Within Australia’s 3-tier federal system the need to better address the challenges of new spatial settlement patterns has been highlighted (Brown and Bellamy, 2008; Gurren et al. 2006; McQuirk and Argent, 2011; Searle & Bunker, 2010; Spearitt, 2009; Stilwell and Troy, 2000). Whilst recent urban policy has focused strategic metropolitan attention around urban consolidation and the compact city, the on-going growth and increasingly contiguous nature of the mega-city continues to re-define contemporary urban Australia (Forster, 2010; Newton, 2008; O’Connor, 2005). The largest of these occur along the Australian coastline and include the areas from Melbourne-Geelong, Sydney-Newcastle and South-East Queensland (SEQ) which links the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast with the capital city of Brisbane. The latter has been coined the 200km city or Noosangatta (Noosa-Coolangatta) by Spearritt (2009, 2010) who highlights that the unplanned nature of growth in SEQ poses significant challenges for local and state governments. It has been argued that the growth of the mega-city region represents the “most significant transition in Australia since the auto city transition in the mid 20th century” (Newton, 2008, p.173). 

There is a growing (some might say insidious) spatial settlement trend in Australia towards vast conurbations that extend most visibly along the Eastern coastline: an almost seamless link-up of mega-cities, cities and towns into complex mega-metropolitan regions. Within this new urban order, the planning and management of metropolitan/regional complexity - and at what scale - are now crucial urban governance dimensions. Perhaps thus it ever was. As Gottmann (1961, p.vii) pointed out half a century ago the extension of urban and economic activity in a linear corridor from Boston through to Washington D.C. in the United States was what he termed the Megalopolis: “the cradle of a new order in the organization of inhabited space...that was in fact far from orderly”. He highlighted the opportunities offered by Megalopolis in terms of economies of scale. This view was contested by Mumford (1961) who stressed that the ‘Myth of Megalopolis’ represented the transition from purposeful growth to purposeless expansion resulting in what he termed ‘sprawling metro giantism’ or ‘the burst urban container’. More recently Short (2007) has highlighted the liquid spatial nature of megalopolis that is perpetually in motion. 

To this end the paper is divided into three sections. The first section ‘Megalopolis Unbound’ recovers some of the key tenets of thinking from the megalopolis literature that highlight the implications for urban governance across complexity and scale. The second part of the paper ‘the 200km city (and beyond)’ builds on this to explore the contemporary governance conditions and challenges of an emergent Australian megametro region in the SEQ/Tweed region that crosses over into the Queensland/New South Wales border. Finally, the third section ‘National Narratives’ focuses on the potential role of national spatial policy to address these new spatial settlement patterns attentive to the principle of subsidiarity in a climate of change.