Megalopolis

Earliest uses of the Term

The 1828 edition of Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language records the earliest known use of megalopolis, which it defined in terms of size and importance as “a chief city; a metropolis.” This use is atypically neutral, but confirms that the term has always had most currency in North America. In The Interpreter Geddes (1927), the geographer and visionary Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) used megalopolis in a stage model of city growth and [Page 1128]decay that was characteristic of his use in the social sciences of the concept of evolution. Geddes's “Polis” (city) grew successively into “Metro-polis” (the capital), “Megalo-polis” (the city overgrown), “Parasito-polis” (the degenerate city), “Pathalopolis” (the diseased city), and finally “Necro-polis” (the city of the dead).

Geddes's pupil Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) extended the model. In The Culture of Cities (1938), he identifies six stages of evolution from “eopolis” (village) to “polis” (association of villages) to “metropolis” (capital city emerges) to “megalopolis” (“the beginning of the decline”) to “tyrannopolis” (the overexpansion of the urban system based on economic exploitation), and finally to “nekropolis” (war and famine, city abandoned).

Mumford's use of the term and his gloomy prophesies continued in The City in History (1961) and in the double volume The Myth of the Machine I: Technics and Human Development (1967) and The Myth of the Machine II: The Pentagon of Power (1970), the latter of which uses images of New York's World Trade Center twin towers as exemplars of the “purposeless giantism” and “technological exhibitionism” of megalopolitan culture.

In 1961 the urban geographer Jean Gottmann (1915–94) published Megalopolis, which used the term “as a geographical place name for the unique cluster of metropolitan areas of the Northeastern seaboard of the United States.” Gottmann's use of megalopolis consciously echoed its history as a place name in antiquity (Megalopolis was a city in the Peloponnese, Greece, founded in 371–368 b.c.e.) and, probably unconsciously, challenged the work of Geddes, who in Cities in Evolution (1915) had coined the term conurbation for the more or less continuous urban development characteristic of the same region, which he found to be “depressing life… [with] disease and folly…vice and apathy…indolence and crime.” Gottmann describes Megalopolis neutrally as “an extraordinarily interesting laboratory in vivo,” but he admired it for the material and cultural opportunities it offered its inhabitants.

Conceit or Concept?

Whether “megalopolis” is an empty conceit or an unjustifiably neglected concept rests on whether the term has explanatory force. When Geddes and Mumford used the term, they were arguing by analogy from biology: organisms develop and decay, so too will cities because they are “organic.” To Geddes's argument by analogy from nature, Mumford added an argument by extrapolation: because cities had fallen in the past, so would they in the future.

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