarta and Manila.
Africa’s largest is the Nile Delta Megalopolis at fifty million people.
Then we come to Europe. Europe’s megalopolises are the most fun both on maps and by names. Their three largest are the Blue Banana, Golden Banana, and Green Banana. They have three more, but they are all under fifteen million people. The Blue Banana goes from Liverpool, down through London, across to pick up cities in the Netherlands and Belgium, plus a lot of the Rhine Valley, extending into France to pick up minor towns such as Paris and then on through Switzerland to pick up Turin, Milan, and Venice in Italy. That is the largest non-Asian megalopolis at between 110-130 million people.
The Golden Banana goes from Turin in Italy, picks up Genoa, then cruises along the coast to pick up the South of France, Monaco, Andorra, and the Eastern regions of Spain. The Green Banana picks up much of central Europe’s cities going through Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, and so forth to Trieste in Italy. All the bananas end in Italy.
South America has nineteen with the largest covering Brazilian cities, such as Rio and São Paulo at about fifty-one million.
North America has eight. That includes such as Mexico City with thirty million people, one in Canada they call the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor, and the Northeast Megaregion in the US I already mentioned. It also includes one more. It’s the largest megaregion or megalopolis in North America. It includes that Quebec City-Windsor Corridor as part of it, but keeps going along the Great Lakes on both sides so that it includes Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, those weird cities in Ohio and Wisconsin, and other Rust Belt places. That’s right. The Great Lakes Megalopolis is the largest in the New World. Forget the Northeast Corridor. Forget Southern California. Forget the Texas Triangle. The Great Lakes is the center of the New World.
Do you live in a Megalopolis? (Or a Magalopolis?) Would you prefer not to? What’s the best megalopolis you have ever visited?
Published in Humor
Has it occurred to you that the ones without the vibe are the weird ones?
My idea of a cozy, warm home town, where everybody knows your name. In the future? Coruscant, here we come!
Yep, just along the lake and up the river a meander. Howdy, Neighbor!
That looks a little bit as if someone had dug a canal along the Michigan and Wisconsin borders to separate them.
Yet Mayor Pete hails from there and has bought a house in SW Michigan (to prepare for a Senate run in ???).
Those are the normal cities. It’s the rest of them that need to be watched.
Tiffin.
I thought about it but the other canals have a higher priority.
That’s where my former girlfriend went to college, Heidelberg University. I went there nearly 40 years ago(!) for her graduation ceremony. I’d never heard the phrase “in absentia” before until the master of ceremonies started using it for kids who weren’t there. I thought it was a little pompous that the guy couldn’t speak plain English!
Next thing one knows, he’d be using words like “megalopolis.”
I think that should be capitalized. Isn’t that the place where Superman and Clark Kent lived?
That would make it this place:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalopolis,_Greece
That was Metropolis.
I thought that was when one company has control over an entire industry.
Megalopolis was a city in Arcadia founded due to the influence of the Theban general Epaminondas as a counterweight to Sparta in 371 BC.
Everybody knows that.
No, that’s Monotony.
That is the act of converting assets to cash.
*Shakes head.*
See what you started?
No, but I do see what you started.
C’mon, guys. This is getting a little monogamous.