Gigalopolis

Natural History, April, 2001 by Robert (American businessperson and engineer) Anderson

I have always enjoyed time-lapse photography--you know, flowers opening, seeds sprouting, clouds racing across the sky as the sun arcs toward the western horizon. By distorting time, these films seem magical, allowing us to see what before we could only imagine. And as a result, we often gain a new understanding. Project Gigalopolis, a joint effort of the University of California at Santa Barbara and the U.S. Geological Survey (www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/gig/ncgia.html) is a prime example. It seeks to document the explosive growth of our cities in recent years. This is an important task, given the project's assertion that "urban settlements and their connectivity will be the dominant driver of global change during the twenty-first century."

To view some of the group's first efforts, click on "Urban Growth Animations." You can see cities and towns in San Francisco's Bay Area gobble up undeveloped land and merge, or you can watch Washington, D.C., spread far beyond the beltway and fuse with Baltimore. For decades, urban growth was slow and had little impact on the surrounding environment. Then suddenly in the 1950s, things began to accelerate--perhaps due to the combination of booming populations, a national campaign of highway building, faster cars, and cheap gasoline. Now cities and their suburbs are poised to consume rural lands that not long ago were considered well beyond their reach.

Project Gigalopolis plans to use its model to predict the expansion of the urban areas around New York City, Chicago-Milwaukee, Philadelphia-Wilmington, Portland-Vancouver, and elsewhere. Those of us who have grown up near any of these cities are well aware of the tremendous growth, but only this sort of time-lapse animation can give us a real sense of what we have lost and what the future may hold.

Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.