BosWash is a name coined by futurist Herman Kahn in a 1967 essay describing a theoretical United States megalopolis extending from the metropolitan area of Boston to that of Washington, D.C.[1] The publication coined terms like BosWash, referring to predicted accretions of the Northeast, and SanSan for the areas on the Pacific coast of California. The general concept for the area described by BosWash was first identified in French geographer Jean Gottmann's 1961 book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States, although the term BosWash did not appear in the work.[2] BosNYWash is a variant term that specifically references New York City.[3]
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The publication of the ideas of Kahn and Wiener were part of a study commissioned in 1965 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which published the results of the commission's findings in the summer of 1967 as "Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress", a special issue of Dædalus, journal of the academy.[4] In their portion of the work, Kahn and Wiener, discussing urbanization, began by writing:[5]
| “ | The United States in the year 2000 will probably see at least three gargantuan megalopolises. We have labeled these—only half frivolously—"Boswash,""Chipitts," and "SanSan." | ” |
The pair went on to give rough geographic dimensions to the areas. BosWash was described as "the megalopolis that will extend from Washington to Boston" along "an extremely narrow strip of the North Atlantic coast."[5] ChiPitts, mentioned as being from Chicago to Pittsburgh but extending east to Rochester, New York, was laid out as "on Lake Erie and the southern and western shores of Lake Michigan and Lake Ontario" and SanSan as "an even more narrow strip on the West Coast" from either Santa Barbara or San Francisco to San Diego in California.[5]
The three portmanteau terms gained use in the period immediately following publication of The Year 2000, with Newsweek using them in 1967[6] and Changing Times featuring them in 1968.[7] However, the names are currently not used in any official capacity, and, of the three, only BosWash is defined in Random House Dictionary, described there as informal.[8]
Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute outlined an area it labeled the "Northeast" megapolitan area, which it views as extending beyond Boston and Washington – past Portland, Maine and Richmond, Virginia – and described it as one of ten such areas in the United States.[9] In the 2005 study, titled Beyond Megalopolis, researchers analyzed Google search results to determine plausible names for the regions, rejecting terms such as BosWash, stating: "We decided that combined place names seemed contrived and offered little chance for eventual adoption. Therefore, labels such as 'BosWash' to refer to the Northeast or 'SanSac' in reference to the combined San Francisco and Sacramento metropolitan areas were not considered."[9]