The New Megalopolis. Our focus on cities is wrong. Growth and innovation come from new urban corridors.

China isn’t the world’s most ferocious new economic competitor—the exploding east-coast corridor, from Beijing to Shanghai, is. India as a whole is not developing high-tech industries and attracting jobs, but the booming mega-region stretching from Bangalore to Hyderabad is. Across the world, in fact, nations don’t spur growth so much as dynamic regions—modern versions of the original "megalopolis," a term coined by the geographer Jean Gottman to identify the sprawling Boston-New York-Washington economic power corridor.
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The New Megas are the real economic organizing units of the world, producing the bulk of its wealth, attracting a large share of its talent and generating the lion’s share of innovation. They take shape as powerful complexes of multiple cities and suburbs, often stretching across national borders—forming a vast expanse of trade, transport, innovation and talent. Yet, though the rise of regions has been apparent for more than a decade, no one has collected systematic information on them—not the World Bank, not the IMF, not the United Nations, not the global consulting firms.

That’s why my team and I set about building a world map of the New Megas shaped by satellite images of the world at night, using light emissions to identify the outlines of each region, and additional data in categories such as population and economic growth to chart their relative peak strengths and dynamism. The result is the topographical maps you see above.

By Richard Florida
Newsweek International

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