Regionalism

Earl Scruggs (1924-2012) Earl Scruggs in 2005. Photo used under Creative Commons license. He was 10 years old on the family farm in Flint Hill ⁠— about eight miles from the former county courthouse in Shelby that now bears his name ⁠— when Earl Scruggs and older brother Horace got into a “fuss.” After it […]

This is the first part in a three-part series. Read Part 2: ‘We needed to do something bold’ and Part 3: ‘A 38-year overnight success story’ for the next parts of the story. Thirteen years later, Brownie Plaster is still bemused by the chorus of laughs that rose one May afternoon in 2006. At the […]

Charitable giving is an invisible thread binding people and communities together across the 32-county Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection study region — but how much people give, and what resources are available, varies from place to place. The Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection A special project from the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute Read about the project here Introduction: Strengthening […]

To better understand commuters in the Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection region down to the individual level, we studied anonymized cell phone tracking data at select employment locations, seeking to determine how commuter connections differ between types of business districts and types of firms. By mapping the residential location of workers at a broad range of employment […]

An array of environmental, cultural and economic connections together give rise to the interdependence of the Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection study region. But none of these connections are more economically significant than the flow of workers within our regional economy. Counties within the region relied on out-of-county commuters for their workforces more in 2015 than at […]

In telephone calls, emails and chats over coffee or dinner, dozens of business and community leaders in Charlotte and the surrounding suburban and rural communities regularly communicate — sometimes discussing local issues and sometimes not, in conversations that are happening deliberately. For two decades, the non-profit Lee Institute, which promotes civic engagement, has focused on […]

“The more successful towns have a champion. The really successful ones have multiple champions.” We visited Liz Parham, director of North Carolina’s Main Street Program, to learn about how communities across the state are capitalizing on their cultural and natural assets to revitalize local economies. But it was a different type of asset – people […]