General News

The farmer points toward a long stretch of turned earth warming in the sun. Tomatoes and squash will grow well there, he says. More crops will be planted over there, he says, gesturing toward another neatly plowed rectangle. Behind him, small fruit trees cast shadows across the grass. It’s bucolic enough to make you almost […]

Our yard in the Uwharries always looks especially mangy in early spring. I wouldn’t presume to call it a lawn. That sounds much too manicured and highfalutin. The fescue is green, but it tends to get lost in a flush of winter annuals like chickweed, buttercups and henbit. These weeds will die back after setting […]

Twenty years after the last revamp of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s zoning ordinance, a politically fractious episode, the city planning department is preparing to study whether – and how – to update it once more. Unlike the years-long, contentious process that resulted in the 1992 zoning ordinance rewrite, this time the process will be less extensive, said Charlotte […]

Recent headlines have trumpeted the U.S. Census finding that between 2000 and 2010, the Charlotte “urbanized area” was the nation’s fastest growing among areas with 1 million or more people, at 64.6 percent. But the statistic also highlighted the inconsistent, even chaotic, differences in how the so-called Charlotte region gets defined, based on who’s doing […]

Eleven Charlotte neighborhoods have won grants of as much as $10,000 from the City of Charlotte’s for projects aimed at cutting energy use. The city’s Charlotte’s Power2 Live Green Special Initiative Neighborhood Matching Grant Program gave out $97,248 in federal Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant money. Ten of the projects are home energy efficiency […]

The former mayor of Pittsburgh and the current president of the American Planning Association – who happens to be Raleigh’s planning director – are keynote speakers Thursday at a symposium in uptown Charlotte for urban design and planning professionals. The symposium, “Resilient communities, innovation for change,” will discuss the capacity for communities to manage change […]

The second quarter 2012 Charlotte Business Confidence Index report, released April 2, shows Mecklenburg County business leaders’ optimism about economic prospects in the second quarter improved compared to their expectations for the first quarter 2012. The overall index value of 58.8, an increase of 4.2 points compared to the first quarter, continues an upswing of […]

Photos by Nancy Pierce Brad Satterwhite wrote this article while interning at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute in 2012. Although some municipalities use their water towers to make a visual splash – such as the beloved Peachoid in Gaffney, S.C., and the baseball water tower in Fort Mill, S.C. – many others are more subtle, […]

Two of UNC Charlotte’s most visible institutes are merging to create a combined center with unparalleled research capacity to address social issues in the Charlotte region. On March 8, the Institute for Social Capital (ISC) board of directors and UNC Charlotte agreed to merge the ISC staff and operations into the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, […]

New York City and Gastonia don’t, at first glance, appear to have much in common. Yet both Manhattan and the much smaller city in the Piedmont of North Carolina can offer an example of “urbanism.” And both have suffered grave harm from well-intentioned “progress.” Charlotte architect Terry Shook, speaking last month at the showing of […]