Liquid City

CHAPTER TEN

MEGALOPOLISAS A GLOBALIZING CITY REGION

In this chapter I argue that the forces of increasing globalization have made Megalopolis the capital city region of the world: a pivotal point of command, control, and narration in the contemporary world.

At the beginning of his 1961 book, Gottmann portrays the region as the Main Street of the nation. Later, in Chapter 3, he describes it as the continent's economic hinge. He saw the region primarily in terms of national importance and to a lesser extent of continental importance, but the forces of globalization then were so relatively weak that global prominence was only embryonic and thus scarcely visible to Gottmann. Today, the region can be identified as one of the dominant globalizing ...