Abstract
The emergence in the United States of large-scale “megaregions” centered on major metropolitan areas is a phenomenon often taken for granted in both scholarly studies and popular accounts of contemporary economic geography. This paper uses a data set of more than 4,000,000 commuter flows as the basis for an empirical approach to the identification of such megaregions. We compare a method which uses a visual heuristic for understanding areal aggregation to a method which uses a computational partitioning algorithm, and we reflect upon the strengths and limitations of both. We discuss how choices about input parameters and scale of analysis can lead to different results, and stress the importance of comparing computational results with “common sense” interpretations of geographic coherence. The results provide a new perspective on the functional economic geography of the United States from a megaregion perspective, and shed light on the old geographic problem of the division of space into areal units.
Highlights
For numerous reasons, ranging from the widening scale of labor markets to the integration of capital flows, many observers have suggested that the economic geography of the United States is best understood in terms of “megaregions.” These are assumed to be large regional areas, often cutting across state lines, that are normally centered on major metropolitan hubs and include an orbit of smaller sub-centers
We believe that our results offer a new, more empirically rigorous evaluation of megaregions and demonstrate the utility of this approach in gaining a better understanding of the functional economic geography of the United States at a macro-spatial scale
The former provides a good example of an apparently polycentric urban network, with multiple centers and a more complex commuting structure, as described previously by Cervero and Wu [39,40]. The latter provides a good example of an apparently monocentric urban commute structure, dominated by a core employment zone in the center, of the kind studied in the past by, inter alia, Bogart and Ferry [41] and Richardson [42]. Both approaches can help us understand more about the underlying economic geography of major metropolitan areas of the United States
Summary
For numerous reasons, ranging from the widening scale of labor markets to the integration of capital flows, many observers have suggested that the economic geography of the United States is best understood in terms of “megaregions.” These are assumed to be large regional areas, often cutting across state lines, that are normally centered on major metropolitan hubs and include an orbit of smaller sub-centers. The impossibility of absolutely defining stable territorial regions has long been recognized by geographers and those working in allied disciplines In his influential 1939 essay “The Nature of Geography,” Richard Hartshorne warned that “the face of the earth is the very antithesis of a mosaic” [15]. Hartshorne pointed to the complex and highly heterogeneous distribution of features which characterizes human geography, concluding that “man does not, consciously or unconsciously, organize a region as a unit” [15]. Though this old debate has been superseded by approaches to human geography which emphasize “relationality,” the problem of defining regional units remains a vexing and unsolved problem. Borderless and intricately intermeshed the actual pattern of human geography may be, the question of how to extract functional regions and edges from the fuzziness of that pattern remains an important task for applied geographers and their counterparts in public administration
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