Northeast megalopolis

Northeast megalopolis
Megaregion of the U.S.
Population density in the Northeast megalopolis along the Atlantic Seaboard
Nickname(s):  Northeast corridor, BosWash, Boston–Washington corridor, Eastern Seaboard,[1] Atlantic Seaboard
Major cities of the Northeast megalopolis counterclockwise from top: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington D.C.
States	Maine  New Hampshire  Massachusetts  Rhode Island  Connecticut  New York  New Jersey  Pennsylvania  Delaware  Maryland  Virginia
Federal districts	Washington, D.C.
Largest city	New York City (8,804,190)
Area
• Total	56,200 sq mi (146,000 km2)
Population  (2010)	52,332,123
• Density	931.3/sq mi (359.6/km2)
Demonym(s)	Northeasterner

The Northeast megalopolis (also Northeast Corridor or Acela Corridor;^[2] Boston–Washington corridor, Bos-Wash corridor, or Boswash^[3]) is the most populous megalopolis located entirely in the United States, with over 50 million residents, as well as the most urbanized megalopolis in the United States and the megalopolis with the world's largest economic output.^[4] Located primarily on the Atlantic Coast in the Northeastern United States, with its lower terminus in the upper Southeast, it runs primarily northeast to southwest from the northern suburbs of Boston to the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.^[5] It includes the major cities of Boston, Providence, Hartford, New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.,^[6] along with their metropolitan areas and suburbs. It is sometimes defined to include smaller urban agglomerations beyond this, such as Richmond and Norfolk, Virginia, to the south, Portland, Maine, to the north, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to the west.^[7]

The megalopolis extends in a roughly straight line along a section of U.S. Route 1 and Interstate 95. As of 2010, the region contained over 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 approximately 1,000 people per square mile (390 people/km²), compared to the U.S. average of 80.5 per square mile ^2[8] (31 people/km²). America 2050 projections expect the area to grow to 58.1 million people by 2025.^[9][10]

French geographer Jean Gottmann popularized the term in his landmark 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.

There are hundreds of colleges and universities in the region, including Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Princeton, Yale, Penn, Johns Hopkins, and Brown, some of which are ranked among the top universities in the world.^[11]

Region[]

The megalopolis encompasses the District of Columbia and most, all, or part of 11 states: from south to north, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. It is linked by Interstate 95 and U.S. Route 1, which start in Miami and Key West, Florida, respectively, and terminate in Maine at the Canadian border, as well as the Northeast Corridor railway line, the busiest passenger rail line in the country that serves Amtrak and several commuter rail agencies. It is home to over 50 million people,^[9] and metropolitan statistical areas are contiguous from Washington to Boston.^[12] 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 Connecticut's Quiet Corner.

The region accounts for 20% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product.^[13] It is home to the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, the White House, the United States Capitol, and the United States Supreme Court, the UN Headquarters, and the headquarters of ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, Fox, Comcast, the New York Times Company, USA Today, and The Washington Post. The headquarters of many major financial companies—such as J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Capital One, and Fidelity—are located within the region, which is also home to 54 Fortune Global 500 companies. The headquarters of 162 of the Fortune 500 are in the region.^[14] The region is also the center of the global hedge fund industry, notably New York City and the Connecticut cities of Greenwich and Stamford.^[15]

Population[]

Largest cities and towns in the Northeast megalopolis with populations over 65,000^[17][18]

