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Carolina Upstate at the center of emerging megapolitan area |
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Tuesday, 26 June 2007 |
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Page 1 of 2
Photo by Denton Harryman / The BB&T bank building in Greenville.
By Casey O’Connor
Speaking to members of the Greater Greenville Chamber of Commerce in early March, Gov. Mark Sanford pointed out that Greenville has been “blowing every other county in the state off the map” when it comes to capital investment.
The S.C. Department of Commerce has logged nearly $954 million in business investment in Greenville County between 2003 and 2006. Commerce department figures show 4,652 new jobs for the county during the period, second only to the 4,681 jobs created in York County.
On the heels of that good news, however, comes a study by the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, in Alexandria, Va., that is giving some Upstate planners reason to consider updating their designs on the future.
The study, “The Rise of the Megapolitans,” authored by institute directors Robert Lang and Arthur Nelson, focused on the trend that has seen America’s population massing in specific areas that eventually cover hundreds of miles.
According to that report, a megapolitan area is engulfing the Upstate of South Carolina, especially along the Interstate 85 corridor between Atlanta and Charlotte. The report states that the current Carolina Piedmont, with a northernmost limit in the Raleigh area, and the Atlanta “mega-area,” known as the Georgia Piedmont, will become virtually contiguous within 20 years, and eventually may join and become part of an even larger region stretching north to Boston.
Carolina Piedmont History
The modern Carolina Piedmont or Upstate gathered steam through the 1870s and 1880s, when completion of the Atlanta and Richmond Air-Line Railway offered a direct route from New York to New Orleans and shifted the region’s orientation away from the Carolina coast. Cotton agriculture, cotton mills and tobacco factories proliferated along the new railway routes and spur lines. Boxcars, hauling northern-made textile machinery, followed the rail tracks.
A century later, in the early 1960s, the completion of I-85 created a “dynamic” connection from Atlanta to Charlotte, N.C., and Greenville became a hub on South Carolina’s road to the future.
Greenville’s Upstate neighbors in Anderson, Spartanburg and the other seven counties in the region have been beneficiaries of that growth spurt that has seen regional population double in the last 40 years, and they are preparing for similar growth over the next 40.
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