Richard Florida and colleagues Tim Gulden and Charlotta Mellander have just published a new report, "The Rise of the Mega-Region." They use a new measure they call Light-based Regional Product to rank the world's top 40 mega-regions. They also include rankings by population, patents and frequently-cited scientists.

Greater Tokyo is the world's top mega-region. Boston-Washington and Chicago-Pittsburgh rank second and third.

Greater Toyko has 55.1 million people, LRP of $2.5 trillion, 91,280 patents, 11 highly-cited scientific authors. (All numbers are 2000-2001.)

Boston-Washington has 54.3 million people, LRP of $2.2 trillion, 21307 patents, and 293 authors.

Chicago-Pittsburgh has 46 million people, LRP of $1.6 trillion, 17,686 patents and 67 authors.

Rounding out the top 10 are:

Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Ruhr-Cologne-Brussels-Antwerp-Lille
Osaka-Nagoya
London-Leeds-Manchester-Liverpool-BIrmingham
Rome-Milan-Turin
Charlotte-Atlanta
Southern California (LA-San Diego-Tijuana)
Frankfort-Stuttgart-Mannheim

One key point of the paper is this: "National borders also have increasingly less to do with defining cultural identity. We all know how different two cities can be within the same state, much less the same country. Cities that have not become a part of the global economy are experiencing more than just lagging economies; they are becoming culturally distinct from their mega-region neighbors as well. These growing pains, on top of glaring economic disparities, are exacerbating the divide between the haves and the have-nots -- the urban sophisticates and rural people -- of the world.... The more two mega-regions -- regardless of their physical distance or historical relationship -- have in common in terms of their economic output, the more likely they are to develop similar social mores, cultural tastes, and even cultural leanings.... Even New York and Shanghai arguably have more in common than, say, New York and Louisville."

Find the paper here.

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