2020 Rank	City	Region	2020 Census	2010 Census	Change	Land area	2016 population density
1	New York City	New York	8,804,190	8,175,133	+7.69%	301.5 sq mi	28,317/sq mi
2	Philadelphia	Pennsylvania	1,603,797	1,526,006	+5.10%	134.2 sq mi	11,683/sq mi
3	Hempstead	New York	793,409	759,757	+4.43%	118.6 sq mi	6,407/sq mi
4	Washington	District of Columbia	689,545	601,723	+14.60%	61.1 sq mi	11,148/sq mi
5	Boston	Massachusetts	675,647	617,594	+9.40%	48.3 sq mi	13,938/sq mi
6	Baltimore	Maryland	585,708	620,961	−5.68%	80.9 sq mi	7,598/sq mi
7	Brookhaven	New York	485,773	486,040	−0.05%	259.4 sq mi	1,873/sq mi
8	Islip	New York	339,938	335,543	+1.31%	104.1 sq mi	3,223/sq mi
9	Newark	New Jersey	311,549	277,140	+12.42%	24.1 sq mi	11,691/sq mi
10	Oyster Bay	New York	301,442	293,214	+2.81%	103.8 sq mi	2,826/sq mi
11	Jersey City	New Jersey	292,449	247,549	+18.14%	14.8 sq mi	17,848/sq mi
12	Arlington[a]	Virginia	238,643	207,627	+14.94%	26 sq mi	7,994/sq mi
13	North Hempstead	New York	237,639	226,322	+5.00%	53.5 sq mi	4,229/sq mi
14	Babylon	New York	218,223	213,603	+2.16%	52.3 sq mi	4,083/sq mi
15	Yonkers	New York	211,569	195,976	+7.96%	18.0 sq mi	11,156/sq mi
16	Worcester	Massachusetts	206,518	181,045	+14.07%	37.4 sq mi	4,933/sq mi
17	Huntington	New York	204,127	203,264	+0.42%	94.1 sq mi	2,160/sq mi
18	Providence	Rhode Island	190,934	178,042	+7.24%	18.4 sq mi	9,740/sq mi
19	Paterson	New Jersey	159,732	146,199	+9.26%	8.4 sq mi	17,500/sq mi
20	Alexandria	Virginia	159,467	139,966	+13.93%	15.0 sq mi	10,387/sq mi
21	Springfield	Massachusetts	155,929	153,060	+1.87%	31.9 sq mi	4,830/sq mi
22	Ramapo	New York	148,919	126,595	+17.63%	61.2 sq mi	2,069/sq mi
23	Bridgeport	Connecticut	148,654	144,229	+3.07%	16.1 sq mi	9,064/sq mi
24	Elizabeth	New Jersey	137,298	124,969	+9.87%	12.3 sq mi	10,459/sq mi
25	Stamford	Connecticut	135,470	122,643	+10.46%	37.6 sq mi	3,434/sq mi
26	Lakewood	New Jersey	135,158	92,843	+45.58%	24.7 sq mi	4,079/sq mi
27	New Haven	Connecticut	134,023	129,779	+3.27%	18.7 sq mi	6,948/sq mi
28	Allentown	Pennsylvania	125,845	118,032	+6.62%	17.5 sq mi	6,882/sq mi
29	Hartford	Connecticut	121,054	124,775	−2.98%	17.4 sq mi	7,083/sq mi
30	Cambridge	Massachusetts	118,403	105,162	+12.59%	6.4 sq mi	17,289/sq mi
31	Smithtown	New York	116,296	117,801	−1.28%	53.7 sq mi	2,194/sq mi
32	Manchester	New Hampshire	115,644	109,565	+5.55%	33.1 sq mi	3,339/sq mi
33	Lowell	Massachusetts	115,554	106,519	+8.48%	13.6 sq mi	8,129/sq mi
34	Waterbury	Connecticut	114,403	110,366	+3.66%	28.5 sq mi	3,799/sq mi
35	Edison	New Jersey	107,588	99,967	+7.62%	30.1 sq mi	3,389/sq mi
36	Brockton	Massachusetts	105,643	93,810	+12.61%	21.3 sq mi	4,398/sq mi
37	Woodbridge	New Jersey	103,639	99,585	+4.07%	23.3 sq mi	4,351/sq mi
38	Quincy	Massachusetts	101,636	92,271	+10.15%	16.6 sq mi	5,567/sq mi
39	Lynn	Massachusetts	101,253	90,329	+12.09%	10.7 sq mi	8,409/sq mi
40	New Bedford	Massachusetts	101,079	95,072	+6.32%	20.0 sq mi	4,754/sq mi
