How much a city can grow?
I thought of this thread more as a reflection about present urban areas and whether there is a physical limit on how much a (monocentric) city can grow and still working as a same labour market.
World's largest city is Tokyo, a "monocentric" metro area. In the future, it could be surpassed by Jakarta or New Delhi, both with the same characteristic. Emerging Chinese metropolises, on the other hand, would work differently, be it on the Pearl River Delta ou on the metro areas around Shanghai. Both regions work more as a big Rhein-Ruhr area, a collection of metropolises instead of a gargantuan metropolis. In South America, São Paulo is transitioning from this Tokyo-model into a Pearl River Delta one: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...012202_lrg.jpg The "Macrometropolis" (a term more and more common) has about 33 million people and growing at a 10% decade rate. Even though São Paulo is the star, it's not big enough to turn Campinas metro area (3 million people) into a mere suburb, even though they touch each other by continuous urban development through Jundiaí and its suburbs and working on a complementary way (Campinas-Jundiaí-Sorocaba triangle absorbing São Paulo's manufacturing and logistic flight, stopping them to move to other parts of the country avoiding a Rust Belt phenomenon). New York and Philadelphia might be a similar case, even though, they are distinct and have their own worlds. At least in São Paulo's case, all the areas are inside the same state and share the same cultural traits. Anyway, can we have a 50 million, a 60 million "monocentric" urban area or Tokyo's 38-40 million is a physical limit for it? What are your thoughts? |
The monocentric model is just much less efficient. Having both housing and jobs spread out requires lower average commute distances than having all the jobs in one area and all the housing in a ring surrounding it. There's really no good reason for cities to remain the way they are given modern communications technology. De-centralization makes way more sense and is only opposed by the structural inertia of the major cities existing built forms.
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It depends. Tokyo, for instance, is not like that. It has a whopping 4,700 km of subway/rail lines carrying 40 million people daily.
A monocentric city is much easier to build a strong label (Paris vs Rhein-Ruhr) and to attract talents from all their hinterland. A polycentric metro area, with separated labour markets, tends to work as a collection of smaller cities, not cohesive enough to work as big metropolis. |
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When jobs are located in a suburb on the north side of the region, people on south side have a longer commute. By definition, the average ends up washing out whatever advantage northsiders have because of the southsiders. It would be the same if everyone met in the middle, in the city center. There is no escaping the reality that as a city gets larger, citizens can only access the whole of its jobs and points of interest if either average commutes grow longer, density increases, or commute speeds somehow increase. Otherwise, as a city gets larger, the actual amount of places citizens can reach in a reasonable time frame(isochrone) stays the same and the expanded metro in reality is a conurbation of many cities. What seems to happen in urban geography is that as a city gets really big, its core reaches a limit. Then, neighboring centers start to grow due to their proximity(because transportation and economic benefits are bidirectional) and reach their natural limit, and their neighbors grow, and so on and you get this fractal looking thing similar to the way slime molds grow(read about how cities and mold grow the same way, its fascinating). Even though there is a tendency for us to want to classify these places as unified giant megalopolises, realistically very few people are going to commute the entire distance across them on a regular basis. A resident of Campinas or Riverside is not really living their full life in Sao Paulo or LA. If it becomes impossible to objectively separate where one city begins and the other ends, maybe we could look at cities as being an individual experience - the personal local geography and abstract social and economic networks that each of us lives in that overlap and entangle massively with others. At some point us city nerds have to stop being borderline autistic about population stats and labels and boundaries and just realize that in the real world it runs together, its fluid. Yuri's question is a real one. Our present modes of transportation mean you can only go so far and so fast and as density increases that effects what transportation we can use. Autonomous cars might increase the potential size of a city, so would high speed regional rail. If more people worked in virtual reality rather than in person the attraction to population centers would revolve around access to things which people's travel time tolerances are higher, like cultural and natural amenities, or access that's infrequent like health care services, then there would be less traffic and people would go further so if people still accepted higher densities you could have very big cities. |
In the future cities can grow in 3 dimensions with elevated roads and transit as well as buildings and public spaces in the air on stilts like in the Jetsons.
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New York would have to decline as America's center of the universe for it to merge with another CSA in any logical way. It already has declined in that fashion to some degree but I mean more like an internal Rust Belt-like decline with Philadelphia picking up some of the outspill, especially the media ventures.
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For that to happen, others would have to grow exponentially while NYC neutralized or even shrank some. Imagine if half of NYC's population left for, Philly, Trenton, JC, Newark and South Jersey. That's about the only way it could become a true mega-region and combined area. |
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Areas that are much closer physically and culturally to Philadelphia and are within the Philly media market are currently included in the New York CSA (Trenton and Allentown/Lehigh Valley). Additionally, daily commuting to NYC/North Jersey for residents of Bucks County, PA (Philly suburbs) via Amtrak, Amtrak/NJ Transit, SEPTA/NJ Transit, NJ Transit (directly from Trenton), or via bus or personal vehicle is very common. |
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There's probably a case to be made that a new category should be created for regions that were built around two major cities that have since fused together. It's sort of Baltimore-Washington like but more extreme. |
That's not quite what I meant. I definitely knew there was plenty of cross-commuting for example and even some blur in sports loyalty.
I mean more like New York and Philly having some Dallas/Fort Worth or San Francisco/Oakland relationship. That's not happening any time soon as far as I can tell. |
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City population tends to be capped by infrastructure. New York's metro population has largely stagnated. There has also been a stagnation in infrastructure development.
Tokyo being the largest city in the world is strongly related to having the world's most extensive rail network. |
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I find that Northeasterners in particular have this kind of mentality of conflating a megalopolis with a metropolitan area (maybe due to a desire to fulfill a superiority complex?). And that's what the term megalopolis is actually supposed mean re: NY + Philly or LA + SD; that is, deeply linked cities who share relationships far more than a typical intercity relationship, but aren't exactly cohesively linked enough to be considered one. |
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