Key points
- Gottmann saw the east coast as one continuous urban region, not five separate cities.
- The liquid city flows thanks to fixed infrastructure that takes decades to pay for itself.
- The megalopolis crosses dozens of counties and several states, and none governs the whole.
Liquid City. Why the city you live in is not a place, but a river of concrete that never stops.
From the BosWash corridor of some fifty million people to John Rennie Short's theory, we explore the megalopolis as a liquid city: a flow with no center or edge. We talk about Bauman's liquid modernity, the tension between fixity and flow, and who flows and who gets stranded, with Gottmann, Short and Harvey. We walk through the megalopolis Jean Gottmann named, John Rennie Short's liquid city, Zygmunt Bauman's liquid modernity and David Harvey's tension between fixity and flow. We see how Baltimore and Philadelphia drain while counties like Fairfax and Ocean swell, why the corridor quadrupled its area, and what it means to be stranded when everything flows.
Frequently asked questions
What is a megalopolis?
The continuous urban corridor Jean Gottmann described between Boston and Washington: cities that lost their own edges and work as a single region of harbours, motorways and suburbs.
Why call it a liquid city?
Because John Rennie Short, following Zygmunt Bauman, describes a region that spills and reshapes itself constantly, even though it depends on highways, ports and cables fixed in the ground.
