It is always painful , here at the Arcadian Recorder anyway, to see authors writing of a 'doomed' Megalopolis.
This is akin to hearing people talk about the 'dumb version' of George W Bush.
Blame the Japanese - manga, anime and all.
Inherent in the history of, and hence in the connotations of , the original Megalopolis is the fact that the glorious future foreseen for it by its founders all came to not.
Once expected to be the biggest city on earth, it relatively quickly ended up as a deserted and unpopulated dot on a rural backroad.
It is hard to imagine a failure more total than that.
A 'Mega' flop in fact.
In the days when knowing Latin and Greek history was part of every educated person's upbringing, this fact was well known.
This perhaps is the reason we didn't see any past city fathers, even those with the most oversized egos, daring to call their large cities 'megacities' or speaking of the residents of their surrounding suburbs as living in 'megaland' .
The more modest, but more neutral, term 'metro' ( meaning 'mother' !) suits these 'fathers' just fine !
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