Articles
We were less than a week into spring. The weather was cold and gray, but the landscape in my Charlotte neighborhood was Technicolor – emerald lawns, sunny daffodils, pastel phlox, Yoshino cherries and redbuds. Oddly, my eye was drawn to the drab trunk of a single willow oak, one of many lining the streets. About […]
Most city plans get input from residents, but if you’ve attended many city planning public meetings, you might notice the crowds tend to be a bit on the not-young side. It’s conventional wisdom that people are more likely to become interested in civic engagement when they buy property or have kids – not things many […]
Charlotte’s planning director, on the job since January, is recommending the zoning rewrite process underway pause for what he calls a “reset.” During that time, he says, the city should spend 15 to 18 months to engage in a wide-ranging community effort to produce a new vision plan for the city. “It took me a […]
[highlight] THE 2018 CHARLOTTE CITY WALKS HAVE CONCLUDED FOR THE YEAR. PLEASE SIGN UP FOR THE PLANCHARLOTTE.ORG NEWSLETTER (SEE SIGN-UP AT RIGHT ON THIS PAGE) TO BE NOTIFIED ABOUT 2019 CHARLOTTE CITY WALKS[/highlight] [highlight]SEE THE LIST OF 2018 CITY WALKS [/highlight] Charlotte neighborhoods have stories to tell – stories many residents have never heard. Explore […]
While Charlotte’s light rail line runs through the city’s glittering uptown – a tunnel of office towers and parking decks – at the farther reaches, the landscape tells different stories. Along the route of the Blue Line, from the edge of Pineville on the south to the UNC Charlotte campus at the north, you find […]
If you pay attention to Charlotte growth topics, you may have heard some unfamiliar words recently: Place Types. UDO. If you’re not a planner or a developer, or even if you are, those terms may baffle you. We hope what follows can help you sort out what it all means. Why now? The City of […]
As Raleigh’s chief planning and development officer for nearly a decade, Mitchell Silver oversaw the rules that shaped development in that fast-growing city. Silver, president of the American Planning Association 2011-2013, will talk Thursday in Charlotte about the importance of having a vision, and what must happen after that vision is created. The event is […]
They seem to pop up each summer like wild onions in the lettuce – small farmers markets around Charlotte selling produce that might or might not be locally grown. Some last barely a season, while others put down roots and continue for years. They’re part of a farm-to-city regional economic system that includes the large […]
Seventh-generation farmer Bent Barbee of Concord’s Barbee Farms credits Cabarrus County’s Voluntary Agricultural District program as an important reason his 70-acre farm is still in operation after almost being lost to a road widening project in 2009. WHAT’S NEXT? Leslie Vanden Herik of the Mecklenburg Soil & Water Conservation District said a next step is […]
In the spring of 1967, Norm Schul was an assistant professor of geography at UNC Greensboro focusing on urban studies when his chancellor asked him to attend a gathering in Charlotte of business leaders, government officials and academics to discuss some of the big policy issues then facing the state’s urbanizing Piedmont. Sponsored by Duke […]
Second in a series of illustrated essays: Part 2: How to make Charlotte a better city In the first illustrated essay in this series, I explained the importance of urban design in the process of improving our city and laid out six basic strategies that guide high quality and sustainable design and planning practice. The […]
While walking a property the other week, we stumbled on a tree with heavily furrowed bark. It took a few minutes of pondering, but we finally decided it was a cottonwood tree, and a large one. Eastern cottonwood (Populus deltoides) is a widespread deciduous native found along sandy riverbanks and in bottomlands – exactly where […]