a stupendous engineering project. There is no apparent reason to dome over New York—the ambient atmosphere is quite breathable—but it is definitely an intriguingly futuristic idea that assumes the ability to consume impressive volumes of resources. To imagine Trantor is to take this sort of fascination with the sheer physicality of future cities to its extreme, and also to put their operating systems front and center in the same way as in air-bubble cities, although again there is really no practical reason offered for the gee-whiz gigantism. A world-encompassing city makes extreme demands on the urban metabolism—the importation of the food, fuel, and materials that keep it functioning and the elimination of waste products ranging from excess heat to garbage. Trantor gets its power from the temperature difference between the surface and the deep planetary interior. It depends on the agricultural production of twenty-four planets in the same way that Rome depended on grain from North Africa, wine from Greece, and olive oil from Spain—one of the many parallels to the history of Rome on which Asimov built his galactic history.
Trantor is an ultimate entry in the reimagination of cities along the horizontal plane that began in the later nineteenth century, when the spread of railroads and streetcars broke the physical limits of cities based on walking. Not long after Arturo Soria y Mata imagined a single linear city stretching between opposite corners of Europe, Patrick Geddes, in 1915, coined “conurbation” to describe the growing together of previously distinct cities in industrial regions like the Ruhr and the English Midlands. The U.S. Census tried to give bureaucratic precision to the idea by defining “metropolitan districts” in 1920 and “metropolitan areas” in 1940 to encompass cities and increasingly sprawling suburbs in a single unit. Jean Gottmann simply took the effort another step in arguing that the entire northeastern United States from Boston to Washington functioned as a single “megalopolis”—a concept quickly adapted in Japan as megaroporisu for the Taiheiyo Belt along the southeast-facing coast of Honshu. It got new life in the twenty-first century as “megaregion” in the United States and “mega-urban region” in China.4
Megalopolis is an easy transfer to science fiction, offering writers a quick way give a sense of verisimilitude to their near-future settings. Much of the action in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) takes place in “BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis” (57). The Judge Dredd comics, published since 1977, take place in the twenty-second century in Mega-City One, which extends roughly from Florida to Ontario (or is it Georgia to Montreal—consistency not being a strong point over decades of comic books) with somewhere between one hundred million and eight hundred million residents (ditto). However, fiction has struggled to out-extrapolate mundane planning discourse, especially the work of the enthusiastic Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis, who envisioned Ecumenopolis—a single supercity that might extend its ten drils across entire continents. Assuming a planetary population of forty or fifty billion, he projected from metropolis to megalopolis to world city in an essay on “Ecumenopolis: Tomorrow’s City”:
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