My brother recommended me Richard Florida’s blog a while ago. It happened that while I was in Hamburg last week, Richard Florida was also there and he was talking in the same conference as Danny. My brother bought one of his books after the conference, Who’s your city. I’ll talk more about this interesting book in other posts, but right now I just wanted to featured this paragraph about Japan’s overpopulation.
Greater Tokyo, home to more than 55 million people and responsible for nearly 2.5 trillion in economic output, is the world’s biggest mega, with world-class strengths in finance, design, and high technology. The second Japanese mega-region, stretching for Osaka to Nagasaki, is home to 36 million people who generate 1.4 trillion in output. Its niche specialties include high-tech innovation and manufacturing- from automobiles to cutting-edge electronics. Fuku-kyushu houses 18 million people and produces 430 billion in LRP, while Greater Sapporo is home to more than 4 million people producing 200 billion in LRP. The boundaries of Japan’s great mega-regions are already blurring. Much of Japan may be well on its way to becoming the world’s first integrated super-mega-region- a single, gargantuan, and geographically overlapping economic entity of more than 100 million people producing 4.5 trillion in LRP.
In this map the super-mega-region structure can be appreciated, almost all Japan is connected.
Map from Richard Florida’s book, extracted from his website.
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4 replies on “100 million super-mega-region”
I’m interested in the big agglomerated cities. I think the fact Japan is a big city is one of the keys of its successs.
If you’re interested in urbanism, I recommend you the website: atributosurbanos.es (in Spanish).
If these regions merge together through population growth, and the fact that Japan’s population is shrinking, this would imply an emptying of the Japanes rural areas and the consolidation of Japanese people in the mega cities.
That’s where the jobs are and people are tired of the long commutes to work so they are movi ng closer to the cities.
looks like S. Korea is already a one big city according to that map
never realized that shanghai was so close to japan
high speed railway between the countries will greatly boost communication