Tag: UNC

Where does the UNC campus get its energy?

January 30, 2018 / odrozd

The Renewable Energy Special Projects Committee (RESPC) is a branch of student government that funds renewable energy projects on campus. The group is funded by the green fee, a $4 fee assessed on all UNC students. In November 2017, several RESPC members toured the UNC Co-Generation plant on West Cameron Street with Time Aucoin, the Regulatory Compliance Coordinator at the plant. Many students do not realize that this facility produces much of the University’s energy. The Co-Generation plant keeps UNC’s energy exceptionally cheap ($0.05/kWh compared to the NC average of $0.12/kWh). Given that the University has its own plant, what are the implications for disincentivizing alternative energy sources?

The co-gen plant has a special use permit for operation, which is reviewed every 12-18 months by the Town of Chapel Hill. On site, there are two coal silos that have the capacity to hold 5,000 tons of coal each, but approximately 8,000 tons are kept on site at any time (in total). There is one additional silo with 10,000 tons on hand. These surpluses are not actively used, but kept on site in the event of lack of supplies. The plant would be able to operate for 30 days without any supplies.

One of the main focuses of the tour in November was the ways in which the co-gen plant is working to limit the environmental impacts of energy production.

The buildings where energy is produced have a negative draft, ensuring that no coal dust is released into the atmosphere. The plant also takes other safety measures to avoid environmental contamination. The baghouse houses six enormous nomex (same material used to make fireman suits) bags, which catch the toxic ash, called “fly ash,” from the burning process. These bag houses last about 6 years, and cost approximately $250,000 each to replace. The University replaces one bag every year. Inside the bags, the temperature is ambient to prevent condensation, and thereby acid rain. Fly ash is kept on site in a silo until shipment to Virginia.

“I’m glad to see the co-gen plant is taking measures to be responsible and control emissions, but climate change is a serious concern of students and coal is a generation method we’d like to move away from,” said Environmental Finance Center Student data analyst Erin Danford, after the tour.

The co-gen plant cannot sell electricity, it can only subsidize the University’s use.

The University uses approximately 100,000 lbs of steam per hour. The co-gen plant produces steam for the hospital for sterilization purposes. Approximately 80% of the steam that the University provides for the hospital comes back as hot water, usually around 180 degrees. The plant takes advantage of this heat by removing contaminants with a magnet, and reusing the water to create more steam. Since the water is already hot, it requires less energy to create steam. Co-gen staff are currently working to get a reverse osmosis machine so that they can remove contaminants from OWASA gray water for more sustainable steam production.

For the future, the plant is working on a coal reinjection program to reduce coal use and transition to gas and potentially biomass. On May 1, 2010, Chancellor Holden Thorp announced that the University would be coal-free by 2020, but it is unclear whether this goal will be seen to fruition. Information on progress toward this goal or how plans to achieve this goal were scrapped are difficult to find. Aucoin suggests that the University will only ever move away from coal if it is “financially prudent for students.”

“Coal is not clean nor sustainable, and I’d like to see our University taking greater steps to move towards renewable energy,” said Danford.

The co-generation plant is integral to the daily operations of the University, and more students and staff should learn about its role. “The tour was pretty interesting in terms of learning about the industrial side of energy and what goes on in the factories,” said RESPC member Jonathan Gonzalez.

Other articles about the UNC Co-Generation Plant by The Daily Tar Heel, The News & Observer, and Sustainability @ UNC.

Feature Image: CC0 MichaelGaida

About the Author: Olivia Corriere is an undergraduate student from Ann Arbor, Michigan, majoring in Environmental Studies (Sustainability Track) and minoring in Geography. She is particularly interested in the implementation of sustainable practices of all kinds in the daily lives of the public. During Summer 2017, she interned with the Huron Waterloo Pathways Initiative with the Karen’s Trail campaign. In her free time, she enjoys running, creating music playlists, and spending time in coffee shops with friends.

Editor: Katy Lang

A Planner’s Post Secret

April 27, 2017 / odrozd

The end of the school year–or end of anything, really–often brings reflection. Two years ago, when I was a prospective student of DCRP, the second-year student who picked from the airport confided in me during the thirty-minute ride their “planning secret shame”; the student did not personally want to live the life of urban density and was making plans to live on a ranch far, far away from people. Everyone had one, I recalled them saying, though few were brave enough to admit it. Communicating these hopes, fears, insights, and admissions can be liberating and restorative, but it can also be rather scary. Unless it is done anonymously, of course.

In the spirit of the wildly successful PostSecret campaign, I asked the graduate students of DCRP to submit their own planning-related secret. All responses were collected anonymously, and any identifying information was removed.

To start, there are those observations with some levity:

I secretly love strip malls. SO CONVENIENT.

I’ve never read a Jane Jacobs book.

I think capitalism is great.

