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Professor Gottmann, in his introduction to this volume, has made plain the nature of his undertaking and the precise significance he attaches to the term Megalopolis. I hope that his own definition will be heeded; for the term is so awe-inspiring, and the phenomenon it describes so dramatic and novel, that it is very easy for misconceptions to take root. While this work was in progress, I found the most universal impression among those who heard of it for the first time to be that of a monstrous city, a kind of indefinite extension of Times Square up and down the whole Atlantic seaboard.This book is about something entirely different. Dr. Gottmann is too careful and too imaginative a scholar to assume that trends are running all in one direction, or to take it for granted that man is doomed to be crushed under an environment of his making. He sees the Northeastern seaboard of the United States as a development of immense significance, typically modern in its urbanized concentration, yet containing balances and counterforces which give it variety within its overall unity. This area, he says, “may be considered the cradle of a new order in the organization of inhabited space.” The fact that the new order is, in his words, “still far from orderly” should not blind us to the possibilities that exist within this form of human settlement — nor absolve us of the responsibility to correct its deficiencies.

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