The Northeast megalopolis—also known as the Northeast Corridor, Acela Corridor,[3]Boston–Washington corridor, BosWash, or BosNYWash[4]—is the world's largest megalopolis by economic output[5] and the second-most populous megalopolis in the United States with about 50 million residents as of 2022.
The region includes many of the nation's most populated metropolitan areas, including those of New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.[8] As of 2010, it contained more than 50 million people, about 17% of the U.S. population on less than 2% of the nation's land area, with a population density of about 1,000 people per square mile (390 people/km2), far more than the U.S. average of 80.5 per square mile[9] (31 people/km2). At least one projection estimates the area will grow to 58.1 million people by 2025.[10]
French geographerJean Gottmann popularized the term megalopolis in his 1961 study of the region, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. Gottmann concluded that the region's cities, while discrete and independent, are uniquely tied to each other through the intermeshing of their suburban zones, taking on some characteristics of a single, massive city: a megalopolis, a term he co-opted from an ancient Greek town of the same name that named itself out of aspirations to become the largest Greek city.
As of 2019, the region is home to 52.3 million people, and its metropolitan statistical areas are contiguous from Washington, D.C., in the south to Boston in the north.[11] The region is not uniformly populated between the terminal cities, and there are regions nominally within the corridor yet located away from the main transit lines that have been bypassed by urbanization, such as Quiet Corner in Connecticut.
A satellite view of the Northeast megalopolitan region at night in November 2021
Due to its proximity to Europe, the Eastern coast of the United States was among the first regions of the continent to be widely settled by Europeans. Over time, the cities and towns founded on the East Coast had the advantage of age over most other parts of the U.S. However, it was the Northeast in particular that developed most rapidly, owing to a number of fortuitous circumstances.
While possessing neither particularly rich soil—one exception being New England's Connecticut River Valley—nor exceptional mineral wealth, the region still supports some agriculture and mining.[18] The climate is temperate and not particularly prone to hurricanes or tropical storms, which increase further south. However, the most important factor was the "interpenetration of land and sea,"[19] which makes for exceptional harbors, such as those at the Chesapeake Bay, the Port of New York and New Jersey, Narragansett Bay in Providence, Rhode Island, and Boston Harbor. The coastline to the north is rockier and less sheltered, and to the South is smooth and does not feature as many bays and inlets that function as natural harbors. Also featured are navigable rivers that lead deeper into the heartlands, such as the Hudson, Delaware, and Connecticut rivers, which all support large populations and were necessary to early settlers for development. Therefore, while other parts of the country exceeded the region in raw resource value, they were not as easily accessible, and often, access to them necessarily had to pass through the Northeast first.
Modern history
By 1800, the region included the only three U.S. cities with populations of over 25,000: Philadelphia, New York City, and Baltimore. By 1850, New York City and Philadelphia alone had over 300,000 residents while Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn (at that time a separate city from New York), Cincinnati, and New Orleans had over 100,000: five were within one 400-mile strip while the last two were each four hundred miles away from the next closest metropolis. The immense concentration of people in one relatively densely packed area gave that region considerable sway through population density over the rest of the nation, which was solidified in 1800 when Washington, D.C., only 38 miles southwest of Baltimore, was made the nation's capital. According to Gottmann, capital cities "will tend to create for and around the seats of power a certain kind of built environment, singularly endowed, for instance, with monumentality, stressing status and ritual, a trait that will increase with duration."[20] The transportation and telecommunications infrastructure that the capital city mandated also spilled over into the rest of the strip.
Additionally, the proximity to Europe, as well as the prominence of Ellis Island as an immigrant processing center, made New York City and cities nearby a "landing wharf for European immigrants," who represented an ever replenished supply of diversity of thought and determined workers.[21] By contrast, the other major source of trans-oceanic immigrants was China, which was farther from the U.S. West Coast than Europe was from the East, and whose ethnicity made them targets of racial discrimination, creating barriers to their seamless integration into American society. By 1950, the region held over one-fifth of the total U.S. population, with a density nearly 15 times that of the national average.[22]
The region has been home to the richest city in the nation for over 200 years: Hartford, Connecticut held the title from the pre–Civil War industrial era until about 1929, and New York City has held it since.[citation needed]Loudoun and Fairfax County, Virginia are the wealthiest counties in the country, and Connecticut’s Gold Coast has one of the highest population densities of families worth over $30 million USD.[citation needed]
The concept of megalopolises originated with Jean Gottmann, a French geographer who wrote Megalopolis, a book whose central theory was that the cities between Washington, D.C., and Boston together form a sort of cohesive, integrated "supercity." He took the term megalopolis from a small Greek town that was settled in the Classical Era with the hope it would "become the largest of the Greek cities". The city still exists today, but is largely a sleepy agricultural community. However, the dream of the city's founders, Gottmann argued, was being realized in the Northeastern U.S. in the 1960s with the ascent of the region to global political, academic, and economic prominence.[23]
Gottmann defined two criteria for a group of cities to be a true megalopolis: “polynuclear structure” and “manifold concentration:” that is, the presence of multiple urban nuclei, which exist independently of each other yet are integrated in a special way relative to sites outside their area.
To this end, twin cities, such as Minneapolis–Saint Paul in Minnesota would not be considered a megalopolitan area since both cities are fairly integrated, even though both cities have distinct city borders and large central business districts. Large communities on the outskirts of major cities, such as Silver Spring or Bethesda in Maryland outside of Washington, D.C., are clearly distinct areas with even their own downtowns. However, they are not in any way independent of their host city, being still considered suburbs that would almost certainly not have developed in the ways that they have without the presence of Washington.
On the other hand, while the major cities of the Northeast megalopolis all are distinct, independent cities, they are closely linked by transportation and telecommunications. Neil Gustafson showed in 1961 that the vast majority of phone calls originating in the region terminate elsewhere in the region, and it is only a minority that are routed to elsewhere in the United States or abroad.[24] In 2010 automobiles carried 80% of Boston-Washington corridor travel; intercity buses 8–9%; Amtrak 6%; and airlines 5%.[25] Business ventures unique to the region have sprung up that capitalize on the interconnectedness of the megalopolis, such as airline shuttle services that operate short flights between Boston and New York City and New York City and Washington, D.C. that leave every half-hour,[26] Amtrak's Acela Express high-speed rail service from Washington to Boston, and the Chinatown bus lines, which offer economy transportation between the cities' Chinatowns and elsewhere. Other bus lines operating in the megalopolitan area owned by national or international corporations have also appeared, such as BoltBus and Megabus. These ventures indicate not only the dual "independent nuclei"/"interlinked system" nature of the megalopolis, but also a broad public understanding of and capitalization on the concept.
In 2007, Gottmann's "megalopolis" concept was largely supported by John Rennie Short, who authored an update to Gottmann’s book, Liquid City: Megalopolis and the Contemporary Northeast. National Geographic Society released a map in 1994 of the region at the time of the American Revolutionary War and in present day, which borrowed Gottmann's book's title. U.S. SenatorClaiborne Pell wrote a book, Megalopolis Unbound in 1966, which summarized and expanded on Gottman's original book to outline his vision for a cohesive transportation policy in the region, including his state of Rhode Island. In 1967, futuristsHerman Kahn and Anthony Wiener coined the term "BosWash" to predict that the region would emerge as the sort of megalopolis initially described by Gottmann.[27]
^Rottmann, Jean (1961). Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. New York: The Twentieth Century Fund. p. 3.
^"Northeast". America 2050. Retrieved August 6, 2018.
^Gottman, J. (1957). "Megalopolis or the Urbanization of the Northeastern Seaboard". Economic Geography. 33 (3): 189–200 (p. 191). doi:10.2307/142307. JSTOR142307.
^Short, John Rennie (2007). Liquid City: Megalopolis and the Contemporary Northeast. Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future. p. 23.
^Todorovich, Petra; Hagler, Yoav (January 2011). "High Speed Rail in America"(PDF). America 2050. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
^Gottmann, Jean (1990). Harper, Robert A. (ed.). Since Megalopolis: The Urban Writings of Jean Gottman. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 63–64. ISBN0-8018-3812-6.
Core cities are metropolitan core cities of at least a million people. The other areas are urban areas of cities that have an urban area of 150,000+ or of a metropolitan area of at least 250,000+. Satellite cities are in italics.
Washington, D.C.
New York City (8,804,190).jpg)
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