There was a theme of a fear of perceived incompetence, too:

I used to say the words “endogenous” and “heteroskedastic” in my first-year classes as often as possible to sound smart.

I still sometimes have trouble saying ‘CDBG’ in the right order.

Transportation was a popular area to voice hidden concerns:

I ride the bus, but I never talk to any of the other riders.

I think bike sharing programs are super overrated.

And for additional emphasis:

I think bike share programs are stupid.

Several entries addressed the dissonance between how we as planners are trained and our personal understanding of the world we shape:

As a soon-to-be planner, I support the new meters and time limits on street parking in Durham. As a person, I am filled with rage that my unlimited free parking options are gone.

I think character preservation is one of the strongest forms of exclusionary zoning, and I feel bad when I facilitate it.

I find it odd that this profession attracts so many people who place priority on “feelings,” when so much of this work is about hard numbers.

Sharing these “secrets” is both an exercise in humor and humility; I found myself nodding in agreeance more than I care to admit. In many of these instances, conflict arises from the struggle with personal beliefs and the false premise that planning maxims (e.g. higher density, transit everywhere, etc.) are always the right strategy. However, when we recognize that members of our department and profession are experiencing these same doubts, concerns, and internal dissonance, we create an opportunity to build a stronger community and have fruitful discussions about our profession. How exactly we achieve that level of comfort in disclosure, I am not sure, but I am confident we can move in that direction.

I would help if I could, but I am late for my strip-mall development lecture focusing on the endogeneity of dying bike share programs. Just thought you should know.

Joseph Seymour is a second-year graduate transportation planning student at UNC DCRP. He’s planning on spending his last months at UNC trying to master the secondary market for meal-card swipes in front of Lenoir Hall.

Featured image: “PostSecret Starbucks Card” Terry Bain, 2005; Flickr

Where Do I Park my Bike?

February 17, 2017 / odrozd

As cities and property owners continue to advocate for bicycling, where should we park our bikes?

The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) produced a guide for planners to use when siting bike parking. An even more detailed guide is available from the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals. The Town of Chapel Hill has a remarkably fine-grained guidebook for what, where, and how bike racks can and should be installed. Most cities with enough cyclists to require ample bike parking have guidelines that aim to improve the quantity and quality of of bike storage capacity. But compared to the great lengths that most municipalities go to in order to ensure quick, convenient, and safe access to and from automobile parking facilities, it is worth asking the question: where will the bikes go?

Let’s examine two examples from the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. First, the Ram’s Head Dining Hall. Located along a major bicycle and pedestrian thoroughfare between the central campus and most of the undergraduate residence halls, this is a great example of bike parking that doesn’t really make sense. Below is an aerial image of the site.

Photo Credit: Google Earth Images. Author’s labels.

In terms of accessibility, the dining hall is excellent. It is easy to see for passersby and has level entries from nearly every angle. And there is some bike parking directly in front of the building. But what happens when the 4 wave racks at the building’s front, with a total capacity of 16 bikes, are full? As the image above indicates, there is additional bike parking on the north side of the building. But the images below tell a different story.

Bike locked to a railing outside Ram’s Head Dining Hall. Photo Credit: author’s image

Additional bike parking on the north side of the building. Photo Credit: author’s image

In the top image, bikes are locked to the railing leading to the building because the other racks in front of the building are also full. Meanwhile, just north of the main entrance (shown by the arrow in the aerial image), there is ample bike parking that is almost entirely unused. What went wrong here? Take a look at the aerial image again. If you were walking towards campus from the residence halls, where would you look to park your bike? What if you were coming the other direction? Would you look for a place to stash your bike that is hidden around a corner and out of sight? Maybe–especially if there is signage clearly indicating that there are additional bike racks around the corner. Or would you join the crowd and lock up on the railing?

I am not opposed to getting creative with bike storage. I have locked my bike to all sorts of inanimate objects when I’ve found myself somewhere lacking formal bike parking. However, here, the university has gone through the time and expense to plan and execute bike storage for the building’s users–and yet they aren’t using it. This is not a failure to provide adequate bike parking. In fact, there’s quite a bit of bike parking at the Ram’s Head Dining Hall. The failure here was in the siting. The takeaway: people will use bike racks if they’re clearly visible. If they aren’t, people will lock-up to whatever is suitable and convenient.

Let’s look at another example. New East, the humble home of DCRP, is located close to the middle of the central campus, adjacent to Cameron Avenue, the main road joining the central campus with major residential areas to the west. In this case, the bike parking is located in clear view to the front of the building.

Photo Credit: Google Earth.

Approaching New East from Cameron Avenue. Photo Credit: author’s image.

Whether approaching the building from the east or west, the bike racks are clearly visible. Because the vast majority of visitors approach the building from Cameron Avenue, it makes sense that most of the bike racks would be located there. However, there is other bike parking located near major ped/bike pathways north of the building as well.In my opinion, the New East bike parking was executed much better than the Ram’s Head Dining Hall bike parking.

