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The One Minute Geographer: Connecticut’s Megalopolis and Primate Cities
The One Minute Geographer is picking up on our discussion of Connecticut where we left off a while ago.
Connecticut is a good state to talk about Megalopolis, the giant super-strip city extending along the east coast from Boston to Washington. New York and its suburban over-spill into Connecticut and New Jersey make up the largest metropolitan area of this super strip which includes Philadelphia and Baltimore and many other smaller cities along the way like Hartford and Providence. The suburbs of these cities spill over and overlap into each other so that when viewed from space, it seems like one giant strip of lights.
This idea of calling this giant strip-city ‘Megalopolis’ is a concept introduced in the 1950’s by a visiting French geographer, Jean Gottmann. And Megalopolis really begins in the northern fringe of Boston’s suburbs in southern New Hampshire (almost to Maine) and extends all the way south to the farthest western and southern suburbs of Washington D. C. in Northern Virginia. The road trip between, let’s say Portsmouth New Hampshire and Spotsylvania Virginia, is about 560 miles.
Some argue that it’s such a short hop from Washington to Richmond and then to the Virginia Beach — Norfolk — Newport News metropolitan area (aka Hampton Roads), that the strip extends…
