Articles About Environment and Planning
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. […]
Develop a historical asset map. Improve physical connections to public spaces and neighborhoods. Conduct a business needs assessment. Explore whether to list the neighborhood on the National Register of Historic Places. Those were among more than two dozen proposals for improving the neighborhoods just west of uptown Charlotte, near Johnson C. Smith University and the […]
Are you new to North Carolina and looking to discover one of the state’s great main streets? Or are you a life-long resident searching for a new place to explore? Or do you want other North Carolinians to know about the great places in your town? Welcome to the fifth annual Great Places in NC […]
[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 […]
Lurking silently beneath the beauty of Charlotte’s tree canopy is a persistent problem with ailing trees. The issue significantly affects the city’s efforts to preserve and replenish its most treasured amenity. Major challenges include: Tree diseases The stresses of an urban, high-rise environment on uptown street trees The age of the tree canopy, particularly in […]
The trout lilies and trilliums are in full bloom, the turkeys are strutting, the smallmouth are biting, and the butterflies are flitting about in our fields and woodlands. One of the most common butterflies seen in our area is the Eastern tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus). Male Eastern tiger swallowtails are yellow with four black tiger […]
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 […]