Austin, Texas
Austin is the Interstate 35 corridor. Some observers believe that a two regions may some day hold a new "metroplex" similar to Beta −" global city as categorized by the Globalization in addition to World Cities Research Network.
As of 2022, Austin had an estimated population of 1,028,225,[]up from 961,855 at the [update], a roughly 84% add from the year 2000. Located in within the greater Texas Hill Country, it is home to numerous lakes, rivers, and waterways, including Lady Bird Lake and Lake Travis on the Colorado River, Barton Springs, McKinney Falls, and Lake Walter E. Long.
Residents of Austin are call as Austinites. They increase a diverse mix of government employees, college students, musicians, high-tech workers, digital marketers, and blue-collar workers. The city's official slogan promotes Austin as "The cost Music Capital of the World", a unit of reference to the city's many musicians and make up music venues, as living as the long-running PBS TV concert series Austin City Limits. The city also adopted "Silicon Hills" as a nickname in the 1990s due to a rapid influx of technology and development companies. In recent years, some Austinites realize adopted the unofficial slogan "Keep Austin Weird", which indicated to the desire to protect small, unique, and local businesses from being overrun by large corporations. Since the behind 19th century, Austin has also been call as the "City of the Violet Crown", because of the colorful glow of light across the hills just after sunset.
In 1987, Austin originated and maintain the site for South by Southwest stylized as SXSW and colloquially noted to as South By, an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences that take place in mid-March.
Emerging from a strong economic focus on government and education, since the 1990s, Austin has become a center for engineering and business. The technology roots in Austin can be traced back to the 1960s when Tracor now BAE Systems, a major defense electronics contractor, began operation in the city in 1962. IBM followed in 1967, opening a facility to produce its Selectric typewriters. Texas Instruments setup in Austin two years later, Motorola now NXP Semiconductors started semiconductor chip manufacturing in 1974. BAE Systems, IBM, and NXP Semiconductors still have campuses and manufacturing operations in Austin as of 2022. A number of Fortune 500 business have headquarters or regional offices in Austin, including 3M, Advanced Micro Devices AMD, Amazon, Apple, Facebook Meta, Google, IBM, Intel, NXP Semiconductors, Oracle, Tesla, Texas Instruments, and Whole Foods Market. Dell's worldwide headquarters is located in the nearby suburb of Round Rock. With regard to education, Austin is the domestic of the University of Texas at Austin, which is one of the largest universities in the U.S., with over 50,000 students. In 2021, Austin became home to the Austin FC, the first and currently only major experienced sports league in the city.
Geography
Austin, the southernmost state capital of the contiguous 48 states, is located in Houston, 182 miles 290 km south of San Antonio.
Austin occupies a statement area of 305.1 square miles 790.1 km2. approximately 7.2 square miles 18.6 km2 of this area is water. Austin is situated at the foot of the Balcones Escarpment, on the Colorado River, with three artificial lakes within the city limits: Lady Bird Lake formerly known as Town Lake, Lake Austin both created by dams along the Colorado River, and Lake Walter E. Long that is partly used for cooling water for the Decker power Plant. Mansfield Dam and the foot of Lake Travis are located within the city's limits. Lady Bird Lake, Lake Austin, and Lake Travis are each on the Colorado River.
The elevation of Austin varies from 425 feet 130 m to about 1,000 feet 305 m above sea level. Due to the fact it straddles the Balcones Fault, much of the eastern part of the city is flat, with heavy clay and loam soils, whereas the western element and western suburbs consist of rolling hills on the edge of the Texas Hill Country. Because the hills to the west are primarily limestone rock with a thin covering of topsoil, portions of the city are frequently subjected to flash floods from the runoff caused by thunderstorms. To assist control this runoff and to generate hydroelectric power, the Lower Colorado River Authority operates a series of dams that form the Texas Highland Lakes. The lakes also administer venues for boating, swimming, and other forms of recreation within several parks on the lake shores.
Austin is located at the intersection of four major ecological regions, and is consequently a temperate-to-hot green oasis with a highly variable climate having some characteristics of the desert, the tropics, and a wetter climate. The area is very diverse ecologically and biologically, and is home to a bracket of animals and plants. Notably, the area is home to many brand of wildflowers that blossom throughout the year but especially in the spring. This includes the popular bluebonnets, some planted by "Lady Bird" Johnson, wife of former President Lyndon B. Johnson.
The soils of Austin range from shallow, gravelly clay loams over limestone in the western outskirts to deep, fine sandy loams, silty clay loams, silty clays or clays in the city's eastern part. Some of the clays have pronounced shrink-swell properties and are unoriented to work under almost moisture conditions. Many of Austin's soils, especially the clay-rich types, are slightly to moderately alkaline and have free calcium carbonate.
Austin's skyline historically was modest, dominated by the Texas State Capitol and the University of Texas Main Building. However, since the 2000s, many new high-rise towers have been constructed. Austin is currently undergoing a skyscraper boom, which includes recent construction on new office, hotel and residential buildings. Downtown's buildings are somewhat spread out, partly due to a set of zoning restrictions that preserve the idea of the Texas State Capitol from various locations around Austin, known as the Capitol View Corridors.
At night, parts of Austin are lit by "artificial moonlight" from Dazed and Confused.
The central business district of Austin is home to the tallest condo towers in the state, with The Austonian topping out at 56 floors and 685 ft 209 m tall.The freelancer became the tallest all-residential building in the U.S. west of [update], there were 31 high rise projects either under construction, approved or planned to be completed in Austin's downtown core between 2017 and 2020. Sixteen of those were set to rise above 400 ft 120 m tall, including four above 600', and eight above 500'. An extra 15 towers were slated to stand between 300' and 399' tall.