Urban Sprawl in Comics Redux?

[dewline]

The latest version of Legion of Super-Heroes mentioned something interesting in passing in a recent issue written by Mark Waid: their version of 31st Century Metropolis runs across nearly the entire North American Atlantic seaboard.

Question: how chilling(or not) do you find the implications of a single city running all the way from Cape Breton to Key West?

Yours, whilst still wishing I'd gotten that Daily Planet Guide to the Legion Worlds project with West End Games past the outline stage,

Dwight

Comments

Further Speculations

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Going point by point...

As to the East Coast, I see no reason why continental unification would not have happened at some point after 2500 AD. Hence my "Cape Breton to Key West" comment. If you've an argument for a "Ville d'Acadie" encompassing the Maritime Provinces, with or without Newfoundland Island...?

No arguments re: "SanAngeleopolis"/"Mega-California" (I think Paul Levitz used both names for that region?) or "Texas City".

Gulf Coast: New Orleans and St. Roch might well merge, as they're both in Orléans Parish, and who knows what else would get swallowed up by the consequences?

More likely, Central-Keystone's swallowed up Omaha and Kansas City. Whether or not Waid and Kitson decide to revive Lakopolis to cover the Great Lakes cities of the United States, I'll be interested to see. No idea either if Madison and Minneapolis-St. Paul -- and Fawcett City as well, if Jerry Ordway's hints of it lying on the Minnesota-Wisconsin line ever get taken seriously again -- get swallowed up by either of our proposed mega-cities.

Since you raised the Toronto-Montréal Corridor -- so it's called by Via Rail (http://viarail.ca/), the transit connections that link those two cities also connect to Ottawa. A "Greater Canada-Centrale" hyperpolis, given a thousand years' uninterrupted urban sprawl.

And as to such maps, I'd gladly accept a commission to draw one up.

Re: Further Speculations

[quietdarkness.livejournal.com]

Man, I was halfway through a long reply to this and the transformer out my window had a hiccup and shut my lights off. @&!*%##$!

Ok, take 2, same verse.

I think you should email DC, or even Mark and Barry and ask if you can draw a map for them. They can include it in the 50th year Anniversary Special, which has BETTER be coming eventually:D

You do bring up an interesting point. How far are regional differences obliterated in the 31st Century? Waid made it sound like there was a uniform static culture galaxy wide, but I think we've seen that people DO congregate on Naltor and on Colu, so I think that Oriental super politeness thing must be peculiar to Earth. It's obvious by the characters that while The Public Service is a UP static feature, cultural differences are still alive and well.

Thank God, because that was one of my favorite complaints about the last boot.

Now, back to the subject at hand...

I would assume the North Am Sector would include Canada and the US. And how the cities would develop would depend, I suspect, on what regional differences were around.

I suppose we could assume that if Metropolis DOES go from Cape Breton to say, Florida, that the US cultural differences between the northeast and the southeast are erased, to say nothing of the differences between the US and Canada.

However, if that's the case, does that also apply to people on this continent who speak a different language from English? Is Mexico part of the North Am Sector, or does it belong to the Central Am Sector? I know for a fact that Central America, even if it's located technically in North America, uses the same seasons as South America. How much is language a part of geographical and cultural differences? Has it ALL been obliterated by the 31st Century?

Knowing human nature, I sorta doubt it, but that's my personal opinion, with absolutely no comic book based data to back it up:)

If regional differences are gone, then perhaps Texas City is wrong. Perhaps it's The Gulf of Mexico City, ranging from Merida, Mexico to Sanibel Island, Florida! Maybe the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is part of the southern part of Central City!

However, if there are still regional variations, perhaps Quebec has it's own megatropolis. Mexico would have one from north of Tampico to south of Merida. Mexico City would be HUGE, perhaps the western edge of the coast metropolis.

I'd hate to imagine what the Euro Sector would look like:)

Anyway, it's an interesting subject, one I hadn't given much thought to, except I did take note of the size of Metropolis.

Which leads to another question...if the envirocrats have succeeded in banning weather control, is the Legion Headquarters somewhere where it's likely for a nice class 3 or 4 hurricane to breeze in? How well prepared is the 31st Century for natural disasters? They don't like to leave their houses for anything, much less evacuate together. And there's some tech they don't trust. When I learned there was no more weather control, it was the first thing I thought of. How well prepared are they for blizzards, ice storms, tornados, and hurricanes? If they've had weather control for awhile, and now it's been recently outlawed, do they even know what they are in for?