An Empirical Examination Of Megalopolitan Structure

Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961). For instance,, p. 100) writes, “Despite the lively competition between the cities and the efforts at decentralization of various overcrowded activities, a specialization worked itself out, establishing a new division of labor not only between groups of people but also between sections of the region, between places in “Megalopolis.” Elsewhere (“Megalopolis or the Urbanization of the Northeastern Seaboard,” Economic Geography, XXXIII [1957], 189–200), after stating that “megalopolis” is of Greek origin and means a very large city, Gottmann refers to this region as an urban system. See also, Howard J. Nelson, “Megalopolis and the New York Metropolitan Region: New Studies of the Urbanized Eastern Seaboard,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers,” LII (1962), 307–10. John Friedmann and John Miller, “The Urban Field,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners, XXXI (1965). See also, Christopher Tunnard, “America’s Super-Cities,” Harper’s Magazine (August, 1958), pp. 59–65. Norman S. B. Gras, An Introduction to Economic History (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922). For an excellent summary, see Donald J. Bogue, The Structure of the Metropolitan Community: A Study of Dominance and Subdominance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), pp.7–8. . , p. 184. R. D. McKenzie, The Metropolitan Community (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1933). . Thus, Jerome Picard writes in “Urban Regions of the United States” (Urban Land, XXI, 4 [April, 1962], 3): A popular misconception has led to calling this a ‘city 500 miles long.’ Otis D. Duncan and Albert J. Reiss, Jr., Social Characteristics of Urban and Rural Communities, 1950 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1956), p. 216. For a study linking the occupational and industrial composition of a community, see Orner R. Galle, “Occupational Composition and the Metropolitan Hierarchy: The Inter- and Intra Metropolitan Division of Labor,” American Journal of Sociology, LXIX (1963), 260–69. For a sophisticated handling of the dichotomy between maintenance and export activities, see Albert J. Reiss, Jr., “Functional Specialization of Cities,” in Cities and Society: The Revised Reader in Urban Sociology, ed. Paul K. Hatt and Albert J. Reiss, Jr. (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1957), pp. 555–76; and Gunnar Alexandersson, The Industrial Structure of American Cities (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1955). , p. 217. For a brief discussion of the European origins of the concept of functional specialization, see Alexandersson, op. cit.Gunnar Alexandersson, The Industrial Structure of American Cities (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1955), p. 20. This notion is stated explicitly by Noel P. Gist and Sylvia Fleis Fava (Urban Society [5th ed.; New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1964], 248), who write, “To the extent that specialization within a region occurs, to that extent there must be interdependence of the parts one on another.” This is also a recurring theme in Amos H. Hawley, Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1950), especially in Chapter 12. Conceptually distinct approaches to measuring systematic interdependence, or in testing for interdependence to ascertain whether a system exists, may be found in Walter Isard and Robert Kavesh, “Economic Structural Interrelations of Metropolitan Regions,” American Journal of Sociology, LX (1954), 152–62; and in Ralph W. Pfouts, “Patterns of Economic Interaction in the Crescent,” in Urban Growth Dynamics in a Regional Cluster of Cities, ed. F. Stuart Chapin, Jr., and Shirley F. Weiss (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1962), pp. 31–58. Office of Statistical Standards, Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961). It was felt that analysis should be limited to units for which comparable data are available, at the same time recognizing that the process of economic differentiation implied by Megalopolis and similar concepts should foster the rise of new metropolitan areas specialized in particular types of economic activity. The places included in this study, by their 1950 SMA designations, are: Albany-Schenectady-Troy; Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton; Atlantic City; Baltimore; Boston; Bridgeport; Brockton; Fall River; Harrisburg; Hartford; Lancaster; Lawrence; Lowell; Manchester; New Bedford; New Britain Bristol; New Haven; Philadelphia; Providence; Reading; Scranton; Springfield-Holyoke; Stamford-Norwalk; Trenton; Washington; Waterbury; Wilkes-Barre-Hazleton; Wilmington; Worcester; and York. The New York-New Jersey Standard Consolidated Area was used in 1960 because of its correspondence to the 1950 New York-Northeastern New Jersey SMA. For an appraisal of the extent to which SMA’s correspond to communities, see Allan G. Feldt, “The Metropolitan Area Concept: An Evaluation of the 1950 SMA’s,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, LX (1965), 617–36. John M. Matilla and Wilbur Thompson, “The Measurement of the Economic Base of the Metropolitan Area,” Land Economics, XXXI (1955), 215–28; and George H. Hildebrand and Arthur Mace, Jr., “The Employment Multiplier in an Expanding Industrial Market: Los Angeles County, 1940–1947,” Review of Economics and Statistics, XXXII (1950), 241–49. An earlier statistic from which the location quotient has been developed may be found in the “coefficient of localization,” in A. J. Wensley and P. Sargent Florence, “Recent Industrial Concentration,” Review of Economic Studies, VII (1940), 139–58. Harvey S. Perloff et al., Regions, Resources and Economic Growth (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960).