Articles About Environment and Planning
Summer is winding down. Kids are heading back to school. Days will soon be shorter than nights. Labor Day weekend marks the end of peak season at the beach, but birders and fishermen flock to the coast in fall. If you plan to visit Kitty Hawk, Hatteras or Bald Head Island in the coming weeks, […]
Update: This survey has closed. The UNC Charlotte Urban Institute is helping Mecklenburg County’s Land Use and Environmental Services Agency (LUESA) learn about county residents’ recycling practices and preferences. The institute has worked with LUESA on an annual phone survey for 11 years. This is the first year in which an online component has been […]
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 […]
According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, North Carolina ranks third in the nation in the amount of installed solar capacity, more than all other Southeastern states combined. At last count, 188 solar companies employed 6,000 people in our state. As a recent article in the Montgomery Herald noted, there’s now a 25-megawatt solar farm […]
Owen Furuseth, UNC Charlotte’s associate provost for Metropolitan Studies and Extended Academic Programs, retired June 30, 2016 after a career researching land use, urban and neighborhood planning topics. During those years, he advocated for open space preservation, worked with Charlotte-Mecklenburg local government to create and refine an extensive set of neighborhood-level information, and studied Charlotte’s […]
A stop by the Eldorado Outpost one recent morning included a sighting of a barn swallow that had built a nest on a ledge of the building under the eave. Barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) are fairly common, and you’ve probably seen them on your own property. A couple of years ago, kayaking on Mountain Creek, […]
From the woods surrounding her Lake Wylie home, Nancy Hayes watches turkeys, deer, raccoons and other animals, including a pair of bald eagles. The wildlife is threatened, she says, by a residential development proposed for more than 400 homes, and she’s angry about it. “It’s outrageous,” says Hayes, who moved to the area three years […]
In the booming South Carolina communities nudging the southern edges of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County a civil war of sorts is erupting over how to manage growth. It is not unusual for intense passions to shape local dialogue over what should and shouldn’t be built, and what it should look like. But in Lancaster and […]
Two years ago, over Memorial Day weekend, I witnessed a phenomenon in the Uwharries that has proven difficult to explain. I stepped out of the house after dinner and looked toward the grove of majestic oaks surrounded by our fields of native warm season grass. Thousands of lights were flashing in the canopy. It was […]
Cohousing is a concept that tries to fit an unusual form of housing into current-day development regulations—a square peg in a round hole is how Robert Boyer puts it. Boyer is an assistant professor in the UNC Charlotte Department of Geography & Earth Sciences where he teaches classes in urban and regional planning and sustainability. […]
Kannapolis is unlike any other municipality in North Carolina. Founded in 1906, for much of its history it was owned by Cannon Mills, which by 1914 was the world’s largest producer of sheets and towels. Kannapolis was the largest unincorporated community in the United States in 1984, when it finally incorporated as a city two […]
Is Jim Garges, Mecklenburg County’s normally ebullient director of parks and recreation, fretting right now? He might be, and for much the same reasons that Janette Sadik-Khan worried eight years ago as commissioner of the massive New York City Department of Transportation. For Sadik-Khan, the summer of 2008 was when her staff decided to gamble. […]