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The mighty Metroplex: dissed for decades as a colorless, conformist jumble of cities and suburbs, it has become a roaring engine of economic growth--and is reigniting Dallas's fading star.

Article Excerpt
There was a time when no sober-minded Dallasite could utter the word "Metroplex" without an ironic smirk. A catchall for Dallas, Fort Worth, and the dozens of lesser municipalities around and between them, the term was coined in the seventies to boost the region's new centerpiece, the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. But DFW was the progeny of a forced marriage (the federal government, weary from maintaining separate airports for the bickering burgs, held the shotgun), and its arrival hardly augured a big happy regional family. On the one hand you had booming Big D, which by the early eighties had become the glittering star of the world's most popular television series, and on the other the rest of the Metroplex, home to a lot of envious goobers who didn't know Anne Klein from Calvin Klein. As recently as 2000, federal officials tried to classify the entire twelve-county Metroplex as nothing more than a giant statistical suburb of Big D; only the howls of pain from Fort Worth and nearby Arlington (a city with a population of more than 350000) persuaded the feds to back off calling the whole thing the "Dallas combined area." But that was then. For the past several years Dallas has been in an uncharacteristic funk, its population growth flat and its leaders lamenting its vanishing middle class, troubled schools, dysfunctional government, and chart-topping crime. Distracted by all the hand-wringing, few in Dallas seem to realize that they've suddenly become part of a bigger and more compelling urban success story. Call it the Revenge of the Metroplex: Just a few years after nearly being written off the map, it has become a roaring engine of growth and social transformation. And its improbable rise promises to not only reignite Big D's fading star but also reset our nation's political and cultural compass.

How is a region dissed for decades as a colorless, conformist lightweight going to do the former, much less the latter? For openers, with a...

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