Full Project Team: Brandon Allison, Madison Gilbert, Malliswari Gorantla, Jo Hamizadeh, Suhhel Mokhtarzadeh, Kevin Odwesso, Alex Schust, Daniel Scruggs, Hanna Stoddard, Akhil Taninki, Sarah Wagner & Almahn Wilson

Across the United States, cities are redeveloping their old rail yards into thriving new communities. The 220-acre rail yard just outside Charlotte’s Uptown will present an opportunity to build a new neighbourhood that is healthy, vibrant, and welcoming through the concept of sports urbanism. Our studio's goal was to re-envision the defunct railyard north of Charlotte, North Carolina's downtown into a place that acts as both its own community and also as an anchor for the surrounding neighbourhoods, bringing unsupported civic and institutional uses to the area and helping to make neighbourhoods closer to the 15 minute city ideal of urban planning.

This was done to help heal a historic divide in Charlotte. The site sits directly between the Lockwood and Optimist Park historic neighbourhoods, and straddles a census line, dividing these two areas of the city. By redeveloping the site into a walkable and communal place, we can reconnect these communities and begin to ameliorate some of the inequities that have formed in their time separated by the railyard.

We did this by pulling heavily from the concept of sports urbanism, designs geared around sports and activity as a means to get people active, both physically and in their community. By developing more than 100 acres of outdoor urban parks and plazas, we support active life by way of sports and otherwise, and connect to the Charlotte Greenway system that weaves through the rest of the city and county surrounding it. We hope that this redevelopment plan can be used to spur consideration about how the city of Charlotte can view this unused land near the city centre as both a site for sustainable city planning in the future, and a study in sports urbanism and how it can redefine what makes a city thrive.