The key is not about the type of bike rack but the placement of the bike rack in relation to the people who are going to be looking for it and using it. For some reason, at the Ram’s Head Dining Hall designers didn’t place the majority of bike parking where it could be easily seen by the people who would be looking for it, and so people improvise. At New East, there is no mystery. The bike racks are right where any user would expect them to be: clearly visible from Cameron Avenue.

Are we spending enough energy making it convenient and safe for cyclists to park their machines? Are we spending as much energy and intention on bicycle storage as car storage? In some cases we certainly are, but if we seek to make cycling as easy as driving, the practice demands more attention.

The next time you park your bike ask yourself: why did I park here?

About the author: Chris Bendix is on the Editorial Board for CPJ. He will graduate from DCRP in 2017 with a specialization in Housing and Community Development and has passion for planning equitable transit-oriented development.

Uber Eats and the Image of the City

August 21, 2016 / odrozd

The sharing economy is a seemingly unstoppable force in the modern global economy. It is changing the way the smartphone owner travels, books a room, and most pertinent to me, how they order delivery food. After reflecting on my brief stint as a bicycle courier, I realized that my deliveries took me to places I would’ve never considered visiting otherwise.

I moved to Washington, DC in June for a summer internship, fully intent on discovering the city on my single-speed bicycle. But by the end of the month, I had ridden a paltry 15 miles, and had visited only tourist attractions, parks, and the millennial-laden Adams Morgan neighborhood.

Washington is more than its Neoclassical marble behemoths. It is also complete streets. Shiny glass towers. Communities threatened by gentrification and discrimination. I found this out by delivering sushi rolls and BBQ chicken with Uber Eats, the ridesharing service’s foray into food delivery.

Critics describe the dominant architectural style of Washington DC as a mix of Federal, Beaux-Arts, and Modern. The photo above is the apartment building I lived in this summer, a prime example of Transit-Oriented Development (its front door was a 90 second walk from a the NoMa-Gallaudet University Metro stop) Photo Credit: Daniela Waltersdorfer

Union Station. Photo Credit: massmat, Flickr

The Supreme Court of the United States of America. Photo Credit: massmat; Flickr

One afternoon in late June, a fellow intern learned I was a cyclist, and recommend I sign up to become a delivery rider using the Uber Eats platform. 2 weeks and a background check later, I owed the company, recently valued at $51 billion, $20 for a deposit on a delivery bag. I broke even after my first night of deliveries.

Using this platform to earn an extra $100 every week is perhaps the most flexible way to earn money I’ve ever encountered. I worked when I wanted to, and Uber pays its “independent contractors” handsomely when demand is high. It also offered me and other new riders a $100 bonus to complete 15 trips in my first weekend of work. When was the last time a fast food restaurant paid the new hire a bonus on the first week? My first week, I earned $55 an hour, and was hooked.

While delivering for Uber, I acted as an independent contractor. This means I received no benefits, insurance, or funds to repair flat tires. I also had to pay a $20 “deposit” for this boxy backpack. Photo Credit: Brian Vaughn.

But like a shiny new bike, the glamour wore off quickly. I sweated through the DC heat dome. My phone died in the middle of a delivery (Uber gave me no directions on how to handle this, and I ate the food I was delivering for lunch). Living a second identity as a “wannabe” bicycle courier was no longer exciting, and it was certainly not helping me like or understand DC.

And then I tried something different.

Rather than rushing to complete as many deliveries as possible, working for hours on end to the point of exhaustion, I established a routine that resulted in roughly 90 minutes of riding per night, yielding about $30 on average ($15/hour).

On my rides, I started noticing districts and where their edges, landmarks, and nodes were. I frequently delivered from restaurants on H Street, a corridor largely burned during the city’s 1968 riots. H Street’s recent commercial potential is being realized thanks in part to the deeply criticized streetcar that operates for free (according to its website, the operator will eventually charge a fare). I find it personally troubling that I was a benefactor from the gentrification of this corridor, without owning property there.

Multiple trips took me to Trinidad, a neighborhood made infamous for gun violence and unconstitutional police checkpoints. In Capitol Hill, I pedaled through what Alan Jacobs would recognize as Great Streets: the places connecting the million dollar row houses to East Capitol Street. I learned the nation’s capital also has a Franklin Street.

14th Street NE is a place that creates community, provides equitable transportation accommodations for all road users, and is very pretty on a warm August evening. Photo Credit: Brian Vaughn.

The money was nice. But the value of the hot summer nights I spent in DC was in learning how to read a city and recognize its elements: concrete and human. Walking would’ve been a better way to read these streets, but the chicken wings would’ve gotten cold.

