Los Angeles, NYC and Chicago are the easiest, what others?

  • jabrd [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Doxxing myself as a North Carolinian, but I think it’s an interesting state because it’s already a small chain of island cities surrounded by rural farmland.

    Charlotte - people would probably think this becomes the new polity of the south after Atlanta, but because it’s a banking hub with no real industry except it’s FIRE economy I think it would be completely vaporized by the ending of the US federal system. I always joke that Charlotte is the city the bad guys from robocop were trying to build because everything old is destroyed and rebuilt shiny with big glass windows and the homeless are routinely rounded up and shunted off somewhere else. Either way though it’s hollow and has no means of survival detached from global capitalism.

    Raleigh/Durham - these cities are already merging into one so I imagine by the time of full imperial break up they’ll have become a single megalopolis. I genuinely think RDU survives as a civilizational hub and maintains more infrastructure (like the airport and hospitals) than most other places namely because the cities are so tied to the agriculture around them. If Charlotte is robocop, Durham always reminded me of Fallout because the poor urban centers looked bombed out following 08 but then mutual aid networks and orgs stepped up to rebuild these places in their own ways. Lots of urban agriculture initiatives. Also know of lots of agricultural projects entwined with the huge immigrant populations where foreign food ways are imported. Either way I see sustainability there and an ability to reconcile the rural vs urban conflict that’s really at the core of this split.

    The triad - Greensboro and it’s smaller satellite cities (towns?) are in a similar boat to Raleigh-Durham but less developed and with a more hostile urban/rural divide. Greensboro has been a historic site of violent clashes between leftist and reactionary forces and I’d expect that tradition to continue. Not sure what the future would hold for the triad but I expect it to be violent and very contingent on what’s going on in the RDU. Maybe they become a vassal state/backwater of Raleigh Durham for a time.

    Asheville - a real leftist hotbed that’s isolated up in the hills. I would expect Asheville to more closely resemble a Greek city state than any other formation because of its geography and radical politics. The city is massively propped up by tourism money, but if that ran dry it still has a solid amount of infrastructure (again think hospitals and colleges and roads) that would make it the center of the mountain region and its agricultural scene should be enough to hold up the city though likely not a larger empire. Lots of coop farms and markets there too. Isolated but free, probably conquered by the dixie techno-raiders in 2174.

    The outerbanks - I don’t really know I’ve never lived here. Ports will always be massively important for trade but the outer banks are a great for shipwrecks and piracy not trade. Add in that climate change is rapidly changing the geography of that coastline and I can’t imagine it being a major mercantile region. Will probably remain the state’s backwater and degrade further towards crime. So yea we’re bringing back the pirates baby :lets-fucking-go: