Urban Growth
The Urban Institute turns 50, Part 1: Urban studies on a rural campus
The UNC Charlotte Urban Institute is marking its 50th anniversary in 2019-20 with a five-part series recalling its history. Sources for these stories include interviews, newspaper articles, university documents and two books – Charlotte and UNC Charlotte: Growing Up Together by Ken Sanford and Dean W. Colvard: Quiet Leader, by Marion A. Ellis. In 1970, […]
Part 4: Connecting urban policy to the community
The UNC Charlotte Urban Institute is marking its 50th anniversary in 2019-20 with a five-part series recalling its history. Sources for these stories include interviews, newspaper articles, university documents and two books – Charlotte and UNC Charlotte: Growing Up Together by Ken Sanford and Dean W. Colvard: Quiet Leader, by Marion A. Ellis. UNC Charlotte […]
Historical Overview Part 2: Post-Civil War, the region becomes an industrial system
From an agrarian system to an economy based on rural mills and factories drawing workers from former farms and sending goods to Charlotte for distribution, the region undergoes rapid change.
Population growth in the 32-county study area starting in 1850
Clayton Hanson & Laura Simmons | Aug 26, 2019 Click anywhere on the map below to pause and play. Each dot represents 500 people. The dots are distributed randomly within each county and are not intended to correspond to specific places, but instead to give a general sense of the number of people residing in […]
Blending the old and the new at Camp North End
The cluster of old factory buildings, warehouses, missile assembly and munition storage facilities just north of uptown have long glimmered with possibility – if you could look beyond the dingy facades and faded, rusty interiors. Now, more of that possibility is becoming a reality at Camp North End, on a nearly 80-acre triangle of land […]
2020: Four plans coming together next year will guide growth for a generation
Next year’s news cycle is already looking pretty crowded, between big-ticket events like the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, the summer Olympics in Tokyo and, of course, the 2020 presidential, gubernatorial and congressional elections. But if there weren’t so much else going on, 2020 might be known as something else in Charlotte: The Year of […]
Charlotte’s torn down a lot of old buildings. But one type has staying power.
Breweries, apartments, hip food halls, creative offices, coworking spaces: Charlotte developers keep finding new uses for the city’s old mills. As a post-war, Sunbelt boomtown, Charlotte has garnered a reputation for tearing down its old buildings and replacing them with sterile plaques to make way for the city’s glittering new skyline. But while many once-grand […]
Should Charlotte do more to preserve its history?
There’s been a lot of talk lately in Charlotte about the value of older buildings and what we should do to save them, spurred by the Excelsior Club’s possible sale and demolition. For a fast-growing city with leaders who have long been spurred by the promise of more development and an ever-bigger, ever-shinier skyline, it […]
Charlotte 1979: Uptown was downtown, everyone wore a tie and the city hungered for ‘world-class’ status
One of people’s favorite pastimes in fast-growing Charlotte is to look back and marvel at how much has changed in so little time. Stephen Overcash, principal at Overcash Demmitt Architects, has worked in Charlotte for 40 years, a time in which the city’s population nearly tripled, skyscrapers shot up in parking lots and downtown became […]
Charlotte is backing off its goal of 50 percent tree canopy by 2050
Charlotte won’t reach its goal of tree canopy covering 50 percent of the city by 2050, officials said last week. Instead, the city is planning to focus on smaller, neighborhood-level targets and “fifty-themed” initiatives to promote trees. “It’s still possible to reach 50 percent, but it would be extremely challenging,” said city arborist Tim Porter, […]