Video: On my bike

Brian Vaughn is an Editorial Board member and undergraduate content editor for CPJ. He is fascinated with the nexus of communications, transportation, renewable energy, and bicycle/pedestrian infrastructure. A Florida native, Brian spent the summer of 2016 interning in the Office of Sustainability and Safety Management at the US Department of Transportation. This fall, he will begin his Junior year at UNC-Chapel Hill as an environmental studies major.

Best Masters Project, 2015

April 15, 2016 / odrozd

Each year the UNC Department of City and Regional Planning bestows the Best Masters Project Award to a graduating Masters student. Mikey Goralnik was the 2015 recipient of the award. Below is an excerpt of his Masters Project titled “Resource Resiliency: preparing rural America for an uncertain climatic future through community design and ecosystem service provision.” A link to his entire project is provided at the end of this post.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New York City and nearby urban areas in New Jersey. In response to the second costliest natural disaster in the US since 1900, President Barack Obama unveiled the Rebuild by Design Competition, likely the largest federal investment in resiliency. Six international transdisciplinary teams will share $920 million to design and implement infrastructural improvements throughout coastal New York and New Jersey that are massive in physical scale, temporal scope, and international renown.

Just as the mainstream public is likely familiar with the impacts of Hurricane Sandy on metropolitan New York, planners and designers from various disciplines are likely aware of the responses to the disaster that have been mobilized from these fields. However, neither group is likely aware that Hurricane Sandy left the same percentage of customers without power in hyper-urban New York as it did in largely rural West Virginia and New Hampshire. Voters and designers are also likely unfamiliar with rural Vermont’s ongoing struggle to recover from Tropical Storm Irene, where four to eight inches of rainfall caused nearly every river and stream in the state to flood, isolating much of Vermont’s non-urban population—many without power—for weeks. And designers and the public-at-large are almost definitely unfamiliar with the story of rural Kinston, North Carolina, where unprecedented rainfall from successive hurricanes caused the Neuse River to jump its banks, flooding a low-lying neighborhood, uprooting a historically close-knit African American population, and challenging a community to plan and design for resilience in a changing climate.

For the millions of Americans who do not live in cities, promoting more resilient planning and design decisions in rural areas remains a critical and under-examined endeavor, one that is literally a question of life or death. What can planners and designers do to achieve a more resilient physical environment in the distant, often isolated communities of the US? This project seeks to answer that question in Kinston, NC. First, I take an ecosystem services-based approach to redesigning nearly 750 acres of publicly-owned land along the Neuse River. By leveraging an asset common to all rural communities—lightly or undeveloped land—I examine methods of monetizing the ecosystem functions that naturally occur on the site. After establishing a baseline value for the site’s current ecosystem service provision, I design a masterplan for the site that both optimizes those ecosystem services and reimagines the site as an amenity for the community.

Results and Conclusions

Comparing the credits to the debits yields a net gain of $4,700/year of social value in transitioning to the new scheme. Given the rough approximations involved in sample-based ecosystem service modeling, a difference this small suggests that redesigned scheme would essentially provide the same quantifiable ecosystem services as the undeveloped status quo, which also means that the new scheme could be expected to receive the same amount of compensatory mitigation wetland credits as the current state would. Based on this analysis, the developed masterplan scenario could receive $36,000-$63,000 in actual, spendable wetland credits, while also serving as a public amenity to the community of Kinston.

Furthermore, as a public amenity, the site would then be able to generate social value, if not actual revenue, through added ecosystem services. For example, given that the site is currently both undeveloped and inaccessible by the public, any recreational activity that would accrue to the redesigned site would be additional recreational activity. Not only does this type of physical activity boost community morale, but it also avoids social costs like healthcare subsidy and hospital operation by promoting healthy lifestyles. Improved recreational facilities like those proposed in the masterplan scenario could also attract tourism dollars to Kinston, thereby stimulating the local economy.

Overall, what this analysis indicates is that financially productive, contextually sensitive, and legally permissible floodplain design is eminently possible in rural North Carolina. By prioritizing revenue generation through ecosystem service provision, planners and designers can implement landscapes that, from an economic perspective, work for their community.

Click here: Mikey Goralnik, Best Masters Project, 2015

The World Trade center Transportation Hub: Worthwhile or Wasteful

April 14, 2016 / odrozd

Some are questioning whether the exuberant lower Manhattan Transportation Hub was a good investment.

