Charlotte: An emerging walkable modern-day megalopolis

[Metro Jacksonville]

Charlotte: An emerging walkable modern-day megalopolis



Remember when Jacksonville used to have a larger downtown than Charlotte? The consolidation of the banking industry over the last two decades has pushed Uptown Charlotte into a different stratosphere. Here's a look at a booming Sunbelt urban environment.

Read More: http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2016-oct-charlotte-an-emerging-walkable-modern-day-megalopolis

[fsquid]

It was great to take the light rail to uptown, take in a baseball game, drink a bit, and go to the Bayern-Inter soccer match there.  We then hopped back on the light rail and took it to the brewery in South End that we left our car at. 

[thelakelander]

The amount of TOD in the South End is pretty impressive. Impressive enough that I decided it merits its own article at a future date, as opposed to lumping it in with Uptown.  Here's a few pictures:

[tufsu1]

Megalopolis...Charlotte....really?  Perhaps you mean it is an emerging walkable city in an emerging megalopolis!

[simms3]

Charlotte is looking so good!  A tad "sterile"/overly new, but that's only a factor completely out of its control (it was never a pre-auto city).

[thelakelander]

Yeah, not much urban grit or history left in Uptown. Like you said, it was never a decent sized pre-auto city to begin with. With that said, you can definitely see that this city has a long term vision and is working aggressively to put it in place. The core looks entirely different from what I remember it being a decade ago. Impressive architecture, parks where parking lots used to be and cranes literally everywhere.

[vicupstate]

Charlotte may not have been a big city pre-WWII, but the Uptown area was fully developed. There was a MASSIVE loss of 1800's and early 1900's building stock that was 100% by design, so yes it was within their control. That one picture in the article is all the evidence you need of that.

Charlotte eventually learned it's lesson but by then it was largely too late. Historic building stock is much more respected now but there is little of it left. Jacksonville has yet to learn that lesson.  Yes, there are the occasional victories but examples like Bostwick are still the rare exception, not the rule.     

[finehoe]

Megalopolis...Charlotte....really?  Perhaps you mean it is an emerging walkable city in an emerging megalopolis!

Yeah, a "megalopolis" is usually defined as a clustered network of cities (think Boston-DC), so what would the other parts of this "megalopolis" be?  Winston-Salem?  Greenville?  Columbia?

[thelakelander]

^Pretty much. Like the I-4 corridor, you have a similar developing growth pattern occurring along the I-85/I-40 corridor: