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cities, links, north america, toronto, transnationalism

[LINK] Megalopolitan Toronto
American writer and urban-studies specialist Richard Florida has recently moved to Toronto and started a column in the Globe and Mail. His first column, "Wake up Toronto - you're bigger than you think" in today's edition, is worth reading for his suggestion that Toronto's future lies in its development into the nerve centre of a major transnational economic and social entity in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence region.

What has happened is that the mega-city has become the nerve centre of one of the world's greatest mega- regions, a trans-border economic powerhouse that stretches from Buffalo to Quebec City. It's important to recognize this, because mega-regions have replaced the nation state as the economic drivers of the global economy.

A glimpse of this new reality came earlier this month when The Globe and Mail revealed that Canadian Football League owners were negotiating to bring an National Football League team to Toronto, and that the most likely and logical choice of available teams was the Buffalo Bills. The Bills are now seeking permission to play two games at the Rogers Centre next season. The move makes sense because the market for American-style football in Toronto is huge, but even more so when you think of the Buffalo-Toronto corridor in a way that was fashionable before 9/11 but has gone mostly unmentioned since: as a single economic entity – a mega-region, in other words.

[. . .]

These days, Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area are the economic success story. But, border or no border and heightened post-9/11 security notwithstanding, the two cities are effectively part of the same mega-region – let's call it Tor-Buff-Chester – with 22 million people and $530-billion in economic activity, making it the 12th-largest mega-region in the world and fifth-largest in North America.

[. . .]

According to our definition, mega-regions are made up of two or more contiguous cities and their surrounding suburbs, and generate more than $100-billion in annual economic output. Looked at this way, the mega-region centred in Toronto and Buffalo stretches to Guelph, Waterloo and London to the west, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City in the east, and includes Ithaca, Syracuse, Rochester and Utica in the United States. If I knew then what I know now, I might have given it the more accurate, if even clunkier, moniker “Tor-Buff-Loo-Mon-Tawa.”

In North America, only the mega-regions of Bos-Wash (Boston-New York-Washington), Chi-Pitts (running from Chicago through Pittsburgh), LA-San Diego-Tijuana, and Char-lanta (Charlotte through Atlanta) are larger. In the rest of the world, Tor-Buff-Chester is outflanked only by Greater London, Greater Tokyo, Osaka-Nagoya, Amsterdam-Antwerp-Brussels, Rome-Milan-Turin, Frankfurt-Stuttgart and Barcelona-Lyons.

It's interesting to see that Toronto's hinterland really might extend that far beyond Toronto proper, beyond even Canada's borders. Since at least the 1960s, Canadian journalists, sociologists, and others have been writing about the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor, a concentration of population, industry, and wealth that stretches from Windsor, Ontario in the southwest (just next to Detroit) northeast towards Québec City, and has Toronto very nearly dead-centre, with its importance rising since then with Montréal's relative decline. More recently than that, at least as earlier as my brief 2005 observation about the decline of the American cities of Detroit and Buffalo relative to Toronto, others have been suggesting that these and other cities might try to recover by linking with a luckier Toronto. I only hope that Toronto's up to the challenge.

UPDATE (11:11 PM) : Peter links to a Marginal Revolution discussion thread which, in turn, links to a 2007 City Journal| article that is very critical of Buffalo's prospects for revival.

UPDATE (30 October, 2:40 PM) : Richard Florida links to this post in a roundup of reactions to his Globe and Mail article.