[PHOTO] Oxford Fruit, 255 Augusta Avenue

Oxford Fruit, 255 Augusta Avenue (southeast corner of Augusta and Nassau), in Kensington Market.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Andrew Barton is decidedly unimpressed by anti-nuclear energy alarmism.


• Beyond the Beyond links to a recent article on the Mexican narcocorrida, a music genre inspired by the exploits of drug lords.


• Centauri Dreams reports on two recently-discovered planets, Earth-sized worlds that are actually the husks of gas giants consumed by red giants.


• Eastern Approaches examines a recent Swedish study on Sweden's defense relationship with the Baltic States. When would Sweden be faced with a need to intervene in their defense?


• Geocurrents notes the latest phase of the Russian-Georgian controversy, a Georgian effort to convince the Eurasian countries which translate the countries name via the Russia "Gruziya" to switch.


• GNXP takes a look at the figures and notes that Turkey is already wealthier than every Balkan state but Greece, even wealthier than the Romania and Bulgaria that have joined.


• Progressive Download's John Farrell notes that astronomers are excited to note that a dust cloud detected approaching the black hole at the centre of our galaxy will be starting to spiral into it shortly.

[BRIEF NOTE] On maps of regionalisms and countries and cities intersecting

A recent post at the blog Landscape+Urbanism drew from a recent discussion of an urban conurbation in northern California extending into Nevada to talk about the megaregion in the United States.

As mentioned in the article, the significance of the concept of megapolitan areas is to look more broadly at a larger scale, King, quoting Nelson, mentions that "regions can be more proactive in everything from transportation planning to economic strategies... to have people look at things a little differently, the whole rather than the parts." While explicitly not a model for mega-regional government, there are some possibilities of what this might mean for regions by looking at larger areas. As mentioned by King, "It's too early to say whether the concept of megapolitan areas will catch on as a framework for government policy, much less in terms of how regular people define where they live." The significant of megapolitan areas, thus is undetermined.

The overall ambiguity of the defining characteristics of a 'city' has led to a lot of questions related to city centers, sprawl, and other hybrid urban agglomerations like edge cities, exurbs, and the shift from urban area to metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). This leads to a lot of diversity in definition (outlined in the SF Gate article) - including the largest megapolitan area (NY-Phil 33.9 million people) to the smallest, fastest growing (Las Vegas 2.4 million). While Vegas booms, the Steel Corridor of wester PA is creeping along slowly. In terms of diversity, not surprisingly, the Southern California region has the largest percentage of minorities (62.7%) and the Twin-Cities are the least diverse with 15.5% of minorities. The terms megaregion, megalopolis, megapolitan area, while similar in nature, are somewhat different historically, spatially, and statistically, so it is worth a look at some of the designations. A map of megaregions shows the eleven areas in the United States as determined by the Regional Plan Association.

The different terms, definitions, and geographical extents makes the concepts a bit difficult to parse, but in general terms, the areas are defined by a population of more than 10 million people that exist within a 'clustered network of cities' typically delineated through transportation corridors. The new interpretation of Megapolitan area builds on earlier concepts to describe a more general 'transmetropolitan geography' which is typically thought of more commonly in larger, global areas such as China, Japan, Brazil - which include megaregions of 120 million (Hong Kong, Shenzen-Guangzhou), 60 million (Nagoya-Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe) and 43 million (Rio de Janeiro-Sao Paulo). While the concepts are similar, the scale of these new global areas are immense in comparison to the US.

What caught my attention in the above map was the location of Toronto on it, as the largest city on the Great Lakes megaregion's northeastern fringe. Other southern Ontario cities feature--from west to east, roughly, London, Kitchener-Waterloo, Hamilton, Oshawa, and the Niagara sprawl--but Toronto stands out for its size. Is it Toronto's particular edge, among its peers--cities of similar size--in the Great Lakes megaregion, to be a city in a polity that is not the United States? This situation, Toronto's inclusion as a non-American component of a largely American megalopolitan region, was described by Richard Florida in 2007; this observation, at least, seems valid.

But what does it mean, too, that Canada's major cities are not united in this megaregion? Ottawa and Montréal and Québec City, all Toronto's peer cities within the central Canadian corridor--as regional or provincial capitals, as economic centres, as hubs of population--are located outside of the boundaries of these megaregions. Vancouver and British Columbia's Lower Mainland generally, in contrast, are part of the identified Cascadia megaregion, but Vancouver is famously a distant periphery of Canada. The other major centres of western Canada, never mind Atlantic Canada, are located far distant from these megaregions, dense hubs of population and--implied--prosperity. How can Canada as a whole benefit from Toronto's inclusion in a largely non-Canadian regionalism that doesn't include Toronto's Canadian partners? Canadian polycentric identities and realities are surely going to be reinforced by this. (Mexico's too, come to think of it.)