The first iteration of the new World Trade Center Transportation Hub opened in early March, 2016. The new transportation hub forms the main transit access point for the new WTC complex, which includes 1 World Trade Center, several other high-rise office buildings, and the September 11th memorial, flanked by reflecting pools representing the imprint of the original towers. In an era when public transportation works seldom reach the scale of the early 20th century, the new Transportation Hub will, according to Port Authority officials and some architectural critics, rival Grand Central Station. One Port Authority employee recently dubbed the complex the “eighth wonder of the world.”¹

However, a strange squabble occurred in early March, weeks before the scheduled opening, when the Port Authority’s Executive Director and highest ranking official, Pat Foye, cancelled the celebration planned for the opening. Citing the high costs associated with the project and the pressing need for investment in the region’s infrastructure, Foye called the Hub “a symbol of excess.”² (It’s worth noting, however, that Foye will leave the Agency later this year, as the Port Authority’s commissioners continue their search for a new CEO to replace him.³)

As Foye alluded to, much of the media coverage of the project has focused on the ballooning costs of the complex. An October 2015 report from the Rudin Center projects the amount of money placed in the complex from 2002 to 2019 at approximately $17 billion. This astronomical figure was financed by the Port Authority, Silverstein properties (a real estate development firm), and a large amount of federal money. Critics allege that these costs have greatly diminished the Port Authority’s ability to invest in many necessary transportation projects, including a new interstate bus terminal to replace the aging structure in midtown.⁴ However, according to others, the complex may yet succeed. The same NYU Rudin Center report notes the Port Authority seems likely to recover much of its investment in the site, and has stimulated the regional economy considerably in the process.⁵

The WTC Transportation Hub seen from ground level just before opening in March, 2016. Photo Credit: author’s image.

Meanwhile, the cost of Transportation Hub alone totals at least $4 Billion,⁶ more than doubling the original estimates for the cost of the structure. Much of these increased costs arose from contracting and construction issues, as well as the unusual design of Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish starchitect who designed the Oculus. The Oculus serves as the centerpiece of the new transportation hub, and is a steel structure which allows light to enter through glass windows into the central terminal. Calatrava’s design of the Oculus changed dramatically over the several years of its construction, owing to practical concerns and unforeseen costs. However, one aspect the Agency did not change was the Transportation Hub’s skylight, in which panes of glass will retract each year on September 11th, exposing the building to the elements.⁷

Architecture critical opinions on the new complex vary widely, with charges ranging from calling it “functionally void” to a testament to the “cost of beauty.”⁸ What many critics have neglected to address, however, is the unique challenge of building a major, functioning transportation hub on the site of an incredible amount of trauma. Little needs to be written about the events that unfolded in lower Manhattan almost 15 years ago. Lower Manhattan and its real estate development will forever be marked by the events that have led to its current spatial configuration.

The Oculus structure. Photo Credit: author’s image.

A fair amount of institutional trauma exists, as well. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s headquarters were located in the North Tower of the World Trade Center towers and the Agency lost 84 employees in the attacks; this figure includes the Agency’s highest ranking official, its then-Executive Director.⁹ The original World Trade Center train station was destroyed by the collapse of the towers, and caused water to flood into the Hudson River tubes back into Jersey City in New Jersey. Because the Port Authority financed and built the original complex, and received much criticism for doing so, the Agency’s future may always remain linked with the event.

It remains difficult to assess what effects recent history has had on the success of the project. One could conclude that the Port Authority, tasked with rebuilding this critical piece of transportation infrastructure, has been enmeshed in a fugue state of trauma. Under this theory the Port Authority has been throwing money into an abyss, trying to fill an absence that can never truly be restored to its previous state.

Another popular narrative sees the development of the entire complex as the height of capitalist and patronage politics. Under this theory, the redevelopment is a consumer-oriented space showcasing a luxury mall, bringing commuters from the outer boroughs and New Jersey, as well as tourists, to the shiny, tone-deaf complex. The ballooning costs owe themselves not to unforeseen logistical complexities because of Calatrava’s design, explains this theory, but rather the awarding of favorable contracts to construction companies and consultants with ties to the Port Authority’s leadership. This theory, of course, gets a boost from recent embarrassing scandals exposing the shadowy political forces working behind the Port Authority’s scenes.¹⁰

Transit users pass through a portion of the station structure before its grand opening in March, 2016. Photo credit: author’s image.

Finally, a more optimistic view of the Transportation Hub sees this project as a deeply personal and valuable project for the Port Authority, New York City, and the region. Given the trauma associated with the destruction of the original station, the Port Authority has used its resources and political clout to revitalize and recreate the whole of lower Manhattan. Perhaps the Port Authority overspent and prioritized the project at the expense of other important infrastructure projects. But no other government body, under this theory, could fund and manage such an enormous and important project. Maybe, as the aforementioned critic stated, $4 Billion is simply “the cost of beauty.”

Ultimately, no contemporary critic alone decides the fate of the Transportation Hub. The Transportation Hub, despite its luxury mall status, will serve as a transfer point between PATH, the New York City Transit rail system,, and city buses. With or without a celebratory opening in March, the Hub exists, and will serve millions of riders every year. Only these riders can truly say if it was worth it.

The author of this piece wishes to remain anonymous.

This article’s featured image is a rendering of the Oculus structure. Rights belong to Forgemind Archimedia and it was reproduced under Creative Commons.

Notes

Jack Moore, “World Trade Center Re-opens as Tallest Building in America,” International Business Times, 3 Nov 2014.
Dana Rubinstein, “Port Authority Declines to Celebrate Calatrava-designed transportation hub,” Capital New York, 22 Feb 2016.
Patrick McGeehan, “Port Authority Leader to Quiet As C.E.O. Search Drags On,” The New York Times, 19 Nov 2015.
Stephen Jacob Smith, “PATH/Fail: The Story of the World’s Most Expensive Train Station,” The Observer, 14 May 2013.
NYU Rudin Center, “Surprise! The World Trade Center Rebuilding Pays Off for the Port Authority and New Jersey,” Oct 2015.
David Dunlap, “How Cost of Train Station at World Trade Center Swelled to $4 Billion,” The New York Times, 2 Dec 2014.
Zoe Rosenberg, “Skylight of World Trade Center Oculus Will Open Each Sept. 11,” Curbed New York, 20 Jul 2015.
Amy Plitt, “Is Santiago Calatrava’s WTC Transportation Hub a ‘Lemon’ or a ‘Beauty’?”, Curbed New York, 22 Feb 2016.
Paul Vitello, “Ernesto Butcher, Who Managed Port Authority After 9/11, Dies at 69,” The New York Times, 22 May 2014.
Katie Zernicke and Jad Mouawad, “United C.E.O. is out Amid Inquiry at Port Authority,” The New York Times, 8 September 2015.

Carolina Graduate Student Organizations Win American Planning Association Award

March 9, 2016 / odrozd

Planners’ Forum and Carolina Planning Journal, two student-led organizations in the Department of City and Regional Planning at The University of North Carolina, were recently named joint recipients of the American Planning Association (APA) Outstanding Planning Student Organization Award for 2016.

The APA Student Representatives Council (SRC) Executive Committee designed this awards program to, as stated on the APA website: promote students’ volunteer involvement in their student organization, communities, and state chapters; recognize the outstanding efforts of these student groups; identify best practices in student organizations; and strengthen the ties between student organizations and the American Planning Association.

Carolina’s organizations were granted this award based on their efforts this year to organize a series of initiatives to create a meaningful experience for students. First, the Carolina Planning Journal published a print volume in May 2015 around the theme of “Planning for the New Economy.” This blog, which publishes twice per week and has attracted a wide readership of almost 2,000 unique visitors in 2016 alone, also featured prominently in the award.

Carolina Planning Journal Editorial Board at the Fall 2015 Launch Party. Photo Credit: Cara Isher-Witt.

Second, its inclusion group, Plan for All, hosted twelve events that engaged issues ranging from planning for LGBTQ folks, public engagement best practices, black planning history, hazard planning and equity, and more. The group hosted Durham Mayor Bill Bell for a conversation about race and poverty in September 2015. Plan for All members are also working with faculty to identify gaps in the curriculum relating to race, class, gender, and equity.

Durham Mayor, Bill Bell speaks with DCRP students and faculty during a Plan for All Brown Bag. Photo Credit: Udo Reisinger.

Third, its Career Development Committee coordinated a number of events and resources to assist students in finding jobs and internships in the field, such as resume workshops and mock interview events. Students also organized a Fall Break Trip to Atlanta that connected Carolina Planning students with some of Atlanta’s most exciting planners such as planner Ryan Gravel, who dreamed up Atlanta’s Belt Line, Tim Keane, Atlanta’s Planning Commissioner, and Nedra Deadwyler, founder of Civil Bikes.

DCRP students tour Atlanta’s Ponce City Market with new Planning Commissioner, Time Keane. Photo Credit: Tim Quinn.

These organizations will be recognized in April at the National APA Conference, and will receive a cash award. This award will be used to support next year’s programming, events, development, publications, and trips.

For more information about this award, see the APA’s announcement https://www.planning.org/awards/pso/ or contact the Carolina Planning Journal and Planners’ Forum.

Featured Image: Watercolor of DCRP’s home base, the New East building at UNC Chapel Hill. Artist Credit: Cara Isher-Witt (DCRP ’15).

A Place for Silent Sam

February 26, 2016 / odrozd

Forty feet tall, dulled from age, the statue of a uniformed young man strides forward from his stone plinth. His face is resolute. He carries a rifle held with two hands, at the ready, though he carries no ammunition box on his belt. In brass relief on his granite base, the same young man sits with a book open in his hands. A tall, robed woman bearing a sword lays a hand on his shoulder. A book lies discarded at his feet as he turns his face to meet her gaze.

Silent Sam. “Confederate Monument, 1913.” Photo credit: North Carolina Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.

