asthasr

To my mind (and I am a layman as well), the best plazas either serve as a "spectacle" in themselves (think of the famous plazas in Europe like Piazza Navona or the Plaza Mayor) or they provide ample space for public use. This is probably more of a "learning from other places" thread post, though.... Edit: posted over there.

That's somewhat true, but even compared to europe our efficiency is terrible. Not sure if it's been posted in this thread yet, but this is a good article; https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-expensive-to-build-urban-rail-in-the-us/551408/

Frankly, there is no excuse for this beyond "we are too cheap to dig." They aren't thinking far enough ahead and they are devaluing the city. Both the enormous parking deck and the cut-rate architecture of the primary tower mean that this project, far from improving the cityscape, helps to make Charlotte look second- or third-rate.

Interestingly, in China, "nail houses" often remain that are permanent holdouts against a given development (e.g. there's one inside a mall; there was one in the middle of a four lane highway in Shanghai; etc.) whereas in the US the project is either stopped completely by one holdout or the holdouts are just legally crushed (infamously in Kelo v. New London).

Definitely. Comparing our struggles in this area with China is disheartening. Here's a fun video:

Here's a good article about one of our fellow sprawly Sun Belt cities: "Memphis Wants to Shrink."

The Pineville/Ballantyne area isn't on the decline, either, but Carolina Place itself is. I suspect most of the people who live in the area (new residents at least) drive a little further and go to SouthPark.

Yesterday there was a deadly shooting at the DTLR in the mall. Seems like the decline is accelerating.

Bangkok Ocha (little Thai place in the shopping center at 51 and Carmel Rd) is marked as closed on Google and Yelp. Seems they closed in late October. I should've eaten there more often...

This is what has struck me as well. You could take a single street from many East Asian cities and plop it down in Charlotte (or practically any peer city in the US) and it'd instantly become the best street in the entire city. Cities like Philadelphia or Washington DC might have a block or two of high density "stroll districts," but the major Asian cities have block after block after block, mile after mile. It's truly amazing.

This isn't exactly academic or architectural, but I've just found these "Gigapixel" photos of various cities in China. Given the relative lack of accessibility of street view there and the modernization/density in these cities, they might be interesting for many of you. Here's the Guangzhou gigapixel photo. Note that there are links to other cities (Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Macau, Qingdao, Shanghai) in the sky area of the photosphere. Also check out the Longmen grottoes, although that's not urban at all. Make sure to zoom in!

It doesn't kill them, but it exerts an invisible pressure on their development (and on the economy of the entire region). The reason that a highway fills up again after spending $150 million widening it is simply because a little of the pressure is released and exurbs further away can be developed. A common new urbanist mantra is that "traffic is good," but I disagree with that. Traffic comes in two types: engaged and passive. Engaged traffic, where there's a possibility that someone will stop and interact with the space through which they're passing, is economically beneficial. Passive traffic, where people are sitting for hours on the freeway and absolutely will not interact with any businesses in the region, is pure drain. I think that this is the reason Atlanta (for example) has plateaued "lower" than might have been expected from its boom times in the 1990s. I think that Charlotte has taken some lessons from that; I hope it's enough to avoid the same fate.

We have some truly massive subdivisions that seem like they should be able to support at least a convenience store and a small cafe, even if it's in the direct middle of the subdivision. It's truly amazing how devoid of interest these places are.

You're right, suburbs are still growing. However, suburbs have a real saturation point that can only be extended by building more highway lanes. I think the appetite for that is diminishing (as we see with our own I-77 debacle) and will reduce the ability to expand along with it. There are also changes in urban planning which will have interesting effects; for example, Minneapolis just banned single-family zoning.

I think Charlotte is already sprawled out like Miami. Fort Mill and Concord can both reasonably called "suburbs" of Charlotte, and are 35 miles apart. Similarly, from Lowell to Monroe is about 37 miles. It's not uniformly distributed within that "box," of course, but we've certainly got our share of sprawl. What I think is more interesting is that Charlotte's inner core is really intensifying. Hopefully that will help slow (or, say it quietly, reverse) the sprawl eventually.

Yeah, it was more just the time between reveal and groundbreaking more than anything else. It feels extremely fast, especially compared to some of the other projects in town (admittedly many of which are on far more challenging sites that aren't totally under the developer's control).

I am, frankly, amazed that they started LU2 so quickly.

This came out from one of my YouTube subscriptions this morning. Miami doesn't get as much attention as some other cities--maybe because it's perceived as being unique in its cultural/economic/geographic positioning and thus "irrelevant?" In any case, this video shows a lot of its characteristic residential architecture and, more interestingly for Charlotte, a lot of its actually good civic art.

Gonna be expensive to put it straight through SFH subdivisions... a quick Zillow tells me that some of those houses are well north of $400k.

Nooo, not that hash tag!

I think the impact of pro sports is overestimated. Cord cutters and fragmentation have made it harder than ever to watch sports on TV. (I used to be able to pay for basic cable and watch games when I wanted to; now I don't even know what channels I'd need to get to watch my preferred teams. Certainly more than one.) The concussion problems in football mean the "pipeline" is getting shallower, which in turn means that the professional version will be declining in popularity as time goes on. MLB attendance is tanking. NASCAR's collapse has already hit us close to home. If the Panthers come knocking for hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds, I'd politely invite them to go ask York or Gaston County. I'd probably be immediately voted out by people who think that pro sports genuinely matter, but there's something distasteful about signing on the dotted line for a debt worth thousands of dollars per city resident that (a) doesn't produce an asset most residents can use, (b) will not pay for itself in economic development, and (c) will likely outlast the "asset" itself.

Maybe so, but my position is simpler: no public funds should go to stadiums at all.

Investing any public funds in another stadium is idiocy.

Yep, and this is about the tenth time I remember this happening. You'd think that over time they'd adjust the computer models to anticipate this near-constant event, but apparently not.

I was just in Dallas and it struck me that the Onion would make a great addition to their skyline.