Perhaps the operable word was sketches.

When Carolina North Executive Director Jack Evans stood beside a giant screen showing three possible site plans for Carolina North, that was how he described them.

Not blueprints etched in stone, but sketches lightly drawn that could be subjected to intense scrutiny and then further refined, or scrapped, based on the differing reactions they get.

Each of these conceptual approaches, Evans emphasized, is “a work in progress.”

“From our perspective, a successful outcome for tonight would be to get people’s feelings about what aspects of these sketches work well or work horribly,” Evans said.

All three sketches, Evans said, are for what is intended to be a “vibrant, compact, mixed-used community” where professors, graduate students and their families, can live, work and play. At the same time, however, thee sketches were designed to be “deliberately diverse” to elicit a range of responses from the 150 people attending two community forums March 27 at the School of Government.

Attendees, who ranged from University professors to town leaders to residents, could ask questions and could share thoughts on comment cards later posted on the Carolina North website, research.unc.edu/cn/community.php. (Also on that site are images of the three conceptual approaches and other meeting materials.)

Evans said the forums marked a pivotal point in the University’s planning process now driven by the mandate of submitting a proposal to the University Board of Trustees in September.

The next community forums are scheduled April 26 at 3:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. at the William and Ida Friday Center for Continuing Education. Plans call for presenting new concept drawings to show possible approaches to greenspace, parking, transit and the arrangement of housing and buildings.

Each of the three concept plans shown last month was based on input including an ecological assessment of the property that will help guide the University’s
efforts toward sustainability strategies, guiding principles developed by the Leadership Advisory Committee and infrastructure workshops. Even as the University continues work on a final concept plan, supporting studies are under way or planned that will involve the campus and various government entities on topics such as transit and transportation.

The three plans limit development on 250 acres over the next 50 years and focus development on the southeastern side of the 970-acre tract by Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Estes Drive outside of Carrboro. This area is the flattest terrain on the tract now occupied by the Horace Williams Airport, which would close.

Each proposal calls for a mixed-use development served by a yet-to-be-determined array of transportation options other than cars that include the possibility of everything from light rail to buses to bikes to simply walking.

And each of the proposals was developed by Ayers Saint Gross, the Baltimore-based architectural firm that led the three-year effort to update the master plan for main campus six years ago.

Yet the three proposals, which are called the “centers,” “grid” and “interwoven,” differ from each other in several key distinctive ways.

The centers plan, for instance, would have a loose, spider-web layout with large open areas, said Luanne Green, principal with Ayers Saint Gross. The centers plan would also push parking lots to the outer edge and feature a transit line running from Seawell School Road to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard that would not be open to cars.

The grid proposal would put most buildings on what is now the airport runway but would intersperse parking throughout side streets and include a road for both cars and public transit running through its heart. Under the grid plan, Greene said, development would look much like that of a traditional city, based on a rectangular, grid-like pattern.

The interwoven proposal, instead of running west, would extend north toward Homestead Road and feature large “fingers” of green space interspersed in the southern part of the campus near the old runway.

Green noted the interwoven proposal would be environmentally friendly to both watersheds in Carolina North. Like the other two plans, the interwoven proposal would steer development away from the Bolin Creek watershed in the southwestern corner of the site. But unlike the other two proposals, the interwoven proposal would run development along Crow Branch, a watershed in the lower corner of the site that is now stopped up and polluted, Greene said. As part of the development, the University would seek ways to clean it up and restore it.

Evans has emphasized that Carolina North would support the University’s mission of teaching, research and public service, as well as ultimately contributing to the state’s economic development. The University needs space to expand activities that will no longer fit on the main campus, he has said. Of particular interest is the need for space for new partnerships with the private sector that can help accelerate economic development.

During the community meetings, campus academic leaders shared information about their programs and the possibilities for the future at Carolina North.

They include Dan Reed, founding director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), a multidisciplinary collaboration of UNC, Duke and N.C. State universities, and Douglas Crawford-Brown, director of the newly announced Institute for the Environment, which is being formed through an expansion of the existing Carolina Environmental Program. (Click here to read a related story.)

Bob Blouin, dean of the School of Pharmacy, said private partnerships at Carolina North would help the University, as well as the region and the state.

The University hopes to turn cutting-edge research into products pushed into the marketplace for consumers, he said. Many of those products would be in health-related fields aimed at improving and extending people’s lives. The research should also spawn the kind of high-paying jobs the state badly needs during a period of economic transition.

The University’s faculty now attracts nearly $600 million in sponsored research grants and contracts each year. Last year, Chancellor James Moeser called for raising the level of research to $1 billion by
2015. For that goal to be reached, Moeser has repeatedly stressed, the development of Carolina North must proceed without further delay.