History

A growing web of infrastructure and physical connections – both within the wider region and between the region and the outside world – has had a profound effect on where growth went, and where it stayed away from. People and industries in the Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection study area followed trading paths, railroads, highways and, now, air service.

While Duke was building the world’s largest electrical network in the Western Piedmont, some Charlotte mill owners recognized that more money could be made loaning money to aspiring industrialists than making cloth themselves.

After visiting a city with a waterfront, maybe stopping for a drink and a bite to eat along whichever river or ocean it’s built along, I’m usually left with one overriding thought: “Wow, Charlotte could really use some of this.” Water plays a prominent role in the design and history of most cities, whether it be a river, bay or ocean. And Charlotte’s skyline and downtown sit tantalizingly close-but-yet-so-far from a major river and lake system. So, the question looms: Why isn’t Charlotte built on the water? 

“How shall we grow?” That question was the dramatic title of a 1955 report examining the Charlotte region’s breakneck growth (Almost 200,000 residents and 75,000 cars in the county!) and looming challenges. Confronted with worsening traffic, inadequate transportation options, a lack of park space and the fear that growth was running away without a real, […]

My husband’s cousin lives on a farm abutting Dartmoor National Park in Devon, England. (As my friend Sam says, everyone should have family so well placed.) Like the Uwharries, it’s a landscape of rolling topography punctuated with rocky outcrops, and the park is fragmented by villages and farms. Trails traverse a patchwork of public and […]

When I came to UNC Charlotte as director of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute in 2003, the campus didn’t look all that different from the campus I visited in the 1980s to see family and friends at what many in the region still referred to as a “commuter school.” And for those students who traveled […]

This article first appeared in the spring 2000 issue of “The LandMark,” the newsletter of The LandTrust for Central North Carolina. It is reprinted with permission of the author and the LandTrust. When European explorers and colonists, African slaves and their descendants were discovering and settling America, they confronted a vast, unknown wilderness. Trying to […]

For those seeking an autumn day trip, a new exhibit at the Stanly County Museum in Albemarle, paired with a visit to an old family homestead in nearby Morrow Mountain State Park, will reward visitors with a unique blend of regional history and natural beauty. And taken together they may inspire deeper thinking about issues […]

A proposal working its way through the city zoning process could create something new for Charlotte: a special kind of zoning designed specifically for one neighborhood. The proposed Gold District would give a section of the larger South End area its own zoning standards, tailored to what businesses and property owners in the area say […]