Articles About Environment and Planning
As a resident of Third Ward uptown, urban design student and enthusiastic cyclist, I frequent the streets of uptown. Most of my trips through its streets are not in my car, which means I travel at a slower pace and am better able to absorb the cityscape experience. On one of these trips through the […]
Photos by Ruth Ann Grissom Related article: The abundant diversity of the hardwood forest
The city, instead of holding its traditional spring summit conference for neighborhood groups, will offer them space and time with facilitators in July to encourage strategic goal-setting and planning. The meetings will be in Foundation For The Carolinas’ uptown meeting rooms, which can accommodate as many as 17 organizations. Trained facilitators from the city and […]
The Charlotte neighborhoods of Belmont and Villa Heights are experiencing an influx of white, professional residents in search of affordable housing close to uptown. Piedmont Courts, a housing project that dates to the 1940s, is gone, and crime is declining. Click here to read the article about the neighborhoods’ revival. Photographs by Nancy Pierce.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]