General News

How has uptown Charlotte changed in the past century? Launch the map below for an interactive graphic that depicts the dramatic change since 1911. A century ago, uptown’s urban pattern was fine-grained, with numerous small buildings on small lots. Today that fine-grained fabric has been lost. The modern projects have giant-sized footprints, often taking up […]

In February, The LandTrust for Central N.C. contracted with the N.C. Forest Service to conduct a prescribed burn on a portion of the Low Water Bridge Preserve. Approximately 250 acres were included in this burn area, and a main reason for this burn was to promote a particularly interesting species down along the river here […]

In the McEniry building at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, students moved out the chairs on a recent afternoon to clear the room for guests and presentations. Pizza boxes, soft drinks and ice arrived for a reception for students in Janni Sorensen’s social inequality and planning class. It was time for a celebration. […]

Over a decade ago, developers sought to build a downtown in a town that did not have one. Harrisburg, N.C., which is four miles east of Charlotte, was a collection of subdivisions and highway retail without a traditional center. Today, the 97-acre site remains incomplete. These photos show the state of the development in spring […]

If you could travel back in time to the Carolinas Piedmont before European settlement, some of the landscape might look a bit like this clearing in northwestern Mecklenburg County, tucked under swooping Duke Energy power lines. Here, a spring breeze whispers through slim brown stalks of last season’s little bluestem and Indian grass. Wild quinine […]

Driving east on busy N.C. 49 through Harrisburg, the scene is repetitive. Farmland, suburbs and strip shopping centers blur at 50 miles per hour until a two-story, 27,000-square-foot, neoclassical building peeks over an Advance Auto Parts’ bright red roof. This massive building greeting the highway’s 40,000 daily travelers is Harrisburg Town Hall. It is the […]

The headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service in Washington bears a quote from former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” Given the sticker shock many of us received when we opened our property revaluation notices, I imagine plenty of folks wouldn’t mind our society being a […]

I’ve been struggling with the question of what exactly makes a place feel like “a place.” You may be baffled by that language, but if you think about it, you probably recognize that being in different kinds of places imparts a different feeling. Some locations feel artificial; others feel authentic. Age and beauty aren’t necessarily […]

The late author and urban thinker Jane Jacobs tends to be pegged as a historic preservationist, an advocate who wanted to preserve her Greenwich Village neighborhood in amber. Although this great champion of cities wrote much about the importance of old buildings to a city, and as an activist fought valiantly to kill a proposed […]

Can Charlotte residents get used to development that looks different from what they’re used to – new houses on small lots instead of large lots, more apartments and condos? Charlotte Planning Director Debra Campbell, in a recent interview, described that as one of the challenges Charlotte faces in coming years. Another, she said, is to […]