UNC Charlotte
Sustainable home prepares for cross-country journey
It took them two years to design and build it, but over the next two weeks, a team of UNC Charlotte architecture, business and engineering students will tear down their solar-powered home, Urban Eden. But that’s only because the home must be deconstructed, loaded on a flatbed trailer and shipped to Orange County, Calif., where […]
Collective Impact for Children and Youth Baseline Report
The Collective Impact Baseline study is part of United Way’s pilot initiative to increase the graduation rate over the next 10 years for the community’s most vulnerable youth. This data will form the baseline against which United Way and its agencies will be measured in the goal to increase the graduation rate for at-risk children […]
Is retail’s future on display in region?
At a rural crossroads 30 miles from Charlotte, an experiment is under way that could reshape the national retail landscape. Walmart, famous for its ubiquitous supercenters averaging 185,000 square feet, is testing a much smaller, 15,000-square-foot format called a Walmart Express store in the Stanly County town of Richfield, population 516. The Richfield store, newly […]
Celebrate Jane Jacobs on walking tour of Central Avenue
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 […]
UNC Charlotte’s Institute for Social Capital and Urban Institute to merge
Two of UNC Charlotte’s most visible institutes are merging to create a combined center with unparalleled research capacity to address social issues in the Charlotte region. On March 8, the Institute for Social Capital (ISC) board of directors and UNC Charlotte agreed to merge the ISC staff and operations into the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, […]
Institute connects with center city
The UNC Charlotte Urban Institute now has office space in the university’s Center City Building. Although the institute will continue to be headquartered on the main campus, several staff members and institute Director Jeff Michael are now regularly spending some time each week in the uptown facility. The Center City Building offers the institute new […]
Research Triangle West: Bringing knowledge production to the western Piedmont
In the early 1950s the not yet established Research Triangle Park (RTP) was pitched to Governor Luther Hodges as a cluster of “two medical schools, two engineering schools and a core of preeminent researchers in every field of science.” Hodges response: he called the presenter (a dean at NC State College) a “huckster.”[i] North Carolinians […]