A new cover story in The Atlantic looks at Phoenix, Arizona and considers what the United States is and what it could be:

The Valley is one of the fastest-growing regions in America, where a developer decided to put a city of the future on a piece of virgin desert miles from anything. At night, from the air, the Phoenix metroplex looks like a glittering alien craft that has landed where the Earth is flat and wide enough to host it. The street grids and subdivisions spreading across retired farmland end only when they’re stopped by the borders of a tribal reservation or the dark folds of mountains, some of them surrounded on all sides by sprawl.

Phoenix makes you keenly aware of human artifice—its ingenuity and its fragility. The American lust for new things and new ideas, good and bad ones, is most palpable here in the West, but the dynamo that generates all the microchip factories and battery plants and downtown high-rises and master-planned suburbs runs so high that it suggests its own oblivion. New Yorkers and Chicagoans don’t wonder how long their cities will go on existing, but in Phoenix in August, when the heat has broken 110 degrees for a month straight, the desert golf courses and urban freeways give this civilization an air of impermanence, like a mirage composed of sheer hubris, and a surprising number of inhabitants begin to brood on its disappearance.

Growth keeps coming at a furious pace, despite decades of drought, and despite political extremism that makes every election a crisis threatening violence. Democracy is also a fragile artifice. It depends less on tradition and law than on the shifting contents of individual skulls—belief, virtue, restraint. Its durability under natural and human stress is being put to an intense test in the Valley. And because a vision of vanishing now haunts the whole country, Phoenix is a guide to our future.

Several thoughts in response:

1. How many Americans know Phoenix is the fifth-largest city in the country – growing from over 106,000 residents in 1950 to over 1.6 million today – and the tenth-largest metropolitan area?
2. Like many American communities, Phoenix and the region depends on growth. More residents, more business activity, more infrastructure. What happens to Phoenix when/if growth slows? How would a mature region in 50 or 100 years look similar or different?
3. The environment plays a role in Phoenix and the region. At the same time, Phoenix expanded at a particular point in American history, later than many big cities. How do these two factors intersect?
4. How would urban sociologists think about Phoenix compared to other American cities and region? Is it more unusual or does it follow similar patterns to other sprawling regions? What marks Phoenix as unique? Do the same social, political, and economic factors propel the region or is there something different going on?