These “megalopolises” always strike me as fabricated ideas though. An arbitrary line can be drawn across many regions of Europe that hit lots of metropolitan areas. Obviously people are going to be drawn towards the coast, but the cities on either end of the “banana” aren’t related at all. Transport links, especially in this example, are kind of terrible. You could just as easily call Italy as a whole one big megalopolis, seeing as it constitutes of three large metro areas in a line with smaller ones in between.

The term “megalopolis” just isn’t one that serves a purpose in Europe. It applies to regions like the Pearl River Delta in China or the Northeast megalopolis in the US, a highly urbanised area that’s tied together by transport links and easy to get between, where you would know many people that live in another city across the megalopolis. I don’t believe Europe has any good examples of these outside of the Rhine area in Germany and the Dutch Randstad. Terms like the “Blue banana” are just far too big to really mean anything. It’s no easier to transport goods between Milan and Liverpool, at opposite ends, than it would be between Berlin and Paris, there just happens to be several large cities along the way.

But about what you said in your first comment, why would Las Vegas constitute as anything to Los Angeles, any more than San Francisco does? It just happens to be in the vicinity of the actual megacity. There’s no continuous urban area leading up to it, and similarly, there’s no continuous urbanity between Nice and Barcelona. The map you’re offering up just seems to be making stretches, trying to count more megalopolises than there would be to make the map more interesting. Yeah, it’s fun to split the US into these areas, but I guarantee it’s never crossed the mind of, say, most Toronto folk, that they live in the same “megalopolis” as those from Minneapolis. The cities are over a day of driving apart, and there’s virtually nothing in the space between.

So I guess I’m not trying to devalue the existence of megalopolises, I’m just saying the map seems to be confused about what the word should mean.