PLANNING

Michael Gallis is a longtime planner with a big idea for Charlotte: Throw out the city’s transit expansion plans and start from scratch. Gallis — who’s been involved in some of the big plans guiding Charlotte’s future, including the original five-corridor transit plan developed before the Blue Line light rail — doesn’t hold back when […]

Charlotte’s seen rapid growth over the past several decades, but many say that boom has come at the cost of inclusivity and, perhaps, even a bit of the city’s soul. With the loss of many historic buildings and without much of an identifiable design vernacular — aside, perhaps, from the profusion of five-story apartment buildings […]

As COVID-19 fades from the front pages but normalcy still hovers out of reach, Charlotte’s two biggest employment centers want to resemble each other a bit more in the decades to come. On the surface, University City (a sprawling, suburban landscape dominated by cul-de-sacs, strip shopping centers, the university campus and office parks) doesn’t seem […]

At a work session about the city’s new unified development ordinance this week, Charlotte City Council members repeated several phrases so often they sounded like mantras: Middle ground, finding a balance, and trade-offs. The ongoing work illustrates the balancing – and sometimes the tension – inherent in translating a high-level document like the Charlotte 2040 […]

Charlotte-based architect and urban planner Martin Zimmerman talks with Melissa and Chris Bruntlett about their latest book and their family’s first few years living and navigating Delft, a 1,200 year-old city in the Netherlands, mostly by bike, at speeds rarely exceeding ten miles per hour. To the casual tourist, this human-scaled city of 104,000 calls […]

When WFAE, The Charlotte Ledger and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute launched a joint newsletter last year to cover transit and transportation, we assumed that the main focus would be the 1-cent transit sales tax vote. Well, that vote didn’t happen and the transit plan is in a bit of limbo, but we’ve still found […]

What if the future is not just a continuation of present trends, but looks radically different? That’s the vision of Curators, a collective of young, multinational designers who hope to develop new, innovative and sustainable ways of life in Charlotte. Join us as we talk about two pilot ideas they want to see happen in […]

Charlotte City Council on Tuesday approved two auto-centric developments in transit-oriented zones along the Blue Line light rail, a move some advocates fear will set a bad precedent as the city tries to move away from its dominant car culture. The developments — a Fifth Third Bank on Woodlawn Road with a drive-thru and a […]

If all the pieces fall into place, some day in the future a new light rail train will pull out of the station at the Central Piedmont Community College Levine Campus in Matthews and head south into Union County. It will turn down a two-lane country road lined with pine trees; run alongside U.S. 74, […]

Despite the pandemic and economic uncertainty, 2021 was a banner year for Charlotte, with major developments announced, a long-awaited new vision plan for the city and big – if uncertain – steps towards a new transit plan. The city’s growth isn’t expected to slow in 2022, but the ways in which Charlotte grows could change. […]