The Confederate soldier monument, known as Silent Sam, occupies a prominent location at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Facing north, it commands a view of the center of Chapel Hill, with the University’s McCorkle Place at its back. Both an entryway and a center, McCorkle Place is the soul of the University, rimmed by its oldest buildings and home to the ‘Old Well,’ the iconic visual symbol of Carolina. Unsurprisingly, McCorkle Place is also the epicenter of a decades-long conflict over the memorialization of the Confederacy within a modern University. The debate over Silent Sam unveils the precarious position of a University built by slaves for the sons of white slaveholders, which today strives to realize the values of diversity and inclusion.

For those who support keeping Silent Sam in place, he represents the sacrifice of 321 Carolina students who died in the Confederate armies. For those who support removing the memorial, he is a totem to white supremacy and physical proof of the University’s ongoing marginalization of students of color. As a planner, I firmly believe that as long as the discussion centers solely on symbolism and intent, it will remain unresolved. As anyone who has recently attended a heated public meeting can attest, arguments that arise from conflicting narratives do not have readily available solutions. One cannot easily bridge the gap between the belief that the statue is racist and the belief that the statue is noble. Our beliefs are ours alone.

As planners, we are tasked with the delicate business of divorcing the debate from individual views toward a communal vision, introducing the material aspects of the problem to the debate, and hopefully finding common ground among a diverse set of constituents in the process.

As a planner and as a member of the UNC community, I believe that if we examine the University’s history, its values, and the relationship between its built environment and its social environment, we should advocate for the relocation of the statue. Many say that removing the monument from McCorkle Place would be tantamount to forgetting our history. I disagree. We both forget our history and deny the realities of our present by keeping the statue as it is. Silent Sam may be without ammunition, but he is still armed. The time has long since arrived for Silent Sam to move from the heart of campus to a more appropriate location.

To move forward, we first must understand our history. Silent Sam was a gift to the University of North Carolina from the United Daughters of the Confederacy and installed in 1913. Unlike most Confederate memorials erected shortly after the Civil War, the statue does not mark a cemetery or a battle site. Instead, Silent Sam is an example of a “lost cause” monument. Built between 1895 and 1935, these memorials elevate the Confederate soldier as the model of citizenship and frame the conflict in terms of states’ rights, not slavery. The placement of Silent Sam at the center of campus is intentional. Lost cause monuments were erected in front of courthouses and by busy thoroughfares as a means to enshrine a positive narrative about the Confederacy within the public life of the South.¹ Amidst a society experiencing the upheaval of emancipation and reconstruction, the lost cause narrative reassured whites by supplanting the dishonor of defeat with a romanticized image of the Confederacy in which brave young men fought and died against a tyrannical Northern aggressor with superior resources. These monuments served to frame the tremendous casualties of the war as a sort of martyrdom: a noble sacrifice cleansed from complicity in slavery and upheld as an example of civic virtue.

Today, Silent Sam remains a physical monument in a public space. Both the product of our social world and the setting of public life, public spaces create narratives of our history and our aspirations. Monuments, in particular, imbue space with meaning, transmitting messages from generations past about how to live well and about what values to uphold. This is exactly what Silent Sam does: it tells a story about the past and evangelizes the values contained within that narrative. While it is easy to see public space as static, our perceptions belie the truth that we experience these spaces anew with each visitation. If the monument is a message from the past, it is one continually translated and reimagined by a community of passers-by. The question for members of the University, therefore, is not solely about what Silent Sam meant in the past. It requires that we connect the dots between the social environment and the built environment in the present day.

“Festivities Surrounding Confederate Monument’s Unveiling.” Photo credit: North Carolina Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.

I see that connection between past and present very clearly in how the lost cause narrative is threaded throughout today’s debate over Silent Sam. Recent letters to the editor published in The Daily Tar Heel defend the statue in terms that echo this narrative, describing the monument as “a reminder of the willingness of [Confederate soldiers] to sacrifice their lives for their community, society and families and [sic] their courage, tenacity and fortitude.”² Another letter supposes that removing the memorial negates “all who had fought and died in vain and the civilian lives of Southern women that were raped by the Union soldiers that pillaged, stole and burned anything that they could not steal.”³ I do not deny the bravery of Confederate soldiers or the atrocities committed during the course of the Civil War. The problem lies within the insidious nature of the lost cause narrative, which cloaks a project of historical revisionism in the disguise of honoring the dead.

Whatever is done with Silent Sam will never right the wrongs of slavery and the systematic discrimination of the Jim Crow South. But to say that we must leave things as they are denies the agency we have as a community of the present. What planners bring to this debate is the knowledge of how we shape our environment, both its physical and social attributes. The Carolina community must ask itself what kind of environment we wish to inhabit, and how we want to remember our shared, fraught history.

