page_title: Great Lakes Megalopolis
section_title: History of the concept
hierarchical_section_title: Great Lakes Megalopolis / History of the concept
caption_attribution_description: English: This map shows the principle railway and shipping routes around the Great Lakes region around the turn of the 20th century. It illustrates the route of the Montreal, Ottawa and Georgian Bay Canal, or Georgian Bay Ship Canal, and the distance that would be cut for anyone shipping cargo to the Montreal area. The map also shows the Ottawa and Perry Sound railway running parallel to the route to the south of the Canal, and the Canadian Pacific mainline, just visible, running just north and south of the canal route.
context_page_description: The Great Lakes Megalopolis consists of the group of metropolitan areas in North America largely in the Great Lakes region and along the Saint Lawrence River. It extends from the Midwestern United States in the south and west to western Pennsylvania and Upstate New York in the east and northward through Southern Ontario into southwestern Quebec in Canada. It is the most populated and largest megalopolis in North America.
  At its most inclusive, in the United States the region cuts a wide swath from the Twin Cities in Minnesota in the west, south to St. Louis and Louisville, Kentucky, and east to Rochester, New York; in Canada, it continues northeasterly to Quebec City. This broader region had an estimated population of 59,144,461 as of 2011 and is projected to reach a population of about 65 million by 2025. Within this broad region, there is a core area of more continual urban development that includes Chicago, Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, South Bend, Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester, Hamilton, Toronto and metropolitan areas between these.
context_section_description: The region was partially outlined as an emergent megalopolis in the 1961 book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States by French geographer Jean Gottmann. Gottmann envisaged the development of other megalopolises in the U.S.: from Boston to Washington, D.C., from Chicago to Pittsburgh, and from San Francisco to San Diego.
  In 1965, futurist Herman Kahn speculated about the three megalopolises in the year 2000. In the 1960s and 1970s, urban planner and architect Constantinos Doxiadis wrote books, studies, and reports about the growth potential of the Great Lakes Megalopolis. Doxiadis envisioned Detroit (on the U.S.-Canada border across from Windsor) as the central urban area in this megalopolis, which he defined as extending "from Milwaukee and Chicago to Detroit, Pittsburgh and Buffalo and into Canada from Windsor to Montreal and Quebec".
  In 2005, the Virginia Tech Metropolitan Institute's Beyond Megalopolis, an attempt to update Gottmann's work, outlined a similar "Midwest" megapolitan area as one of ten such areas in the United States (Canada is discussed tangentially). Over 200 million tons of cargo are shipped annually through the Great Lakes. The America 2050 project identified 11 Megaregions of the United States, including the Great Lakes Megalopolis. The Canadian part of the region is also referred to as the Quebec City–Windsor Corridor, and the densest part in Southern Ontario has long been known as the Golden Horseshoe.
caption: 1907 Canadian major internal and cross border shipping routes
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