Nancy Donaldson, age 14, of Portland, Ore., for her question:
WHAT IS A MEGALOPOLIS?
A metropolis is any large, busy city. The total district is often called a metropolitan area and it includes the boroughs, villages, towns or townships that are located in the city's suburbs. Metropolitan areas have developed in every country in the world. Since the early 1900s, the most important population shift has been from large cities to the suburbs.
In the United States, a metropolitan area is officially called a Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA). Two or more adjacent metropolitan areas and additional counties may form a Standard Consolidated Statistical Area CSCSA).
The United States has 13 SCSA's.
The United States government officially defines a metropolitan area as a region with at least one city with a population of 50,000 or more. The area also includes the entire county in which the city is located. At least 75 percent of the county's labor force must be nonagricultural.
A megalopolis, on the other hand, is a region made up of two or more metropolitan areas. Metropolitan areas form a megalopolis if they attract enough people and industry and then expand and begin to grow together.
The largest megalopolis in the United States is developing in the Northeast. It includes the metropolitan areas of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. It extends about 450 miles from southern New Hampshire into northern Virginia and about 100 miles inland. It covers more than 50,000 square miles and has a population over 36 million persons.
Two other major megalopolises are developing in the United States: the area from Milwaukee through Chicago to South Bend, Indiana, and the vast area from San Francisco through Los Angeles to south of San Diego.
The term megalopolis was introduced by a French geographer named Jean Gottmann in 1961 to describe the urban development in the Northeastern part of the United States. The English use the term conurbation instead.
A huge conurbation is developing rapidly at the present time in the area between London and the industrial midlands of central England.
Other developing megalopolises or conurbations at the present time include the Tokyo Osaka area in Japan and the vast Ruhr Industrial Basin in Germany, Belgium and Holland.