What Is a Megaregion?

by Richard Florida

Tags: City, Population, Richard Florida, Globalization, Workforce Management, Leadership, Strategy, Management, Human Resources, Richard Florida, Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, Books, Creative Class, Knowledge Worker, Urban Communities, Economic Conditions, BNET Feature

Adapted from “Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life” by Richard Florida.

Cities have always been the natural economic units of the world. But in the past several decades, what we once thought of as separate cities — with central cores surrounded by rural villages, or later by suburbs — have grown into "megaregions" composed of two or more cities, like the Boston-New York-Washington corridor. Megaregions are more than just bigger versions of a city. As a city is composed of separate neighborhoods, and as a metropolitan region is made up of a central city and its suburbs, a megaregion represents the new, natural economic unit that emerges as cities (and their suburbs and exurbs) not only grow upward and become more dense, they grow outward and into one another.

Today, megaregions range in size from 10 to 50 million people — and in some cases, in the developing world, even more. They produce hundreds of billions — and sometimes trillions — of dollars in economic output. They harness human creativity on a massive scale, and they are the source of the lion’s share of the world’s scientific achievement and technological innovations.

The megaregions of today perform functions that are somewhat similar to those of the great cities of the past — massing together talent, productivity, innovation, and markets. But they do so on a far larger scale. Furthermore, while cities in the past were part of national systems, globalization has exposed them to worldwide competition. As the distribution of economic activity has gone global, the city-system has also become global — meaning that cities compete now on a global terrain. This means that bigger and more competitive economic units — megaregions — are required to survive and prosper.

Population is not tantamount to economic growth. Unlike megacities, which are termed as such simply for the size of their populations, megaregions are by definition places with large markets, significant economic capacity, substantial innovation, and highly skilled talent, as well as large overall populations.

A megaregion must meet three key criteria. First, it must be a contiguous, lighted area with more than one major city center. Second, it must have a population of 5 million or more. Finally, it must produce more than $100 billion in goods and services. By that definition, there are some 40 megaregions in the world. If we take the largest megas in terms of population:

The 10 biggest are home to 666 million people, or 10 percent of world population.
The top 20 comprise 1.1 billion people, 17 percent of the world population;
The top 40 are home to 1.5 billion people, 23 percent of global population.

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consulmendez

03/25/08 | Report as spam

Megaregions and Poverty

It is true that a megaregion is concept useful for analyzing future needs, supply and demand, provide ideas for the changing patterns of urbanization and suburban developments. However, many of these megaregions have important clusters of poverty, New York, Los Angeles or Chicago have millions of people living in poverty or extreme poverty, many times immigrants coming from developing countries. The hundreds of thousands sweat shops already discussed by professor Robert Reich is a reality and a shame for countries like the US, Francenad the UK that keep these linkages of poverty and depressed inside shanty towns in the wealthy high tech mega regions. Without analyzing quality of life and trends in basic needs satisfaction the megaregion is a concept that can not evolve in good health. This contradictory reality of wealth-poverty in megaregions is more clear in places like Mexico City Metropolitan region, Sao Paulo Metro region, Mombay Metro region or Metro-Manila. I think we have to develop a new developmnet paradigm such as the one advised by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Ricardo Ffrench Davis, Deepak Nayar, Jose Antonio Ocampo in a recent book about Macroeconomics and social development. Developing the idea of megaregions in the same vision of today?s world paradigm of the World Bank and IMF will become soon or later in a Time-Bomb with social unrest and increasing despair of millions of people.