In his 1961 study Megalopolis, the geographer Jean Gottmann analysed the urbanised corridor stretching from Boston through New York and Philadelphia to Washington as a single continuous metropolitan region. He argued that the merging of cities, suburbs and their hinterlands into an interlinked super-region was a new and significant urban form. The book documented the corridor's economic dominance, mobility and land-use patterns in unprecedented detail. It gave planners a vocabulary for thinking about megaregions and polycentric metropolitan growth.
Megalopolis introduced the megaregion as an object of analysis and influenced later thinking about polycentric metropolitan structure.
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