ChiPitts

ChiPitts or the Great Lakes Megalopolis refers to a group of metropolitan areas in the Great Lakes region or Midwest of the United States along with Western Pennsylvania and Western New York, extending from Pittsburgh to Chicago (the largest city in the megalopolis) and linked by economics, transport, and communications. The estimated population of this megalopolis is 54 million people.

The term was coined in the 1961 book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States by French geographer Jean Gottmann. Gottmann also envisaged the development of two similar megalopolises in the US: BosWash from Boston to Washington, DC and SanSan from San Francisco to San Diego.

Beyond Megalopolis by Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute, an attempt to update Gottmann's work with current trends, defines a similar Midwest megapolitan area, as one of ten such areas in the United States, avoiding the neologism ChiPitts which has never come into common use.

Criticism

Compared to BosWash, Japan's Pacific Belt, and others, this is a looser collection of cities, spread over a large area with much suburban and rural space in between, rather than a continuous urbanized area, and one review judges it to be "at best a borderline case" of a megalopolis. [1]

Since ChiPitts is very close to Canada's Quebec City-Windsor Corridor, the question which megalopolis many areas in Southern Ontario and Southern Quebec (or contrarily Western New York and Southeast Michigan) belong to is debatable.

Since Gottmann's original publication, many constituent portions of this corridor have suffered job loss and in some cases diminished populations, in the wake of changes in the U.S. economy and the shift of manufacturing jobs to other portions of the U.S. or overseas.

Related terms

The Pittsburgh-Chicago Corridor is an academic Urban Studies term that describes the area running through the Rust Belt from the Mid-Atlantic to the Western Great Lakes. ChiPitts also roughly has the same boundaries as the Rust Belt.

The Steel City Corridor ideally describes the area connecting Cleveland to Pittsburgh via Youngstown-Warren (OH), and Sharon-Farrell-New Castle (PA). Historically, these areas are known as the Steel Valleys (Mahoning and Shenango).

US Census statistics

The table above does not include:

• Metropolitan Statistical Areas not part of a CSA (see List of United States metropolitan statistical areas by population),
• micropolitan or rural areas (see List of United States micropolitan statistical areas by population),
• or Canada (Toronto is at the centre of the Golden Horseshoe, a densely populated region in Ontario which is home to roughly eight million people, or one quarter of the Canadian population)

List of cities

The major cities in the ChiPitts megalopolis include the following: (Note: as it says above, areas in Southern Canada, Western New York and Southeast Michigan can be considered to be a part of the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor, not ChiPitts.)

• Wisconsin
  • Green Bay, Wisconsin Pop: 102,313
  • Kenosha, Wisconsin Pop: 96,845
  • Appleton, Wisconsin Pop: 70,087
  • Waukesha, Wisconsin Pop: 68,545
  • Racine, Wisconsin Pop: 81,855
  • Madison, Wisconsin Pop: 221,551
  • Milwaukee, Wisconsin Pop: 578,887
  • Janesville, Wisconsin Pop: 59,498
  • Beloit, Wisconsin Pop: 35,775
• Illinois
  • Aurora, Illinois Pop: 157,267
  • Chicago, Illinois Pop: 2,900,000
  • Elgin, Illinois Pop: 98,645
  • Joliet, Illinois Pop: 145,803
  • Naperville, Illinois Pop: 140,106
  • Rockford, Illinois Pop: 150,115
  • Waukegan, Illinois Pop: 91,396
• Indiana
  • Indianapolis, Indiana Pop: 794,160
  • Hammond, Indiana Pop: 83,048
  • East Chicago, Indiana Pop: 32,414
  • Fort Wayne, Indiana Pop: 248,341
  • Gary, Indiana Pop: 102,746
  • South Bend, Indiana Pop: 107,789
• Michigan
  • Ann Arbor, Michigan Pop: 114,024
  • Battle Creek, Michigan Pop: 53,364
  • Detroit, Michigan Pop: 917,866
  • Flint, Michigan Pop: 124,943
  • Grand Rapids, Michigan Pop: 197,800
  • Kalamazoo, Michigan Pop: 77,145
  • Lansing, Michigan Pop: 119,128
• Ohio
  • Cleveland, Ohio Pop: 478,403
  • Cincinnati, Ohio Pop: 317,361
  • Columbus, Ohio Pop: 728,432
  • Toledo, Ohio Pop: 313,619
  • Akron, Ohio Pop: 217,074
  • Dayton, Ohio Pop: 166,179
  • Youngstown, Ohio Pop: 82,026
• Pennsylvania
  • Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Pop: 334,569
  • Erie, Pennsylvania Pop: 103,717
• New York
  • Buffalo, New York Pop: 282,064
  • Niagara Falls, New York Pop: 55,593
• Ontario, Canada
  • Windsor, Ontario Pop: 208,402
  • Kitchener, Ontario Pop: 209,200
  • Hamilton, Ontario Pop: 500,000
  • Mississauga, Ontario Pop: 700,000
  • Toronto, Ontario Pop: 2,613,900

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