Charlotte is a tale of one city, a meditation and inquiry into the inner life of one Southern metro of 2.6 million. It is also a story of life in cities across America. It is about a profound and prevalent experience of daily life, yet so seldom acknowledged or allowed expression, it has no name. This book calls it Soul, referring to Sense of Place, Home, the universal and innate need of people to form attachment to and shape where they live.

When Soul is undermined, people live as in “exile.” Though not physically displaced, a vital connection is broken, the foundational past eroded, a stake in the future foreclosed. It gives rise to public moods of angst, anomie, resentment, perhaps even primed for sedition.

Robert FitzPatrick goes looking for Soul in Charlotte, where he was born and lived most of his life. He investigates how Sense of Place is affected by the city’s quest for “world class” status. Examining its massive expansion and makeover from the 1960s forward, this book searches in Charlotte’s obliterated old downtown and the gleaming new uptown that replaced it. It walks through neighborhoods and parks, and reports on heroic efforts of residents to maintain them against commercial re-purposing. It inquires into Charlotte’s struggling public schools, now the state’s most racially and economically segregated. It explores the values proclaimed in Charlotte’s prosperity-preaching churches and reflects upon the historical imprint of acquisitive Calvinism on the city’s core character. It tells of a struggling but resilient arts community and looks for civic spirit in Charlotte’s professional sports. In each area, this book asks, “Where is Home?”

In Charlotte, Robert FitzPatrick directs his insights at values and beliefs that replace a city’s heart with high rises, history with hype, civic needs with commercial narrative, and life with lifestyle. This story is about Charlotte but listeners will recognize their own cities, their own lives.