Cities: Capital for the New Megalopolis

On the Eastern Seaboard, airline pilots flying north at dusk from Washington to Boston look down on a coruscating corridor of light, an unbroken, 450-mile-long conglomeration of 37 million Americans that is referred to by demographers as “the Eastern Megalopolis.” Another area is growing even faster, and will ultimately pose bigger problems. This is the potential “Great Lakes Megalopolis,” which will soon stretch without interruption from Pittsburgh to Chicago, by the year 2000 will contain a population of 45 million. Fortunately, in the opinion of City Planner Constantinos Doxiadis, the great heartland megalopolis has a natural focus and headquarters in Detroit —if the city will only rise to the challenge.

Ekistics. Doxiadis, 53, is the articulate Athenian who raised the eyebrows of less Demosthenic city planners by coining the term ekistics (derived from the Greek word for home) to dignify city planning as “the science of human settlement.” He describes his own methodology for charting an urban area’s future as the “isolation of dimensions and elimination of alternatives,” or, more handily, I.D.E.A. No mere talker, Doxiadis has helped resettle 10 million humans in 15 countries. His projections for Detroit are part of a $2,000,000, three-stage report on the city’s future presented last week.

As Doxiadis projects it, Greater Detroit will eventually cover 23,000 sq. mi., stretch 150 miles long, 220 miles wide, and include 37 counties: 25 in Michigan, nine in Ohio and three in Canada. The area will have a population of 15 million centered in the Motor City but with secondary concentrations at Port Huron, 55 miles to the northeast, Toledo, Flint, Saginaw, Grand Rapids, Lansing and Ann Arbor.

Manifest Destiny. By that time, both Chicago and Pittsburgh will have expanded until the edges of the three cities touch. Because of its key location on the St. Lawrence waterway and at the junction of East-West rail and motor routes, Detroit “is in the most advantageous location to act as the central urban area of this space.” To be sure, Doxiadis added firmly, “Detroit’s role is not the most important at present. It is an industrial center, but it does not provide services for a major urban area. It is not attractive as a center city.”

If Detroit is to live up to its manifest destiny by the second millennium, it will need massive urban redevelopment: roads, ports, airports, research facilities and shopping centers must be strategically located and built in the next 33 years. How much, where and when? His I.D.E.A.s, Doxiadis promises Detroit, will be ready in two years.