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Originally Posted by iheartthed
I think the real question is what will "southern" mean in the future. We tend to think of places in the south as not being "southern" as they urbanize, so does the southern identity just get discarded?
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Depends on who's coming in and what direction culture is diffusing (are the new transplants changing the place culturally, or assimilating to it?). Atlanta and Nashville are both rapidly-growing urban centers that still have a very strong Southern cultural imprint. I would guess Atlanta at 10 million will still feel strongly Southern.
In Houston, the new neighbors are disproportionately Latinos and Western liberal Whites. As it urbanizes, Houston will become less and less culturally Southern. I already don't think of Austin or Dallas as Southern, and I never thought of San Antonio as Southern regardless of what happened 159 years ago.