I. Why the Category Travels Badly
The megaregion concept was built in and for North America and Northwest Europe. It presumes a particular starting condition: several cities of roughly comparable weight, historically independent, growing until their commuting fields overlap. Gottmann’s Megalopolis, the Randstad, the Rhine-Ruhr, the Tokaido corridor — all describe coalescence among near-equals.
South America does not generally look like that. Its dominant settlement pattern is primacy: one metropolis vastly outweighing every other city in its national territory, with the second city often a third or a quarter its size. Lima holds roughly a third of Peru’s population. Santiago holds around 40 percent of Chile’s. Buenos Aires and its conurbano approach a third of Argentina’s. Montevideo holds nearly half of Uruguay’s. Where North American megaregions form by adjacent cities growing into one another, several South American formations exist because one city absorbed the national future and the others did not.
Applied carelessly, “megaregion” in South America becomes a flattering synonym for “very large metropolis.” Applied carefully, it identifies something real and distinct: a set of formations in which economic integration genuinely exceeds the metropolitan scale, but where the integrating agent is usually not a shared labor market. It is more often an export corridor, a river, a customs regime, a mountain pass, or the concentration of state authority in one place.
This paper follows the structure of its North American companion — span, binding mechanisms, typology, governance, objections — but the typology is not simply the earlier one relabeled. Two categories are added that the North American case does not require, and one North American category turns out to be almost entirely missing here. Those asymmetries are the analytical payoff of doing both.
II. The Span
South America holds roughly 440 million people. Something on the order of 200 to 220 million live in formations plausibly classified as megaregional, but the coverage is far less continuous than in North America: the continent has intense concentrations separated by very large sparsely settled interiors — the Amazon basin, the Chaco, Patagonia, the Altiplano, the Brazilian sertão. There is no South American equivalent of the near-continuous urbanized band from Boston to Washington, nor of the Great Lakes lattice. What exists instead is a series of dense nodes and a small number of genuine corridors.
Figures below are approximate, and boundary questions are more contested here than in North America because comparable commuting microdata largely does not exist.
A. Brazil
The Macrometrópole Paulista. The clearest megaregion on the continent and the only one with a statutory planning instrument named for the scale. It joins the São Paulo metropolitan region with Campinas, the Baixada Santista (Santos), the Paraíba Valley and São José dos Campos, Sorocaba, Jundiaí, and Piracicaba — on the order of 170-plus municipalities and roughly 33 to 34 million people, generating something approaching a quarter to a third of Brazilian output within a single state. It satisfies the strict coalescence criterion: these are overlapping labor sheds, not merely trading partners.
The Southeast Triangle (São Paulo–Rio de Janeiro–Belo Horizonte). Extending the Macrometrópole northeast along the Dutra corridor to Rio (roughly 13 million) and north to Belo Horizonte (roughly 6 million) yields a formation of 55 to 60 million — comparable in weight to the U.S. Northeast, but with far weaker internal commuting and far worse intercity connectivity.
The Southern Corridor. Curitiba–Joinville–Blumenau–Florianópolis–Porto Alegre: roughly 900 kilometers of agro-industrial and manufacturing settlement holding perhaps 16 to 18 million, with an unusually even city-size distribution by South American standards.
The Northeast Coastal Arc. Salvador, Recife, and Fortaleza, with Natal, João Pessoa, Maceió, and São Luís between and beyond them: perhaps 25 million along 2,000 kilometers of coast. This is a string of metropolises rather than an integrated region — the weakest claim on the list, included because the settlement density is real even where the integration is not.
The Center-West Agro-Logistical Lattice. Brasília–Goiânia (roughly 7 million within 200 kilometers) together with Campo Grande, Cuiabá, and the soy municipalities of Mato Grosso. The fastest-growing formation in Brazil and the least classically megaregional: its coherence comes from grain, not from commuters.
B. The Southern Cone
The Argentine Diamond (Diamante Argentino). Buenos Aires, La Plata, Rosario, Santa Fe, and Córdoba, arranged along the Paraná and the Pampas rail-and-road network: roughly 22 to 24 million, over half of Argentina’s population, containing nearly all of its industry and virtually all of its export capacity. Extreme primacy inside a nominally polycentric shape — Buenos Aires alone accounts for about two-thirds of the total.
