Courtesy of NAP

March 14 [Updated March 15]. Birkdale Village has been selected for a tour during the 31st annual Congress for the New Urbanism happening in Charlotte May 31-June 3.

In collaboration with Michael Dunning, founder of Charlotte-based MEND Design Collective and former Shook Kelley architect on Birkdale’s original project team, North American Properties will  host the national group onsite June 1.

The goal is to showcase Birkdale’s past, current modernization and the role it will play in the future of Huntersville.

About Congress for the New Urbanism

The non-profit CNU’s mission is to champion “walkable urbanism.”

The group provides resources, education, and technical assistance to “create socially just, economically robust, environmentally resilient, and people centered places.”

Their goal is to leverage New Urbanism’s unique integration of design and social principles to help diversify neighborhoods, design for climate change and to legalize walkable places.

Background

More than 1 million people lost their homes, researchers have estimated. Federal transportation officials noted that in the first 20 years after the 1957 Federal Highway Aid Act launched nationwide highway construction, more than 475,000 households were displaced.

To learn more about the conference, visit https://www.cnu.org/cnu31.

In Lake Norman

Davidson, Huntersville, Cornelius,  Antiquity, along with Birkdale Village are  all first-generation New Urbanist developments and towns with form based codes since the early 1990s.

A North Meck tour is planned Periphery Towns – Living on the Edge,  focusing on  Davidson and will be led May 31 by Jason Burdette, Davidson town planning director.

The private and public sector planners will tour Mecklenburg County’s northern towns to see best practices and lessons learned from some of the earliest suburban adopters of form-based codes in the southeast region. Participants will travel by bus from Charlotte to Davidson and will walk throughout the town to various destinations.

Participants will review the relative success of infill projects in its historic downtown compared to its newer, interstate-adjacent mixed-use areas built upon the same principles as the historic core, along with how other new-urbanist inspired residential projects have matured over time, Burdette wrote in an email. Attention will be paid to affordable housing, of which Davidson has long led in requiring developments to integrate units within market-rate projects.

The Shape(ing) of water, a tour of the U.S. National Whitewater Center that is designed and operated as an outdoor center offering over 30 different recreational activities. The Whitewater Center is currently comprised of over 1,300 acres of protected land offering 50 miles of trail and access to the Catawba River and Long Creek. The center’s goal is to continue to increase the size of these protected lands and promote even greater access through land acquisition and natural resource management.