PLANNING

[highlightrule]Can lower South End survive the large-scale cookie-cutter development now ravaging South End and NoDa? Charlotte can learn some lessons from another Millennial magnet city, Des Moines. Yes, Des Moines. [/highlightrule] In post-election America, consensus seems as unreachable as the lost land of Atlantis. Republican “Middle America” has triumphed over the Democratic coastal regions, and […]

Imagine: Charlotte neighborhoods with their own master plans to care for their trees. A citywide initiative to pinpoint neighborhoods with few trees and then help get trees planted there. A dependable, dedicated source of public money to care for Charlotte’s street trees. Assistance for low-income homeowners who can’t afford to give proper care to large […]

[highlightrule]Choices made decades ago ruled out the preservation of large-scale green belts or farmlands in Mecklenburg. This is the story of how that came about. [/highlightrule] You can drive south down Dixie River Road beyond the venerable Dixie Grill & Grocery and for 2 miles you’ll see only woods, a few driveways and the scattered […]

Although Charlotte is rapidly growing, the area just south of the city is growing even faster. From 2000 to 2014, Charlotte’s population grew 43 percent while that of unincorporated Indian Land more than tripled. Lancaster County Planning Director Penelope G. Karagounis. Photo: Mary Newsom Indian Land is in the Lancaster County, S.C., panhandle – a […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]