Central Chile. Santiago (about 7 million), Valparaíso–Viña del Mar (about 1 million), Rancagua, and Concepción: 12 to 14 million in a 600-kilometer stretch of central valley between the Andes and the coastal range, holding over 70 percent of the national population. Chile is the continent’s most linear case, its shape dictated almost entirely by terrain.
The Río de la Plata Estuary. Buenos Aires and Montevideo face each other across the widest estuary in the world, with no fixed link. Combined weight of roughly 18 million. Functionally, they are two national capitals with shared finance, shared media, and a ferry — which makes this a useful test of whether shared institutions can substitute for physical adjacency. The evidence suggests only partially.
C. The Andean North
The Colombian Triangle. Bogotá (roughly 11 million with its Sabana), Medellín (roughly 4 million), Cali (roughly 3 million), plus the coffee-axis cities and Bucaramanga: 25 to 30 million. This is the continent’s most terrain-fragmented formation. The three vertices sit in separate Andean cordillera systems, and moving between them by road means crossing mountains. The region is joined by aviation and by trucking over passes, and it behaves accordingly.
Lima–Callao and its coastal extensions. Roughly 11 million, about a third of Peru, with the Cañete–Chincha–Ica agro-export axis to the south and, since 2024, a new deep-water gateway to the north. Extreme single-node primacy with almost no counterweight anywhere in the country.
The Ecuadorian Bipole. Quito (about 3 million) and Guayaquil (about 3 million), roughly 420 kilometers apart across the Andes, with Cuenca as a third node. One of the very few genuinely two-headed national systems in Latin America, and worth study for exactly that reason.
The Venezuelan Central Axis. Caracas–Los Teques–Maracay–Valencia, with Barquisimeto: nominally 10 to 12 million. This is the continent’s one clear case of megaregional contraction, following the emigration of several million people over the past decade. Its inclusion matters typologically: it demonstrates that megaregional consolidation is not a one-way process.
The Bolivian Eje Troncal. La Paz–El Alto, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz de la Sierra: roughly 6 million along 900 kilometers, with the economic center of gravity shifting steadily eastward toward Santa Cruz.
D. The Trinational Node
The Triple Frontier — Foz do Iguaçu (Brazil), Ciudad del Este (Paraguay), and Puerto Iguazú (Argentina) — assembles perhaps a million people around a river junction where three sovereignties meet. It is far below megaregional weight and is included here for a different reason: it is the continent’s only urbanized tripoint, and it demonstrates the pattern that such junctions generally follow. Commercial activity concentrates on the side with the most permissive tariff and regulatory regime; the other two sides receive the traffic without capturing the revenue; and the governing institutions that actually function there are single-purpose and asset-anchored — most notably the binational hydroelectric entities of Itaipú and Yacyretá, which are corporations exercising quasi-governmental functions over shared assets because no general-purpose trinational authority exists or is likely to.
This is worth stating plainly, since South America otherwise has no border seam of megaregional weight. There is no San Diego–Tijuana here, no Paso del Norte, no Detroit–Windsor. The absence is structural, not accidental, and Section V returns to it.
III. What Makes Them Cohere
Nine mechanisms recur, and the mix differs sharply from the North American case.
1. Administrative primacy. In unitary states — Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Ecuador, and to a considerable degree Colombia — licensing, courts, ministries, national universities, and corporate headquarters concentrate in the capital because the constitution places decision-making there. Firms locate near the permitting authority. This produces megaregional-scale concentration without any of the intercity coalescence the concept usually implies. Brazil and Argentina, as federations, are partial exceptions, though Argentina’s federalism has not prevented the most extreme primacy on the continent.
2. Interior-to-port export corridors. The dominant freight geometry is directional and one-way: grain from Mato Grosso and the Pampas to Santos, Paranaguá, and Rosario; copper from the Atacama to Antofagasta; iron ore from Carajás to São Luís; oil from the pre-salt basin to Rio. North American freight corridors carry reciprocal flows between metropolitan markets. South American corridors mostly carry commodities outward and containers inward, which builds a different kind of settlement — terminal towns and transshipment nodes rather than distribution employment lattices.
3. Inland waterways. The Paraguay–Paraná Hidrovía is the binding agent of the Argentine Diamond, southern Brazil, Paraguay, and eastern Bolivia. Roughly 3,400 kilometers of navigable channel carrying a very large share of the Southern Cone’s soy and iron. It has no close North American analogue except the Mississippi–Great Lakes system, and unlike that system it is governed by a multi-country agreement whose dredging and tolling arrangements are perennially contested.
