Urban Design

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 […]

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 […]

First in a series of illustrated essays: Part 1: An introduction to urban design “Why do the apartment buildings all look the same?” “Why does South End look so boring?” “Why is it so dense?” “What about traffic?” Questions like these have become common in Charlotte over the past several years. Charlotte neighborhoods such as […]

[highlightrule]Can lower South End survive the large-scale cookie-cutter development now ravaging South End and NoDa? Charlotte can learn some lessons from another Millennial magnet city, Des Moines. Yes, Des Moines. [/highlightrule] In post-election America, consensus seems as unreachable as the lost land of Atlantis. Republican “Middle America” has triumphed over the Democratic coastal regions, and […]

In August 1974, I was a rising junior in the College of Architecture at UNC Charlotte, and I had returned to school early to take advantage of the woodworking shop. One day, covered in dust, I passed one of the seminar rooms and noticed a good number of faculty as well as the dean had […]

[highlightrule]You probably know places you like. And you probably don’t know whether they’re MUDD-O, R-22MF or UR-2(CD). A new approach to zoning lets us envision places we like and then come up with ordinances that allow us to build them—without the arcane sets of letters and formulas.[/highlightrule] If I described a well-known locale in Charlotte […]

Most of the ideas about SouthPark offered last week by a group of out-of-town development experts were what you’d hope to hear from 21st-century planners: create connections, try public-private partnerships, build a better public realm. But a few of their comments might raise questions or even baffle some Charlotteans. The advisory panel from the nonprofit […]

Could the SouthPark mall area of Charlotte ever grow into a collection of neighborhoods that more resemble a city than suburban developments? What would it look like? What are the possibilities? The question is timely. Already, about 2,400 new apartments, as well as office towers and mixed-use projects are proposed or in the works. Tuesday […]

A proposal working its way through the city zoning process could create something new for Charlotte: a special kind of zoning designed specifically for one neighborhood. The proposed Gold District would give a section of the larger South End area its own zoning standards, tailored to what businesses and property owners in the area say […]