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The Great Lakes megalopolis is a hypothetical urban agglomeration encompassing the southern Great Lakes Region of the United States and Canada. In the mid-twentieth century, futurists and urban planners envisioned, based on economic and population trends at the time, that by the year 2000 a continuous metropolitan area would stretch from the Twin Cities of Minnesota in the west to Toronto and Rochester, New York in the east and be home to many tens of millions of people. [ ]

The concept is particularly associated with the writings of urban planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis, who prepared a planning study for Detroit in 1966, envisioning that city as the centrally-located "hub" of the megalopolis. [ ] Doxiadis' ideas were elaborated upon in a subsequent paper, in which he predicted that by 2000 there would be a population of 15 million in southern Michigan alone. [ ] However, in the ensuing decades, the region's population growth proved far more modest than Doxiadis predicted (by 2020 the entire population of Michigan was only a little over 10 million [ ]), and deindustrialization and centralization of agriculture led to depopulation of the urban cores and rural areas of the region, respectively. [ ] Today the concept of a "Great Lakes megalopolis" has little recognition, though the region does contain many large metropolitan areas including Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Buffalo, and Toronto.

History of the concept

Map of the emerging American-Canadian megaregions as defined by America 2050.

The region was partially outlined as an emergent megalopolis in the 1961 book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States by French geographer Jean Gottmann, who predicted the growth of the Northeast Megalopolis of the United States. A few years later, futurist Herman Kahn, sociologist Daniel Bell, and historian Stephen Richards Graubard similarly predicted a megalopolis stretching from Chicago to Pittsburgh. The idea then reached its fullest development in the writings of Doxiadis, but fell from favor following Doxiadis' 1975 death.

Several decades later, the Regional Plan Association released the America 2050 report, identifying eleven "megaregions" with interdependent economies and infrastructure, with emphasis on transportation and land-use planning. [ ] Among these was the so-called "Great Lakes Megaregion", though the UPA avoided the term "megalopolis" and specifically stated the megaregions were defined based on "layers of relationships that together define a common interest", and not on actual existence of continuous urban development.^[A]