Ancient city, central Peloponnese, Greece. Occupying both banks of the Helisson River, it was founded in 371-368 BC by Epaminondas of Thebes as the seat of the Arcadian League. Attacked several times by Sparta, it joined the Achaean League in 234 BC. It declined rapidly after being plundered by Cleomenes III of Sparta in 223 BC, and by the 2nd century AD it lay in ruins. The nearby modern town lies in a rich lignite-bearing region that fuels thermal power stations. A major conurbation. Generally the term describes any densely populated social and economic entity encompassing two or more cities and the increasingly urbanized space between them. It particularly came to describe the urbanized region of the northeastern U.S. that arose in the second half of the 20th century. Stretching between the metropolitan areas of Boston on the northeast to Washington, D.C., on the southwest, it included the metropolitan areas of New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Md. The name, meaning "great city," was coined by French geographer Jean Gottmann
A heavily populated urban area that runs continuously through numerous cities An example would be the Eastern Seaboard of the United States starting with Washington, D C , and continuing through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Y, Boston
A spiffy new term for urban sprawl, situations where the expansion of several cities in a particular area has created one continuous city, even if the different parts retain their own name (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, etc )
Term used to designate large coalescing supercities that are forming in diverse parts of the world: used specifically to refer to the Boston-Washington multi-metropolitan corridor (de Blij & Muller, 1996)