Читать книгу The Urban Planning Imagination - Nicholas A. Phelps - Страница 31

Cities did not emerge in splendid isolation but from the start developed within systems (Smith, 2019), so that city networks of megalopolitan scale and organization are not new. Archaeological research suggests that the central lowlands of Guatemala may have been home to between 7 million and 11 million people over 1,200 years ago in a system of settlements extending across an area of 95,000 km² (Canuto et al., 2018). Nevertheless, the term ‘megalopolis’ emerged in the early 1900s to decry the increasing scale at which urbanization was taking place (Baigent, 2004) and resurfaced later to describe the reality of large-scale urbanization along the eastern seaboard of the US (Gottmann, 1961). Gottmann later defined a megalopolis as a functionally interdependent system of cities of at least 25 million population acting as both an incubator of new economic activities and a national-international hinge of trade (Li and Phelps, 2018).

Today, many national economies show signs of organization at the megalopolitan scale. The world’s forty largest mega-regions account for two thirds of economic output and 85 per cent of innovation (Florida et al., 2008). Megalopolis is a concept with renewed salience as a descriptor of the contemporary scale of urbanization and economic functioning of the US (Nelson and Lang, 2011) and of China, where one can travel by road or rail from Shanghai westwards through a near-continuous urban landscape to Suzhou, Wuxi and beyond. And yet megalopolis has limited appeal as a scale for urban planning. The idea found some favour in Japan in the 1970s (Hanes, 1993). Today, active megalopolitan-scale planning efforts in China are apparent in the Pearl and Yangtze River Deltas, though their purchase on patterns of urbanization and infrastructure development remains unclear in a context of rivalry and duplication of functions among cities (Wu, 2015). In Europe, the Randstad area of the Netherlands is a recognizable and coherently planned constellation of cities but lacks the scale to be considered megalopolitan.

Less clear still is whether the morphological and economic appearances of ‘ecumenopolis’ (Doxiadis, 1962) – urbanization stretching across continents – will ever capture the political or planning, let alone popular, imagination. Something of this ecumenical scale of economic ties and cultural connections is made explicit in China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI).⁴ This scale is certainly apparent in the narrower joint planning efforts of states and multinational enterprise clubs interested in ensuring the smooth functioning of today’s logistics corridors that unprecedented levels of international economic integration rely on (Cowen, 2014).