4. Bioceanic land bridges. The Capricorn Bioceanic Corridor is the flagship: a 2,400-kilometer road route intended to link Brazil’s Atlantic interior with Pacific ports in northern Chile, traceable to the 2015 Asunción Declaration signed by the presidents of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay. Its keystone is a bridge over the Paraguay River between Porto Murtinho and Carmelo Peralta. The current state of the project illustrates both the ambition and the characteristic difficulty: the two halves of the 1,294-meter span were joined in July 2026, but Brazil’s 13.1-kilometer access road to the BR-267 highway remains unfinished and is not expected before 2027, while Paraguay estimates its own section will be ready in November 2026; a joint customs arrangement has only recently been accepted after protracted negotiation, and road sections in Argentina and Chile still require upgrading or paving. A second crossing on the route, between Pozo Hondo in Paraguay and Misión La Paz in Argentina, remains at the feasibility stage. A corridor is not open when its longest structure is finished; it is open when its slowest customs post is staffed.
5. Pacific gateway restructuring. The most consequential recent change to South American logistics geography is the Chancay megaport north of Lima: a deep-water terminal inaugurated in November 2024 and operated by COSCO, with 1,500 meters of quay across four berths in its first phase and a design capacity of roughly one million containers per year. Growth has been rapid — 286,255 containers in the first year, and more than 502,000 containers and 2.4 million tonnes by mid-2026, with vessel calls up 44 percent in the first five months of 2026 over the same period a year earlier, and feeder services running north to Panama, Guayaquil, and Paita and south to four Chilean terminals. Peruvian analysts report that cargo departing directly for China now includes volumes originating in Ecuador, Chile, and Colombia, with transit time cut by roughly ten days. The port is reorganizing the Pacific coast into a hub-and-feeder system where none previously existed — with the qualification that its position is politically exposed. After the terminal became a focus of United States–China rivalry, a Peruvian court reversed an earlier ruling and restored the oversight authority of Peruvian regulators over the facility in mid-2026.
6. Informal urbanization. A large share of megaregional population growth in South America occurs through self-built housing on peripheral land outside formal subdivision, mortgage, and permitting systems. The conurbano bonaerense, the São Paulo periferia, the hillside comunas of Medellín, and the sand-lot expansion of northern and southern Lima are functionally part of their regions and institutionally semi-visible. Any delineation built on official metropolitan boundaries will systematically understate the functional region, and any infrastructure plan built on formal cadastral data will misplace the demand.
7. Migration, including displacement. Rural-to-urban migration is largely complete in the Southern Cone and continuing in the Andean and Amazonian countries. Layered on top is the Venezuelan displacement of the past decade, which has moved several million people into the Colombian Triangle, Lima, Santiago, Guayaquil, and northern Brazil. This is a binding agent unlike anything in the North American inventory: a single national collapse redistributing population across five other countries’ megaregions simultaneously, while contracting the sending region.
8. Trade regimes — weakly. Here the contrast with North America is sharpest. USMCA rules of origin create a genuine cross-border manufacturing region. Mercosur has not done the equivalent. Internal trade grew quickly through the 1990s, then stalled after Brazil’s 1999 devaluation and Argentina’s 2001 crisis and never fully recovered, with members maintaining long national exception lists against the common external tariff — 100 lines each for Argentina and Brazil, 225 for Uruguay, and 649 for Paraguay. The bloc’s most important recent development is external rather than internal: a political agreement with the European Union reached in December 2024, with the Partnership Agreement and a parallel Interim Trade Agreement signed on 17 January 2026. Brazil completed ratification on 25 February 2026, Argentina and Uruguay ratified quickly, and Paraguay became the last Mercosur state to ratify on 17 March 2026; the European Commission announced it would proceed to provisional application on 27 February 2026, after the European Parliament in January referred the agreements to the Court of Justice, suspending its own consent procedure for an expected sixteen to eighteen months. Whether this reshapes regional production geography or merely widens the commodity export channel is the open question, and the early structure of the concessions suggests the latter is more likely.
9. Aviation over terrain. Where mountains prevent road integration — Colombia above all, but also Ecuador and Bolivia — air links do work that highways do elsewhere. The Bogotá–Medellín–Cali triangle is one of the densest short-haul air markets in the hemisphere relative to its population, precisely because the alternative is a mountain crossing. Terrain converts what would be a driving corridor into an aviation lattice, and this has consequences for who participates in the region: air integration binds professionals and firms while leaving the working population of the intervening territory outside.
Growth
Four sources, weighted differently than in North America. Natural increase is falling across the continent and is now a minor contributor in the Southern Cone, where fertility has dropped below replacement in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and Colombia. Rural-to-urban migration is largely exhausted in the south and continuing in the Andean north. International displacement is currently the most dynamic single source. Informal peripheral expansion adds functional population to megaregions without necessarily adding it to their official boundaries. The overall effect is that South American megaregions are growing more slowly than a decade ago, and that the composition of their growth has shifted from birth to movement.
IV. A Typology
The axes are those of the companion paper — binding agent and morphology — with additions where the North American scheme does not reach.
Axis One: Binding Agent
Type A — Commuter-Field. Overlapping daily labor sheds. Cases: the Macrometrópole Paulista; Santiago–Valparaíso in part; the Bogotá Sabana. Rare, and the only clear full instance is São Paulo’s.
Type B — Transactional Corridor. Business travel, headquarters relations, professional networks, minimal daily commuting. Cases: São Paulo–Rio–Belo Horizonte; Buenos Aires–Rosario–Córdoba; the Colombian Triangle; Quito–Guayaquil; Buenos Aires–Montevideo.
Type C — Production-Sharing. Supply chains under a shared trade regime. Cases: the Argentina–Brazil automotive arrangement, and very little else. This type dominates North American megaregional analysis and is close to vestigial here. Its weakness is the single most consequential structural difference between the two continents, and it explains why South American corridor projects are framed around reaching distant markets rather than around building regional production.
Type D — Extractive-Logistical. Resource extraction, processing, and port capacity. Cases: the Center-West agro-lattice; the Atacama–Antofagasta mining complex; the Carajás–São Luís axis; the Hidrovía corridor; the pre-salt coastal band. The continent’s dominant type by land area and by export value.
Type E — Amenity-Migration. Growth driven by climate, cost, and lifestyle in-migration. Nearly absent at megaregional scale. Coastal Santa Catarina, the Ecuadorian and Colombian retirement enclaves, and parts of the Argentine lake district exhibit the mechanism at sub-megaregional weight. The type is listed to record its absence, which is itself informative: South American internal migration has been driven by employment and by flight, not by amenity.
Type F — Administrative-Primate. (No North American counterpart of significance; Mexico City is the closest.) Cohesion produced by the concentration of state authority in a single capital under a unitary or heavily centralized constitution. Firms, universities, courts, and headquarters agglomerate around the permitting power rather than around each other. Cases: Lima; Santiago; Caracas; Montevideo; Quito; Buenos Aires in substantial part; Bogotá in part. Type F formations are large but structurally shallow: they lack the multi-nodal redundancy that makes a Type A or Type B region resilient, and their fortunes track the fiscal and political health of the national state directly.
Axis Two: Morphology
M1 — Coalescent Polycentric. Macrometrópole Paulista. Essentially one case.
M2 — Primate-Radial. One overwhelming center with absorbed satellites. Lima, Santiago, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Montevideo. The continental default.
M3 — Linear Corridor. Central Chile, the Bolivian eje troncal, southern Brazil, the Brazilian northeast coastal arc.
M4 — Constellational. Multiple centers with substantial empty space between. The Argentine Diamond, São Paulo–Rio–Belo Horizonte, the Center-West lattice.
M5 — Seam. Binational pairing organized around a crossing. Essentially absent at scale; the Triple Frontier and the Rivera–Santana do Livramento type pairs are the only instances, all far below threshold.
M6 — Terrain-Fragmented Archipelago. (No North American counterpart.) Nodes separated by mountain or forest barriers that prevent contiguous settlement, joined by aviation and by a small number of passes and river routes. The region exists as a network without ever becoming a surface. Cases: the Colombian Triangle; the Ecuadorian bipole; the Bolivian eje troncal; any prospective Amazonian formation.
The Cross-Classification
| Formation | Binding Agent | Morphology | Consolidation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Macrometrópole Paulista | A | M1 | Consolidated |
| São Paulo–Rio–Belo Horizonte | B | M4 | Consolidated, weakly linked |
| Southern Brazil corridor | B / D | M3 | Consolidating |
| Brazilian Center-West | D | M4 | Consolidating rapidly |
| Northeast coastal arc | F / D | M3 | Weakly integrated |
| Argentine Diamond | B / F | M4 | Consolidated, primate-skewed |
| Central Chile | F / D | M3 | Consolidated |
| Río de la Plata | B | M2 (paired) | Institutionally linked, physically not |
| Colombian Triangle | B | M6 | Consolidating |
| Lima and coastal Peru | F | M2 | Consolidated, single-node |
| Quito–Guayaquil | B / F | M6 | Emergent |
| Venezuelan central axis | F | M2 | Contracting |
| Bolivian eje troncal | D / F | M6/M3 | Emergent |
| Atacama–Antofagasta | D | M3 | Functional, low-population |
| Capricorn Corridor | D | M3 | Under construction |
| Triple Frontier | — | M5 | Sub-threshold |
Three observations follow.
First, Type F dominance predicts fragility. A region whose cohesion rests on the concentration of state authority is exposed to whatever happens to that state. The Venezuelan axis is the demonstration case, and it should be read as a warning about the general class rather than as a national peculiarity.
Second, Type D dominance predicts a particular failure mode: the corridor without a region. Extractive-logistical infrastructure can pass through a territory for decades while integrating almost none of it. The Chaco sections of the Capricorn Corridor are the current test of whether transit converts into development or remains transit.
Third, the near-absence of Type C and M5 together explains why South American regional integration has produced so much less economic knitting than North American integration has, despite far more elaborate institutional machinery and far more explicit political commitment to the goal. Integration built on production sharing binds firms whether or not politicians remain enthusiastic. Integration built on summits and declarations does not.
V. The Governance Gap
South America has more formal integration institutions than North America and less functional megaregional governance. The two facts are related.
At the continental level, the record is one of institutional churn. UNASUR, once the region’s principal coordinating body, was reduced to five members as frustration over inaction on Venezuela led the presidents of Colombia and Chile to launch a competing bloc, Prosur, which itself struggled to attract regional interest. Argentina and Brazil rejoined UNASUR in 2023. What survived the collapse was not the political vehicle but the project portfolio: the infrastructure planning apparatus originally assembled under the IIRSA initiative and later housed in UNASUR’s infrastructure council persisted as a technical inventory of corridors and crossings, largely because development banks and national transport ministries continued to work from it regardless of which acronym nominally owned it. The lesson is the same one the North American case teaches from the opposite direction: coordination survives where it attaches to a physical asset and a financing stream, and does not survive where it attaches only to a communiqué.
At the national and metropolitan level, the picture is better than the continental one and better than commonly assumed:
- Brazil enacted a metropolitan statute in 2015 requiring integrated urban development plans for metropolitan regions, and São Paulo state produced an action plan for the Macrometrópole — the only planning instrument on the continent explicitly built for a megaregion rather than for a metropolis.
- Colombia created a constitutionally grounded Bogotá–Cundinamarca metropolitan region through amendment in 2020 and implementing legislation in 2022, joining the capital with surrounding municipalities under a shared body. Medellín’s Área Metropolitana del Valle de Aburrá, dating to 1980, remains among the longest-functioning metropolitan authorities in Latin America.
- Chile moved to elected regional governors from 2021, the most meaningful decentralization on the Pacific coast in a generation, though fiscal authority has lagged the electoral reform considerably.
- Argentina remains the clearest failure: the functional Buenos Aires region is split between an autonomous city and a province with divergent political incentives, and no general-purpose body spans the conurbano.
- Binational asset corporations — Itaipú, Yacyretá, the Río de la Plata administrative commission, the Hidrovía agreement — do real governance work within narrow mandates. They confirm the pattern: shared physical assets force coordination; shared aspirations do not.
The structural point is worth stating against the North American comparison. In North America, the megaregional governance problem is competitive: multiple general-purpose jurisdictions each want the region and none can exit the resulting race unilaterally. In South America, the more common problem is capacity concentration: a single dominant authority formally covers the region but has neither the fiscal reach nor the administrative presence to govern its informal periphery, so large parts of the functional region are governed by nobody in particular. These are different failures and they call for different remedies. Compact-style bodies with independent revenue address the first. They do very little about the second, which is a problem of state presence rather than of jurisdictional design.
