Cities Will Blend Together Into Giant Urban Regions
In the future, a megalopolis could stretch from D.C. to Boston
If you journey from Nanjing to Shanghai through Suzhou, a distance of nearly 200 miles, you will be struck by the fact that you pass through almost continuous urban development. The countryside seems to be turning into a new kind of city — “desakota,” a term the geographer Terry McGee once coined. This is a mixture of town and country, an urban sprawl, peppered by many high-rise blocks in what seem to be rural areas.
This is indigenous, perhaps, to China itself, but it is symptomatic of the fact that many cities all over the world are rapidly fusing into one another and making the traditional definition of cities as independent entities no longer appropriate. By the end of this century, the world will consist of nearly everyone living in one kind of city or another, and in many cases, we will not be able to distinguish one city from another.
I made this journey for the first time in 2002, and 15 years later, I retraced my steps, this time traveling from Suzhou to Shanghai. I remember Suzhou in 2002 as a town of perhaps 1 million, but still enough of a small town, built around canals in its core and reminiscent of the old China in the Yangtze delta region. In the intervening years, it seemed to me that…
