The metropolis of the future are massive , sprawling , beautiful monster , covering entire coastline — and in some cases , entire continents . Whether it ’s Judge Dredd ’s Mega - Cities or William Gibson ’s “ Sprawl , ” future cities always devour solid ground . Here ’s a map of succeeding megalopolis .
So why are these city so overwhelmingly large ? And where do they do from ? Here ’s a listing , by region :
North America:
The metropolis of North Am ( in Magnus Robot Fighter ) does just what it sound like — it covers almost the entirety of North America , throw you piles and lots of distance in which to ( what else ? ) agitate automaton .
The Maze is a vast mesh of hush-hush parking garages that stretches all the style from New York to Los Angeles , in the movie Circuitry Man .
Lots and lots of SF stories predict a immense swathe of metropolis stretching along the East Coast of the United States . One of the most illustrious is Judge Dredd ’s Mega - City One , which eventually stretch out all the style down to Florida .
In Neuromancer and other books by William Gibson , a mega - city stretch from Boston to Atlanta is known as the Boston - Atlanta Metropolitan Axis ( BAMA ) or The Sprawl .
InHe , She And It by Marge Piercy , the urban megalopolis that stretch from the former Boston to the former Atlanta is called The Glop .
And similarly , in the novel The Rise Of The Conglomerates by Thomas Nevins , a huge sprawl “ Conglomerate City ” occupies most of the East Coast of the United States .
There ’s also BosWash , the city that stretches from Manchester , NH to Virginia Beach , Virginia . It was first auspicate in the 1961 book Megalopolis : The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States by Jean Gottman .
The City in Transmetropolitanis commonly trust to be a megacity including New Yorkand stretching as far West as the Great Lakes , which are consult to as its Western lake .
The Greater Chicago Industrial Zone : In Halo , the former metropolis of Chicago now covers the former states of Illinois , Wisconsin , Indiana . And Chicago is no longer really part of the United States — the people in this city - United States Department of State consider thesmelves citizens of the United Nations .
In actual life , some urban planner talk about an domain called ChiPitts , which comprises Chicago and Pittsburgh , and everything in between .
Texarkana in A Canticle For Leibowitz , appears to cover a huge ball of the former Texas and Arkansas , and becomes the Capitol Building of an conglomerate that rein the Western Hemisphere — and finally pass over out its main rival , New Rome . ( single-valued function fromWikipedia page . )
Texas City , in the Judge Dredd comic , breed a Brobdingnagian area of the former Southwest — including Texas , of course .
Bay City is a massive urban sprawl hide San Francisco as well as its outlying orbit , in Richard K. Morgan ’s Altered Carbon .
San Angeles appears in many different plant of fiction , and it usually encompasses Los Angeles , San Diego and sometimes Santa Barbara . It ’s the context for Demolition Man .
Mega - City Two also accounts for five thousand miles of California coastline — or it did , until it was nuked — in the Judge Dredd comedian .
South America:
Sao Paulo / Rio : In Ben Bova ’s Mars , the rural wretched stream into the city of Sao Paolo and Rio De Janeiro in such vast numbers , the two metropolis rise into “ a single urban megacity more than three hundred kilometers wide , that stretched from the beaches to the inland Hill , sparkling eminent - hike towers for the fertile , sprawl filthy slum for the poor , and smoggy lung - corroding pollution for all . ”
Ciudad Baranquilla , aka Banana City , is the mega city that covers most of Central America in the Judge Dredd comics .
Europe:
Greater London — in Sunstormby Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter , London has get outwards massively , swallow up stacks of villages and formerly independent towns . Clarke and Baxter report London as spreading out , “ kilometer upon kilometre of house and factories … the scatter , helpless metropolis that lie incapacitated below ” a passing airplane .
Edinburgh / Glasgow — it ’s not purely speaking science fabrication , butthere ’s a lot of talkabout these two Scots cities commingle into one megalopolis in the arrive century . The two cities could soon be link by a eminent - hurrying maglev geartrain . But it does n’t come along that any science fiction authors have written about EdinGow yet .
Metropia , in the animated moving-picture show of the same name , is a massive internet of underpass arrangement and “ undergrounds ” linking all the cities in continental Europe . The world is running out of oil , so the leaders come up with the programme to link all of the subway systems into one Brobdingnagian internet — which seems to be stalk .
City Europe , in theChung Kuo series by David Wingrove , comprehend an tremendous domain of continental Europe , from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean . The city is made up of a serial publication of “ push-down storage ” with the ample people living on the top levels and the poorest down in the waste below .
The Dixieland of England is occupy by Brit - Cit in Judge Dredd . Plus East Meg One is another mega - city in the Judge Dredd universe , which covers a braggy clod of the former Soviet Union , including Moscow .
And of course , there ’s East - Meg One , the Soviet mega - city in Judge Dredd , which sprawls around the cadaver of Moscow — until it gets destroyed in a war with Mega - City One .
Africa:
Pan - Africa isa continent - wide quasi - statecomprising several mega - cities in the Judge Dredd universe : they include Umar ( the former Libya ) , Simba City ( Cameroon ) , Luxor ( Egypt ) , New Jerusalem ( the northeast of Ethiopia ) , and Casablanca .
Gauteng is another one that does n’t appear to have drink down up in science fiction very much , but it’stalked about a lot in actual life . In a nutshell , Johannesburg ( a city already growing way past its capacity)joins up with Pretoria / Tshwaneand a identification number of other municipalities , to shape a single megacity . There are already planstojoin them via a high - pep pill “ Gautrain . ”
Asia:
Mega - Tokyo in Bubblegum Crisis . An seism dissever Tokyo in two , and as the metropolis rebuilds , it get even larger and much more rambling , follow to be known as Mega Tokyo . Here ’s a mapping of Mega Tokyo , from B - Club Special ( viaIgarashi ) too , Akira takes plaza in Neo Tokyo , asprawling metropolisof steel and neon . And the anime Cyber - City Oedo 808 claim position in a fabricated future “ Edo , ” or Tokyo , which is plainly much turgid than the existing city .
And real - animation urban planners tattle about the Taiheiyo Belt , which will compensate the Pacific sea-coast of Japan including Tokyo , Osaka and Nagoya .
A single continuous robotic social organisation known as The server cut across almost all the island of Japan , and 50 million people go inside it , in Magnus Robot Fighter and Rai .
And of course , Judge Dredd does not leave Asia untouched — Hondo City cover most of Japan , from Hokkaido all the way down to Wakayama .
Australia:
Greater Sydneyis predicted to encompassa region cross from Melbourne , all the way up to Queensland along the coast . But as with Edinburgh / Glasgow and Gauteng , it does n’t appear that anybody ’s save science fable about this megalopolis yet .
The South Pole:
A continent - wide metropolis call Antarcto covers the whole of the Antarctic , in Magnus , Robot Fighter . Because automaton - combat is intimately dish … cold .
And of course , the metropolis of Holy Terra , or just Terra , take almost the entire planet ’s surface in Warhammer 40,000 .
Additional coverage by Alexis Brown . Map layout by Stephanie Fox .
A translation of this article originally appeared in 2009 .
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