Mega Cities

In Kyle’s reading of The New Urban Crisis, “mega cities” names one of the two failure modes of urbanization he wants to avoid — the dense, superstar metropolises whose clustering of talent drives growth but also drives inequality and prices everyone else out. Responding to Richard Florida, Kyle’s note frames the choice starkly: “Instead of suburban sprawl or mega cities of inequality, we need micro cities deliberately designed.” Mega cities are thus the inequality-producing extreme on one end, sprawl the inefficient extreme on the other, with deliberately designed Micro Cities as the throughline answer.

The concept connects directly to the The New City / Prosperable project and the EPCOT hub-and-spoke idea from Walt Disney and the Promise of Progress City — alternatives to concentrating ever more people and capital in a handful of crowded, expensive cores.

Context: “Megacity” is the demographic term for an urban area with a population over ten million. The coming wave of urbanization — Florida notes another 7–8 billion people moving to cities, mostly in the developing world — is concentrated heavily in such mega cities.

Where this appears

• The New Urban Crisis — the inequality-driving extreme Kyle contrasts with deliberately designed Micro Cities; paired with suburban sprawl as the two patterns to avoid