Poster: Modernizing the Old Order

My master's project examines how Charlotte, North Carolina became a major corporate and financial center, tracing the role of commercial-civic elites who used public policy — through urban renewal, banking deregulation, airport expansion, annexation, and selective integration — to engineer a postindustrial growth strategy in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on archival research across newspapers, planning documents, and public records, the project applies growth machine and urban regime theory to show how private priorities were institutionalized as public policy, producing a more connected and economically powerful city that was not necessarily more democratic or equitable.