I live on the edge of a city, which has a population of around of around 150,000, surrounded by fertile farmland to the north and a river estuary to the south (where you can still catch a sea trout or a salmon if your lucky). The city has at one point in human history had the very first railways, the first systems electrification such as public street lighting and public transportation, the worlds largest factories, the worlds longest bridge (all now of course surpassed in the last 130-150 years) and even had some notable technological firsts such as the invention of the postage stamp. Much of the finance to build the United States of America originated from these parts and had a one point the highest density of millionaires in the world (around 120-150 years ago). Yet it never materialised into a Megacity. For folks who live in modern Megacities the contrast would I suspect would be quite amusing as many folks from my city could well still be living in substantial Victorian and Georgian properties getting on for 150 years old (before electricity became widely available) where chimney pots (for burning coal) still abound everywhere. The small and narrow and winding streets were laid out for a human scale and not motorised vehicles (although the town planners had tried darnedest to fix this during the period 1960-2000)

How do you cope in a Megacity when the interconnectedness of the global economy (finance, energy requirements such as peak oil or even insurrection due to inequality between the rich and the poor) or even mass casualty catastrophic events in the future such as earthquakes or when its just all starts to decay away and begin to fall apart such as large post industrial conurbations such as Detroit?