Silent Sam watches as counter-protestors greet Confederate rally protestors in October, 2015. Photo credit: Libbie Weimer

We have a place to start to answer the first question. The University’s Statement on Diversity states that “the University promotes intellectual growth and derives the educational benefits of diversity by creating opportunities for intense dialogue and rigorous analysis and by fostering mutually beneficial interactions among members of the community.”⁴ The diversity statement encompasses our core values and presents a place of common ground from which to begin the work of shaping our environment and remembering our history.

As a planner, I believe that Sam should be moved not simply because he represented the “lost cause” to his builders, but because of the connections between public space, public memory and shared history. I believe that as long as monuments to the lost cause remain at the heart of our campus, the lost cause narrative remains in the heart of our community. This narrative is antithetical to our values because it denies the centrality of slavery to the Confederate cause. In doing this, it both subverts a rigorous analysis of the past and undermines mutually beneficial interactions among the diverse members of our community. As a community of the present, we must confront the past with clear eyes.

“Silent Sam blindfolded by Confederate battle flag.” Photo credit: Bradley Sacks, The Daily Tar Heel (September 2015).

The debate over Silent Sam does not happen in a vacuum. In Fall, 2015, students at the University of Texas at Austin successfully petitioned to move a statue of Jefferson Davis from a public space on campus into the Briscoe Center for American History. Closer to home, students at Carolina succeeded last year in renaming a building dedicated to William Saunders, a prominent statesman and leader of the Ku Klux Klan. In both instances, pressure from students quickly led to change. Unlike William Saunders or Jefferson Davis, however, Silent Sam remains firmly in place.

I believe that the reason why we should move Silent Sam goes a step beyond the seduction of the lost cause narrative. Silent Sam evokes a wholly different and much more powerful response than Jefferson Davis or William Saunders. It is entirely possible to reject the actions and values of historical figures without considering one’s own actions and values. But Silent Sam is not a historical figure. Silent Sam is a student of the University. For this reason, he is a particularly potent symbol, both in eyes of the white men and women who see the image of their ancestors and of themselves, and in the eyes of the people of color who see him as their oppressor. It is one thing to call into question the motives of named elites of the day, and another altogether to call into question the motives of the everyday people of the past. To defend Sam as not racist today is to defend oneself as not racist today. Sam embodies a myth of white innocence in the past and he also embodies a myth of white innocence today.

Silent Sam circa April 7th, 1968. Photo credit: Hugh Morton Photographic Collection, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archive, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.

For this reason, Silent Sam is not only a historical controversy, but also an uncomfortable examination of today’s academic environment and today’s student body. The discomfort around acknowledging white supremacy tacitly fuels the debate. More than the continuance of the lost cause narrative, this is why the University should remove the statue. Carolina’s trend of downplaying and denying the damage of white supremacy in the past and today must end. The University must move the conversation from a childish posture of denial to a real conversation about race, a conversation that organized students such as the Real Silent Sam Coalition are already having. This conversation is fundamental to transforming the University from an institution designed for white men to an institution for students of all races, ethnicities, religions, and genders.

The road toward realizing the goals of diversity and inclusion is a long and winding path. It is the difficult and uncomfortable path. Removing Silent Sam is a difficult decision that would signal the University’s commitment to this path. I believe that Carolina should take a page from the University of Texas’ book and relocate Silent Sam to a more appropriate location. For Jefferson Davis, a history center is an ideal location, where a historical figure can be put within the context of the events of the time. For Silent Sam, the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery is my preferred option. The cemetery includes remains of Confederate soldiers who were buried there during the Civil War. Removing the monument from a prominent public space and placing it in a cemetery among Confederate dead affirms the sacrifice of the 321. The lost cause narrative does not belong at the heart of our institution. Let’s populate our sacred ground with monuments that truly speak to our principles, such as the Old Well. The time has come for Sam to be laid to rest.

Notes:

1. Thomas J. Brown, interviewed by Frank Stasio, “Flags, Soldier Statues and Civil War Memory,” WUNC, an affiliate of National Public Radio, (12 November 2015), http://wunc.org/post/flags-soldier-statues-and-civil-war-memory#stream/0.

2. Dr. Edith Bernosky, “Letter: Silent Sam represents sacrifice, not hate,” The Daily Tar Heel, (10 November 2015), http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2015/11/letter-silent-sam-represents-sacrifice-not-hate.

3. Danny Knowles, “Letter: Remove all war memorials or none,” The Daily Tar Heel, (24 August 2015), http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2015/08/letter-remove-all-war-memorials-or-none.

4. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Division of Workforce Strategy, Equity & Engagement. “Core Diversity Values of the University” http://diversity.unc.edu/our-commitment/carolinavalues/

Libbie Weimer is a current master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UNC-CH. She is interested in the connections between environmental justice and energy policy, and is working on a master’s project about coal ash in North Carolina.