Megalopolis

[2] The megalopolis concept has become highly influential as it introduced a new, larger scale thinking about urban patterns and growth.

[3] The term comes from the Greek word megalo-polis (big city), and has specific geographic definitions dating from 1832, when its meaning was "a very large, heavily populated urban complex".

[4][6] America 2050,[7] a program of the Regional Plan Association (RPA), lists 11 megaregions in the United States and Canada.

Megaregions of the United States were explored in a July 2005 report by Robert E. Lang and Dawn Dhavale of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech.

Using these commuter passageways to travel throughout the megalopolis is informally called megaloping, a term coined by Davide Gadren and Stefan Berteau.

[12][11] In 2019, National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) published guidelines and made a distinction from a similar concept "metropolitan area" (都市圈), which is of a smaller scale than a city cluster.

[13] In the latest standard terminologies of both economics[14] and urban planning,[15] 城市群 is translated as "city cluster", replacing "agglomeration".