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How is a megalopolis different from a single metropolitan area?
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Crowds of people in Tokyo's Shibuya shopping district.
A metropolitan area consists of a major city and its surrounding suburbs, towns, and nearby regions that are economically and socially influenced by that central core. In contrast, a megalopolis—often referred to as a "supercity"—is a much larger, complex urban form created by the territorial coalescence of two or more sizable cities and their respective metropolitan areas.123
The primary differences include:
- Scale and Composition: While a metropolitan area is typically centered around one or more major cities, a megalopolis is a polycentric constellation of multiple, distinct metropolitan zones that have grown together to form a continuous or near-continuous urbanized region.23
- Connectivity: In a megalopolis, these individual urban centers are complexly interlocked both socially and physically.2
- Development: The formation of a megalopolis represents a qualitative transformation of settlement patterns, where the outward sprawl of separate cities eventually merges into a single, vast urbanized corridor that can extend for scores of miles.23
Examples of megalopolises include the Atlantic seaboard in the United States and the Tokyo–Ōsaka–Kyōto complex in Japan.23