The following originally appeared as an Op/Ed piece in The Chapel Hill News on January 25, 2004.

UNC has unique opportunity at Carolina North to explore ideas for sustainable urban form

Having 940 undeveloped acres at the center of a vibrant community is incredibly good fortune for UNC-Chapel Hill. But given the magnitude of the opportunity, do the latest plans for Carolina North measure up to the site’s potential? How will Carolina North mitigate the adverse effects on our towns of the intense use being proposed? How do we ensure this development has a positive long-term outcome? Our nation is facing critical environmental, resource, and geopolitical issues at the beginning of a new millennium. Does the current proposal respond to that larger context?

The features that have drawn so much attention – abundant parking, UNC’s unwillingness to put any land into permanent conservation, the “parkway” to Weaver Dairy Extension, their indifference to the rail line – are just symptoms of a much deeper malaise: the lack of purpose underlying the planning of this campus. Where’s the VISION??

Carolina North’s presenters say they want to maintain and enhance the University’s national reputation. Clearly, good intentions underpin their emphasis on developing land that has already been disturbed, establishing a grid of streets, promoting bike & pedestrian infrastructure, respecting traditional architectural forms and committing to “green building.”

But given the magnitude of the opportunity, the latest plans for Carolina North don’t measure up to the immense potential here. While there’s no fault in the idea of a “Living & Learning” site that addresses current Main Campus problems and hosts cutting-edge research, the proposal doesn’t grasp the historic opportunity to be found in devising the fabric of the campus itself.

The plan includes only 1800 homes. Where will the other 16,000 employees and their families live? How will they get to work? Will they end up in sprawling subdivisions they can only get to by car, or in walkable transit villages reached by bus and train? If they’re not going to live on the campus, how does UNC propose to provide resource-efficient means to get them to affordable homes?

The arrangement of the buildings, their design, the lay of the connecting landscape, and the relationship to the existing community could be a model of land use and urban form that responds to the critical local and national crossroads we’re at. How the uses will occupy the land, relate to the surrounding community, provide water, treat sewage, manage stormwater – and grapple with global contextual issues – is as important as any activity that might take place on the campus.

The historic opportunity here cannot be realized without more fundamental visionary thinking about how to use this property. The worst thing the UNC Trustees could do would be to adopt in haste a plan whose purpose is so limited in scope.

The permanent conservation of a large portion of the tract should be the first principle used to guide this project, as well as a commitment to avoid fragmenting natural areas. Current practice in environmentally sensitive planning embraces the concept of reducing the “urban footprint,” or conserving land and resources by building up, not out. Large scale protection of farmland and open space can only happen when we start making cities the way we used to, with taller structures that help create the density that makes places walkable and supports public transit.

Why not design this project to be “Car Free” from the start? Forget haggling over the number of parking spaces and forget depending on access by single-occupancy vehicle. A hundred years ago people said the automobile would never replace the horse; now it is claimed Americans will never use public transit in numbers sufficient to make a difference. Yet we can and must transition away from depending on cars by taking inspiration from places that thrive without them such as the historic centers of European cities, Mediterranean hilltowns, and Venice, Italy (a car-free city of 85,000).

A rail corridor crosses this property and its tracks connect to almost every large and medium-size city on the continent. We can have passenger service originating at Carolina North that would take us swiftly to a multitude of destinations. The Carolina North campus can be one of the most exciting and important stops to be found at this end of the nationwide passenger system which will flourish again as fossil fuel reserves decline.

Already some 6 billion people on the planet are competing for limited resources. In that global context, as well as in the context of neighborhood preservation, the challenge for UNC is to produce something people in the community will want to fight for: a model for urban living that can sustain and enhance human life for the next millennium.

Kathy Buck & James Carnahan
Kathy Buck is a landscape designer, sculptor, and member of Carrboro’s Environmental Advisory Board.

James Carnahan is a designer, cabinet maker, member of Carrboro’s Planning Board, and Chair of The Village Project.