How North Carolina Is Building America's Newest Mega-City

Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro, Winston-Salem — separately, they look like ordinary Sun Belt cities. Together, they're filling in the 170 miles between them faster than almost anywhere in the country. But North Carolina isn't building one big city. It's building something stranger: a region with no center, tied together by two interstates and a pair of state-run trains. This is how the Piedmont became a mega-region almost by accident, what it's finally doing about transit and housing, and why the next decade will decide what kind of place it becomes.