VI. Objections
The category may be imported and ill-fitting. The strongest objection is the one this paper opened with. If a “megaregion” is defined by coalescence among comparable cities, then most of what is catalogued above does not qualify, and calling Lima a megaregion adds nothing to calling it a large primate metropolis. The response offered here — adding Type F as a distinct binding agent rather than stretching Type A to cover it — is a defensible move, but a critic could fairly call it a rescue of a category that the underlying settlement pattern does not support.
The data are thinner. Nothing comparable to North American employer-household linked commuting microdata exists across most of the continent. Delineations rest on coarse census journey-to-work questions, on nighttime lights, or on economic output proxies. Boundaries in this paper should be read as arguments, not measurements.
Informality confounds measurement in one direction. Because peripheral growth is largely informal, official figures understate functional region size and understate it unevenly across countries — which makes cross-national comparison within the continent less reliable than the tables suggest.
Corridor projects have a poor completion record. The bioceanic route has been under discussion since 2015 and its access roads and customs arrangements are still incomplete on both sides of its keystone bridge. A literature that treats announced corridors as existing corridors will systematically overstate integration.
The environmental and social critique deserves a hearing. Critics have argued that Pacific gateway and bioceanic corridor investment functions principally to accelerate the extraction and export of soy, beef, and minerals, with the corridor’s benefits accruing to shippers and its costs to the Chaco, the Pantanal, the Amazon fringe, and the communities living along the route. This is not merely an ethical objection appended to an economic analysis; it is an empirical claim about who captures the gains from Type D integration, and the burden of showing otherwise sits with corridor proponents.
Cohesion here is at least as policy-contingent as in North America. The Chancay case makes this concrete: a single port has reorganized Pacific coast logistics within eighteen months, and its regulatory position has already been litigated twice under great-power pressure. Analysis that treats new integration as settled mistakes a recent decision for a trend.
VII. Comparative Observations
Setting the two continents side by side yields four findings that neither paper produces alone.
- North American megaregions are bound most durably by labor markets; South American ones by commodity corridors and state authority. This makes the northern formations more resilient to political change and the southern ones more responsive to it — in both directions.
- Trade agreements bind unevenly. USMCA rules of origin created a manufacturing region that persists across administrations. Mercosur’s tariff structure, riddled with exceptions, has not. Integration that operates on the firm’s bill of materials outlasts integration that operates on the diplomat’s calendar.
- Border seams are a North American phenomenon. The four dense binational crossings of North America have no South American counterpart of comparable weight. The reason is that North American seams pair a high-wage and a low-wage economy across a single crossing with enormous production-sharing volume, while South American borders mostly pair similar economies across sparsely settled interiors. Where megaregions do not touch, seams do not form.
- Terrain matters more in the south, and it produces a distinct settlement form. The Andes convert what would be corridors into archipelagos, integrated by air rather than by road. This yields regions whose professional and corporate classes are fully integrated and whose working populations are not — a stratified integration with few North American parallels.
VIII. Conclusion
South America contains perhaps a dozen and a half formations at megaregional scale, holding something under half its population on a small fraction of its land. They are less continuous, more primate, and more commodity-dependent than their North American counterparts, and only one of them — São Paulo’s Macrometrópole — satisfies the strict coalescence test that produced the concept in the first place.
That is not a reason to discard the frame. It is a reason to specify what kind of integration is present before recommending instruments. Intercity rail is a Type A and Type B proposal, and it makes sense in the São Paulo–Campinas field and possibly on the Santiago–Valparaíso and Bogotá–Sabana axes; proposing it for Lima or the Center-West misreads what those places are. Customs harmonization, road paving, and port capacity are Type D instruments, and they are where the returns are, provided the corridors actually get finished and the territories they cross get something more than dust and transit. Strengthening state administrative presence in informal peripheries is the Type F instrument, and it is the one least often described in megaregional terms even though it addresses the largest population.
The continental integration bodies will likely continue to be founded, abandoned, and refounded. What will keep functioning is what has always kept functioning here: the binational dam corporations, the river commission, the customs post, the dredged channel, the finished bridge. The practical program is to attach as much coordination as possible to those durable objects, and to be honest that where no such object exists, the region will be governed at the scale of the municipality and the ministry, and not at the scale where its economy actually operates.
