Liquid City

CHAPTER TWO

LIQUID CITY

Jean Gottmann applied the term Megalopolis to the urbanized Northeast of the United States. He described it as “an almost continuous stretch of urban and suburban areas from southern New Hampshire to northern Virginia and from the Atlantic shore to the Appalachian foothills” with a total population of 37 million people in 1960 (Gottmann 1961, 3). He first used the term in English in 1957 in an article published in Economic Geographer, where he prefigured the main arguments that would appear later in his better-known book, Megalopolis (Gottmann 1961).

The map that Gottmann used in the 1957 paper to delineate Megalopolis was drawn from an even earlier study, an innovative government survey to identify economic areas in ...