Here are some ideas to chew on:
– An “applied innovation corridor” stretching up North Tryon Street from uptown to UNC Charlotte, along the to-be-built light rail line.
– A “culinary corridor” from Johnson & Wales University to Central Piedmont Community College’s new culinary building.
– Create a consortium of the higher education institutions in and near uptown, so they can pool their resources with shared facilities. CPCC, Johnson & Wales, Johnson C. Smith University, Queens University of Charlotte, even UNCC with its new uptown presence could all be players. (Sorry, Davidson College, you’re just too far away.)
– With the growing numbers of college students, why not build a shared student union uptown?
That last idea came from a focus group for high school and college students.
The others came from Daniel Iacofano, one of the consultants for the ongoing Charlotte center city planning (public workshop tonight at 5:30 at the Convention Center.) I caught up with Iacofano this morning to hear where he and the consultants are headed in their thinking on the Charlotte Center City 2020 Plan.
He talked a lot about the economic underpinnings, and he offered some of the many ideas the California-based consulting group MIG (the I is for Iacofano) are tossing around. He’ll talk about some of them tonight at the public workshop.
Cheryl Myers, the Charlotte Center City Partners senior veep of planning and development, said the consultants had gotten 80 ideas from Center City 2020 Plan working groups alone. (Disclosure: Observer publisher Ann Caulkins is a co-chair of the steering committee for the 2020 Plan. She doesn’t know that I’m writing this, or what I’m writing. And I have been supportive of having uptown plans since I’ve been writing opinions for the Observer.)
Iacofano said the I-277 loop is “kind of a noose” around uptown.
I asked, “How do you tame the loop?”
Iacofano: “There’s a menu of interventions.” They could range from capping it – there are places where that could work – to simply enhancing the connectivity under and over it with better lighting, artwork, and so on. Other possibilities would be to put development closer to the highway, or to put things under the freeway overpasses.
Tonight, expect a lot of attention to the issue of creating “seams” rather than “dividers” between uptown and the neighborhoods that surround it.