The urbanized northeastern seaboard of the United States, with its immediate hinterland—called the Atlantic Region for the purposes of this paper—is the world’s largest urban cluster.
In 1966, it had 47.1 million people (nearly 22 percent of the population of North America) within 126,000 square miles - only 1.3 percent of the land area of the United States and Canada. Projections indicate that over the next half-century the Atlantic Region’s share of the continental population will shrink by only a few percentage points while in absolute terms its population will nearly double. This prospect raises two related issues:
Is it desirable to try to redistribute population more evenly across the continent in order to avoid the high concentration in the Atlantic Region?
What are the basic patterns of settlement open to the area (issues of overall size and internal structure are somewhat interdependent), and how do they relate to prospective technological possibilities and social objectives?
The purpose of this paper is, then, to sketch a portrait of the Atlantic Region spotlighting these issues, and to establish a framework for subsequent discussion of impending development decisions.