Category: Research Triangle

Economic Development, Personal Reflections, Research Triangle, Transportation

Fall 2016 Workshop Review

Each year, UNC Department of City and Regional Planning students have the opportunity to take a hands-on workshop course; the course is required for second year Master’s students. Workshops usually include client-facing work, collaborating with large teams on complex challenges taking place in a North Carolina community. This fall, the department organized two workshop courses: one focused on economic development, the other on transportation. Below … Continue reading Fall 2016 Workshop Review

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Hazards, Land Use and Environmental Planning, Research Triangle

The Future of Floods: Lessons from Charlotte-Mecklenburg County

This post was drafted prior to the flooding in North Carolina associated with Hurricane Matthew, but we feel that these lessons are now more relevant than ever given the severity of the damage across the state. This post was written in response to a field trip taken by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Natural Hazards class in the Department of City and Regional Planning … Continue reading The Future of Floods: Lessons from Charlotte-Mecklenburg County

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Opinion, Research Triangle

CAN SOMEONE TELL US WHAT’S GOING ON?

A bit belated but still entirely relevant. Here are some answers provided by the class of 2017 for the the class of 2018’s deepest darkest questions starting their first year of graduate school in City and Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill. The ones you were afraid to ask. 2018: What advice do you have for students who are transitioning from working full-time to being a … Continue reading CAN SOMEONE TELL US WHAT’S GOING ON?

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Research Triangle

Plan for All —Making Planning More Inclusive

As planners, we are supposed to represent the public interest. But ensuring that this representation truly reflects a diverse public with uneven access to power can be challenging. Addressing this challenge is the mission of Plan for All, a subcommittee of the Department of City and Regional Planning (DCRP) student governing body, Planners Forum. We aim to bring greater awareness of social justice issues like … Continue reading Plan for All —Making Planning More Inclusive

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Bike Ped, Downtown Revitalization, Land Use and Environmental Planning, Opinion, Research Triangle, Transportation

Durham’s Crisis of Priorities: Parking and Housing

A version of the following piece was originally published in the Triangle-based Indy in response to an article about the downtown Durham parking “crisis”. The article mentions that the city of Durham will soon begin charging for on-street parking and that local leaders are debating whether to use two county-owned downtown parcels for parking or affordable housing. The assumption that plenty of parking should be … Continue reading Durham’s Crisis of Priorities: Parking and Housing

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Research Triangle

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Seeing Race in the City’s Structure

We typically do not use literature for city planning texts, but Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) deserves careful consideration. Ellison weaves a narrative through New York City’s urban spatial structure to map how race is physically built into the city’s neighborhood composition, street networks, and utilities. Using the binary of invisible versus visible, Ellison defines invisibility as the African-American experience of being isolated explicitly and … Continue reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Seeing Race in the City’s Structure

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Research Triangle

Evolution of the Design Commission

Whether referred to as The Civic Design Review (San Francisco), Civic Design Commission (Boston), U.S. Commissions of Fine Arts (Washington D.C.), Mayor’s Design Advisory Panel (Los Angeles), or Public Design Commission (New York), major cities across the United States have established boards and commissions to ensure the design quality of our civic structures and public spaces.  Design commissions, which are typically made up of four … Continue reading Evolution of the Design Commission

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Research Triangle

Selections from La Ciudad Actual

In 2014 and 2015 I spent nearly a year in Mexico City as a Fulbright National Geographic Fellow, exploring the city’s feathered edges. While the anchor of Mexico’s capital, the Distrito Federal (or Federal District) has around nine million residents, the larger metropolitan zone of the Valley of Mexico is home to more than twenty one million people. The sixty municipalities surrounding the DF form … Continue reading Selections from La Ciudad Actual

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Research Triangle

March Mapness: And the Winners are…

We feel certain that your enthusiasm for these maps helped the Heels make it to Houston. Thank you to everyone who participated in the mapness! We grouped the maps into a handful of categories and came out with five winners, displayed below, along with a description of the map provided to us by the person submitting. Winners, please see Taylor McAdam or another CPJ board member to … Continue reading March Mapness: And the Winners are…

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Research Triangle

General Assembly Lifts Light Rail Spending Cap

Citing a shift in political philosophy, legislators in the North Carolina General Assembly voted to lift the light rail spending cap in a special session in Raleigh on Friday. This comes in the wake of a contentious politicization of the infrastructure project, which has been considered in transportation planning conversations since the 1980s. GoTriangle, the region’s newly renamed regional transit authority, estimates the light rail … Continue reading General Assembly Lifts Light Rail Spending Cap

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