Regionalisation: Probing the urban landscape of the Great Lakes Region

Abstract

Over 40 million people live within the watershed region of the Great Lakes in North America, the largest body of fresh water on the planet. During the past two centuries the region has been given a series of idiosyncratic designations such as the Great Cutover, the Manufacturing Belt, the Rust Belt, the Great Lakes Megalopolis and the Megaregion by well-known urbanists from Patrick Geddes to Jean Gottmann. Emblematic of different processes of colonisation, industrialisation and urbanisation, these historical characterisations reveal a landscape of geo-economic significance beyond the conventional limits of the city while testifying to a deeper ontology of regionalist canons whose focus is the hydrophysical system of the Great Lakes. Referencing a series of overlooked plans, projects and processes, this essay demonstrates how the Great Lakes Region is a macrocosm of change, a case study in the urban transformation of the continent with relevance to other parts of the industrialised world such as France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Russia, Japan and Australia. As a revival of the revolutionary régionalisme of Jean Charles-Brun in late 19th-century France and as a challenge to contested globalisation identified by Saskia Sassen at the end of the 20th century, this essay proposes that the regionalisation of ecological, economic and political conditions is of crucial significance to the global discourse on urbanisation.