The Complex American South
Memphis, Jackson, and New Orleans face challenges to their prosperity. One is best positioned for the future
When I set out to write my forthcoming book, The Geography of Prosperity: A New Map of the American Dream (MIT Press, 2027), I committed to traveling across the United States to visit city leaders in the public, private, and non-profit sectors and speak with locals. My goal was simple: uncover the stories shaping prosperity as the country confronts the most dynamic and disruptive period in a century, with swift changes in population, weather, and technology reshaping the map. Behind the scenes, and backing my reporting, an amazing team from Human Change and Motivf has been working tirelessly to build The Geography of Prosperity Index, a ranking of 250 metropolitan areas across the U.S. on five key metrics: population renewal, climate and extreme weather preparedness, social cohesion, automation and AI readiness, and governance and foresight, which Jaymes Cloninger and I will release at SXSW in Austin, Texas, on March 13.
This past week, I traveled south, visiting Memphis, Tennessee; Jackson, Mississippi; and New Orleans, Louisiana, taking the Amtrak from one city to the next. Each of these cities is negotiating its future, but one is clearly better positioned than the others, despite the headwinds it faces.
Memphis, Tennessee: Investing in Tomorrow
Memphis was the first stop on this reporting stretch—a city that has shaped American culture in ways far beyond its size, particularly in music. I’d first come across the Memphis Public Library in an article in Smithsonian Magazine that described how the system was rethinking what a public library could be in the 21st century.
The library’s Innovator-in-Residence program isn’t a startup incubator in the traditional sense. It’s designed to embed a practitioner within the library system to expand access and opportunity for Memphis residents, particularly those historically excluded from prosperity. The library connects working creative professionals with patrons to teach marketable skills, foster entrepreneurship, and manage workshops, enhancing library programming and capacity. Launched in 2023, the program provides specialized mentorship and tools to the community.
That posture matters in Memphis. This is a city with deep inequities and an equally deep bench of civic pride. By housing innovation within a trusted public institution, the library signals a subtle but important point: the future doesn’t have to bypass the public square. It can be built through it with a clear eye to the future, and that matters more now than ever. Memphis is also home to xAI, which has begun building out significant artificial intelligence infrastructure in the region. The arrival of a high-profile AI firm—complete with data centers and enormous energy demands—would seem, at first glance, disconnected from a public library’s community-based innovation work. But the contrast is precisely what makes Memphis compelling. One represents concentrated capital and computational scale. The other represents distributed trust and human capital.
As my first stop, Memphis framed the trip in a way I didn’t expect. It forced a question that would follow me south: when advanced technology arrives in a place with long-standing structural challenges, who translates its promise into broad-based prosperity? Private companies can deploy resources quickly, but public institutions—libraries, schools, community colleges—are often the ones that determine whether opportunity circulates or concentrates.
Jackson, Mississippi: Decades of Disinvestment
I was drawn to Jackson, Mississippi, partly because of geography. It sits almost equidistant between Memphis and New Orleans—two cities wrestling with their own histories and reinventions—and partly because of something harder to map: its moral and political weight in the American story. As both the state capital and the county seat, Jackson carries institutional gravity. In theory, that should translate into momentum—government jobs, legal firms, steady commerce, a humming downtown. Some neighborhoods, such as Belhaven, Broadmoor, and Northwest Jackson, perform well. But zoom out, and the citywide numbers tell a different story: more than one in four residents live below the poverty line. The promise of capital-city status collides with the reality of concentrated poverty.
On a weekday afternoon, downtown felt suspended in time. Storefronts were dark, some were boarded, and others looked like they’d simply been abandoned altogether. There were almost no pedestrians, which means no lunch crowds and no casual loitering. It’s not just that the streets were quiet; they were empty. And an empty downtown is never a good sign.
Sidewalks, I’ve come to believe, are diagnostic tools. They measure more than foot traffic; they measure trust. When sidewalks are intact, active, and shared, they generate what sociologists call “weak ties”—those low-stakes, everyday encounters that knit strangers into neighbors. A nod between two regulars. A brief exchange at a crosswalk. A familiar face seen often enough to become reassuring. These interactions seem trivial, but they compound. They create a shared reality and a baseline of belonging. When sidewalks are cracked, deserted, or treated as afterthoughts, those ties thin out. People retreat into cars, into private spaces, into isolation. And when that happens, economic decline isn’t far behind. Prosperity depends on the circulation of people, ideas, money, and trust. Sidewalks are where that begins.
So the question for Jackson isn’t simply how to attract more investment or land the next employer. It’s more elemental. Can a city rebuild prosperity if its public spaces no longer function as connective tissue? Or does prosperity have to start, quite literally, from the ground up?
New Orleans, Louisiana: Confronting Cascading Challenges
By the time I arrived in New Orleans on the Amtrak, the questions I’d been carrying from Memphis and Jackson had sharpened. In Memphis, the tension was between technological acceleration and civic inclusion. In Jackson, the issue was the erosion of connective tissue. In New Orleans, the tension is more existential. Here, prosperity isn’t just about jobs or sidewalks. It’s about whether the ground itself will hold.
New Orleans lives with cascading risk. Large portions of the city sit below sea level, protected by levees, pumps, and a coastal restoration strategy that must function flawlessly in an era of rising tides and intensifying storms. Hurricane Katrina remains a civic scar and a demographic turning point, and the city has never fully recovered its pre-2005 population. Some neighborhoods have rebounded with remarkable strength, while others still bear the imprint of dislocation.
Climate pressures intersect with economic fragility, as insurance premiums have surged and housing costs remain volatile. The economy, still heavily anchored in tourism and hospitality, is vulnerable to both storms and economic slowdowns. Population loss compounds workforce shortages, which in turn complicate public finances and infrastructure maintenance. Each challenge amplifies the next.
And yet, arriving during Mardi Gras week complicates any simple narrative of decline. Mardi Gras is not just a party; it’s a civic celebration, where social cohesion shines. On Canal Street, I stood alongside multigenerational families, greeting parade participants from the sidelines. This is what strong social cohesion looks like in practice: people show up, they participate, and they maintain rituals that bind generations together. In a city confronting environmental instability and demographic churn, that cohesion serves as a counterweight. The physical infrastructure may require constant reinforcement, but the relational infrastructure remains remarkably durable.
The open question—and it’s a serious one—is whether that cultural strength can be converted into long-term resilience and prosperity. Can a city so rich in identity diversify its economy beyond tourism? Can it adapt its housing and insurance systems fast enough to keep middle-class families from leaving? Can it invest in climate preparedness without pricing out the very communities that define it?
Three cities. Three stress tests.
Memphis is intentionally experimenting with how public institutions can absorb technological change and convert it into broad-based prosperity. Jackson is experiencing the cumulative effects of prolonged disinvestment, with weakened civic infrastructure making renewal harder by the year. New Orleans is contending with something even more unforgiving: rising water, rising costs, andrising risk. Its social cohesion is powerful—but cohesion alone cannot hold back the tide.
As I boarded my early morning flight back to D.C. on Saturday, I couldn’t help but think that prosperity in the coming decades will not belong to the cities that land the flashiest employer or lean hardest on cultural nostalgia. It will belong to the cities that align systems.
Alignment is the new growth strategy, and of these three, Memphis is already moving in that direction—pairing advanced technology with civic infrastructure, capital with access, and ambition with inclusion. It still faces steep headwinds, but that distinction may define its future success.
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Cities reveal themselves when you spend time on the ground.
Prosperity is layered. The cities planning ahead will outlast the headwinds.