Articles
The UNC Charlotte Public Policy Program, in Partnership with Gerald G. Fox Masters of Public Administration Program and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, will hold its 2nd annual Talking Policy in the Queen City event on October 2nd from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m. at the Center City campus. This year, guest speaker Dr. Erik Godwin […]
In telephone calls, emails and chats over coffee or dinner, dozens of business and community leaders in Charlotte and the surrounding suburban and rural communities regularly communicate — sometimes discussing local issues and sometimes not, in conversations that are happening deliberately. For two decades, the non-profit Lee Institute, which promotes civic engagement, has focused on […]
“The more successful towns have a champion. The really successful ones have multiple champions.” We visited Liz Parham, director of North Carolina’s Main Street Program, to learn about how communities across the state are capitalizing on their cultural and natural assets to revitalize local economies. But it was a different type of asset – people […]
Think of an important waterway: You’re probably picturing a rushing river, a huge lake or a roaring waterfall. But what about the humble creek running through the woods near your house? That’s where most of our waterways start, and if those creeks aren’t healthy, our larger waterways won’t be healthy either. Creek Week is a […]
The Charlotte Area Transit System took another step towards expanding the region’s transit network this week, with recommendations for how to extend the Blue Line light rail about five miles through Pineville to Ballantyne. At the Metropolitan Transit Commission, staff presented their preferred routes, which would take the rail line across Carolina Place Mall along […]
[Read the full report here] It was a cold January day in 2018 when eight researchers from UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute stepped out into the brisk air in Hamlet, a small town in Richmond County, N.C. A dusting of snow from a surprise storm the previous day still covered the railroad tracks adjacent to the […]
The city of Charlotte has a long reach. While this is certainly not a surprise, we don’t really know much about how Charlotte influences its surroundings and how far this reach extends. We do have some conventions to help us understand the extent to which our region is connected. Metropolitan areas are commonly used to […]
While Duke was building the world’s largest electrical network in the Western Piedmont, some Charlotte mill owners recognized that more money could be made loaning money to aspiring industrialists than making cloth themselves.
From an agrarian system to an economy based on rural mills and factories drawing workers from former farms and sending goods to Charlotte for distribution, the region undergoes rapid change.
A growing web of infrastructure and physical connections – both within the wider region and between the region and the outside world – has had a profound effect on where growth went, and where it stayed away from. People and industries in the Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection study area followed trading paths, railroads, highways and, now, air service.
How do you protect a plant that grows only on rocky outcrops at high elevations in the Amphibolite Mountains of northwestern North Carolina? It takes a team.
The overall cluster was about the size of my fist. A woven cylindrical core was decorated with willow oak leaves, some of them whole and others torn. They had been applied in an intriguingly symmetrical pattern, creating the effect of wings and a tail. Tiny twigs with swollen buds had also been incorporated into the design, their weight providing a ballast. The creature twirled and fluttered in the breeze, a sylvan ballerina.