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Originally Posted by detroitmetro101
tennessee seems like an amazing state, overall. it seems very urban, with quite a few large cities. and the fact that its mountainous, will mean that these cities will becomes denser as the economy and the population grows. it seems like the only way to stop sprawl, effectively, is if there are natural physical barriers to it. otherwise, even in oregon where they have artificial boundaries, people keep challenging them for cheaper real estate. tennessee is lucky.
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The four TN bigs (Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga) are actually not very urban (at least not compared to most of the established rustbelt cities like Detroit), but they all seemed to preserve a decent amount from urban renewal. The result is that they all essentially have fairly charming downtown areas and have focused on playing to those assets.
Memphis is definitely the most urban. It has been a large city for longer and is on flat terrain. It also had leaders early in the 20th century who understood how to plan a city.
Nashville is a different beast. It's pretty urban in and around I-440 and East Nashville, but that's essentially it. Although it's technically an older city than Memphis, Nashville did not hit its stride until the the second half of the 20th century after it consolidated with Davidson County. So much of the Nashville metro outside of what you see here in the photos is miles of suburban sprawl in between rolling hills. Actually, about an entire third of Nashville/Davidson County to the northwest is very, very sparsely populated due to the terrain and all those hills have bedrock right up to the surface too. Lots of gorgeous scenery here, but it'll likely always come at the expense of our density stats.