41	Toms River	New Jersey	95,438	91,239	+4.60%	40.5 sq mi	2,254/sq mi
42	Greenburgh	New York	95,397	88,400	+7.92%	30.3 sq mi	2,917/sq mi
43	Reading	Pennsylvania	95,112	88,082	+7.98%	9.9 sq mi	8,912/sq mi
44	Fall River	Massachusetts	94,000	88,857	+5.79%	33.1 sq mi	2,682/sq mi
45	Hamilton Township	New Jersey	92,297	88,464	+4.33%	39.5 sq mi	2,240/sq mi
46	Nashua	New Hampshire	91,322	86,494	+5.58%	30.9 sq mi	2,804/sq mi
47	Norwalk	Connecticut	91,184	85,603	+6.52%	22.9 sq mi	3,745/sq mi
48	Trenton	New Jersey	90,871	84,913	+7.02%	7.7 sq mi	11,102/sq mi
49	Clifton	New Jersey	90,296	84,136	+7.32%	11.3 sq mi	7,472/sq mi
50	Lawrence	Massachusetts	89,143	76,377	+16.71%	6.9 sq mi	11,028/sq mi
51	Newton	Massachusetts	88,923	85,146	+4.44%	17.8 sq mi	4,774/sq mi
52	Clarkstown	New York	86,855	84,187	+3.17%	38.5 sq mi	2,188/sq mi
53	Danbury	Connecticut	86,518	80,893	+6.95%	41.9 sq mi	1,931/sq mi
54	Upper Darby Township	Pennsylvania	85,681	82,795	+3.49%	7.8 sq mi	10,581/sq mi
55	Cranston	Rhode Island	82,934	80,387	+3.17%	28.3/sq mi	2,837/sq mi
56	Warwick	Rhode Island	82,823	82,672	+0.18%	35.1 sq mi	2,359/sq mi
57	Somerville	Massachusetts	81,045	75,754	+6.98%	4.1 sq mi	18,405/sq mi
58	New Rochelle	New York	79,726	77,062	+3.46%	10.4 sq mi	7,446/sq mi
59	Frederick	Maryland	78,171	65,239	+19.82%	22 sq mi	2,967/sq mi
60	Bethlehem	Pennsylvania	75,781	74,982	+1.07%	19.1 sq mi	3,925/sq mi
61	Pawtucket	Rhode Island	75,604	71,148	+6.26%	8.7 sq mi	8,194/sq mi
62	Cherry Hill	New Jersey	74,553	71,045	+4.94%	24.1 sq mi	2,948/sq mi
63	New Britain	Connecticut	74,135	73,203	+1.27%	13.4 sq mi	5,466/sq mi
64	Mount Vernon	New York	73,893	67,292	+9.81%	4.4 sq mi	15,342/sq mi
65	Brick Township	New Jersey	73,620	75,072	−1.93%	25.7 sq mi	2,919/sq mi
66	Framingham	Massachusetts	72,362	68,323	+5.91%	26.5 sq mi	2,879/sq mi
67	Camden	New Jersey	71,791	77,344	−7.18%	8.9 sq mi	8,670/sq mi
68	Bayonne	New Jersey	71,686	63,024	+13.74%	5.8 sq mi	10,858/sq mi
69	Wilmington	Delaware	70,898	70,875	+0.03%	10.9 sq mi	6,498/sq mi
70	Passaic	New Jersey	70,537	69,781	+1.08%	3.2 sq mi	22,180/sq mi
71	Gaithersburg	Maryland	69,657	59,933	+16.22%	10.2 sq mi	5,875/sq mi
72	East Orange	New Jersey	69,270	64,270	+7.78%	3.9 sq mi	16,377/sq mi
73	Southampton	New York	69,036	56,790	+21.56%	139.2 sq mi	408/sq mi
74	Union City	New Jersey	68,589	66,455	+3.21%	1.3 sq mi	51,797/sq mi
75	Franklin Township	New Jersey	68,384	62,300	+9.77%	46.2 sq mi	1,350/sq mi
76	Haverhill	Massachusetts	57,787	60,879	−5.08%	33.0 sq mi	1,847/sq mi
77	Rockville	Maryland	67,117	61,209	+9.65%	13.5 sq mi	4,531/sq mi
78	Middletown Township	New Jersey	67,106	66,522	+0.88%	46.2 sq mi	1,350/sq mi
79	Old Bridge Township	New Jersey	66,876	65,375	+2.30%	38.1 sq mi	1,718/sq mi
80	Malden	Massachusetts	66,263	59,450	+11.46%	5.0 sq mi	11,788/sq mi
81	Gloucester Township	New Jersey	66,034	64,634	+2.17%	23.0 sq mi	2,812/sq mi
82	Waltham	Massachusetts	65,218	60,632	+7.56%	12.8 sq mi	4,763/sq mi

History[]

A satellite view of the megalopolitan region at night, 1995

The Eastern coast of the United States of America, due to its proximity to Europe, was among the first regions of the continent to be widely settled by Europeans. Over time, the cities and towns founded here had the advantage of age over most other parts of the US. 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 does support some agriculture and mining.^[19] The climate is also 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,"^[20] 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, Washington Harbor, 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, Potomac, 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 four U.S. cities with populations of over 25,000: Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and Boston. By 1850, New York 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 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."^[21] 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 especially but also the cities nearby a "landing wharf for European immigrants," who represented an ever-replenished supply of diversity of thought and determined workers.^[22] 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.^[23]

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]}

Concept[]

Map of the 11 emerging megaregions of the United States (Upper right: Northeast)

Jean Gottmann wrote his most famous work, Megalopolis, around the central theory 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 had been settled in the Classical Era with the hope it would "become the largest of the Greek cities". Though it still exists today, it is just a sleepy agricultural community. The dream of the founders of the original Megalopolis, Gottmann argued, was being realized in the Northeastern U.S. in the 1960s.^[24]

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 with each other 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, DC, 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 Boston–Washington 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.^[25] In 2010 automobiles carried 80% of Boston-Washington corridor travel; intercity buses 8–9%; Amtrak 6%; and airlines 5%.^[26] 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-New York and New York-Washington that leave every half-hour,^[27] 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.

Among examples of academic acceptance of Gottmann's Megalopolis concept, John Rennie Short authored a major update to Gottmann’s book in 2007, Liquid City: Megalopolis and the Contemporary Northeast. The National Geographic Society released a map in 1994 of the region at the time of the Revolutionary War and in present day, which borrowed Gottmann's book's title and referred to him by name. Senator Claiborne Pell wrote a full-length book entitled Megalopolis Unbound in 1966, which summarized and then expanded on the original book to outline his vision for a cohesive transportation policy in the region (of which his state, Rhode Island, is part). Futurists Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener coined the term "BosWash" in 1967 in their predictions concerning the area described by Gottmann as "Megalopolis".^[28]

Use in fiction[]

The immensity of the megalopolis, and the idea that it might one day form an actual uninterrupted city, has inspired several authors and has resulted in extrapolations of the current megalopolis appearing in fiction. Examples include William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, which envisions a future Boston–Atlanta Metropolitan Axis known as The Sprawl, and the even larger Quebec–Florida Mega-City One from the Judge Dredd comic books and films.

See also[]

• Metropolitan Statistical Area
• Conurbation
• Megalopolis (city type)
• Megaregions of the United States
• BosWash
• East Coast of the United States
• Mid-Atlantic states
• Northeast Corridor
• Northeastern United States
• Quebec City–Windsor Corridor, a densely populated corridor in Canada

References[]

External links[]

• Media related to BosNYWash at Wikimedia Commons