Charlotte, NC: The Global Evolution of a New South City

by William Graves (Editor), Heather A. Smith (Editor)

The rapid evolution of Charlotte, North Carolina, from "regional backwater" to globally ascendant city provides stark contrasts of then and now. Once a regional manufacturing and textile center, Charlotte stands today as one of the nation's premier banking and financial cores with interests reaching broadly into global markets. Once defined by its biracial and bicultural character, Charlotte is now an emerging immigrant gateway drawing newcomers from Latin America and across the globe. Once derided for its sleepy, nine-to-five "uptown," Charlotte's center city has been wholly transformed by residential gentrification, corporate headquarters construction, and amenity-based redevelopment. And yet, despite its rapid transformation, Charlotte remains distinctively southern--globalizing, not yet global. This book brings together an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars and local experts to examine Charlotte from multiple angles. Their topics include the banking industry, gentrification, boosterism, architecture, city planning, transit, public schools, NASCAR, and the African American and Latino communities. United in the conviction that the experience of this Sunbelt city--center of the nation's fifth-largest metropolitan area--offers new insight into today's most pressing urban and suburban issues, the contributors to Charlotte, The Global Evolution of a New South City ask what happens when the external forces of globalization combine with a city's internal dynamics to reshape the local structures, landscapes, and identities of a southern place.

Genres: History

310 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 2010

Reviews

[Everett · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you go in knowing what to expect, this is a pretty good read; it is not a narrative or cohesive history of Charlotte, which I'm still searching for -- Hornet's Nest: The Story of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County is on my list and may be the saving grace (the fact that I'm a sucker for local history may explain my relatively high ranking). Instead, the book provides a mix of essays dedicated to some of the major topics that shaped Charlotte (mostly) during the transformative 20th century: textiles, banking, NASCAR, segregation/resegregation, and immigration. The book is best thought of as an urban studies book rather than a history. The editors did a decent job of pulling together a good mix of topics, though I will say there were sometimes abrupt / unsettling shifts in tone between the different essays and, perhaps to be expected, some overlap in topics covered. I really enjoyed reading certain chapters, such as "Red Dust and Dynamometers" and "Development and the Politics of School Desegregation and Resegregation," that did a great job of weaving a story together and taught me a lot about how Charlotte's core industries and institutions came to be. Others were more academic in nature, were written at a 30,000 ft level, and provided little in the way of insights or anecdotes specific to Charlotte (which is more what I was looking for).
On more than one occasion, the book left me reflecting on the soul of the city. I appreciated that Charlotte has, even before the last 25 years, been a place where outsiders come together to trade and benefit economically. The book helped crystalize the fact that from the gold rush, to textile trading, to global banking, Charlotte has always been a commercial city "searching for respect" (as one of the early chapters effectively established) across the region and the nation; being landlocked and not tremendously unique in terms of geography, it's a wonder that the city has grown to the level it has. No doubt, a number of passionate individuals (like Hugh McColl) who had a vision for the city enabled such a transformative change. Charlotte has prided itself on being a progressive Southern city - mostly, I realized, with the aim of being respected a stable and acceptable place to do business. As the city has evolved and grown, the book does a good job of highlighting the key issues Charlotte faces if it seeks to make decisions for more reasons than they are so practical ways to enable economic growth. The book provides a good overview, with a few fun tidbits of knowledge, for anyone interested in understanding the changes in Charlotte over the (mostly late) 20th century.... but I am still on the search for a single-author narrative that goes back further in time and provides a wide-ranging analysis.