Megalopolis – the new American frontier?
March 27, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter
On Edge of Va. Sprawl, Labels Crumble, New Lives Thrive:
Maybe the question is not what we think we are, but what do we want to be?"
It is a question that might apply to any number of similar areas across the country, places far down the highway and then a couple of exits more, fast-changing places that demographers have struggled to describe.
Over the years, such areas have been called exurbs and disurbs, edge counties and edgeless cities, exopoli, outtowns, penturbias, rururbias, slurbs and, curiously, net of mixed beads. Still other terms grasp at their relation to neighboring areas: archipelago economy, global network of nodes and hubs, planetary urban networks.
Increasingly, Lang believes, technology will untether people from long commutes and offices, making the outward expansion ever more appealing and geographic centers less fixed and more relative.