The Human Scale official trailer via YouTube

In the months ahead, people who live, work and play in Uptown Charlotte will have a chance to imagine what North Tryon Street could become.

Tryon Street – in the museum mile stretching from the cultural campus at the south end to the McColl Center for Visual Art at the north end – is the spine of our center city. The southern end has become a lively, dynamic destination for Uptown workers and out-of-town visitors. Corporate towers dominate the streetscape.

The northern half of Tryon has important civic assets as well, but the area is less developed as you move away from The Square. There are fewer and lower towers, empty lots and parking lots, and some publicly owned land available for future development. As many see it, there’s the opportunity.

In just one block, for example, we have Discovery Place, our popular science museum, the main branch of the public library, and our beloved sanctuary-turned-performance-hall, called Spirit Square. What if their physical spaces and programming were created in concert? I could imagine this area in the heart of Uptown becoming the city’s new living room, a place where people of all ages from all areas of town would come together to mix and mingle and share ideas.

The design team for the North Tryon Master Planning process will be announced soon, and the plan itself should be ready by the end of the year. Foundation for the Carolinas and Center City Partners are leading a planning group that includes the city, the county, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library, Discovery Place, and other property owners in the area. Knight will contribute knowledge and access to experts along with its dollars.

For example, we expect to link national and international leaders and ideas to the process, such as Gehl Architects, a Danish urban research and design firm with a global reputation for making cities more livable. Recently, I joined other Knight colleagues in Miami to learn about the work of Gehl Architects, founded by professor and architect Jan Gehl in Copenhagen. For more than 40 years Gehl has studied human behavior in cities, prompting his seminal book, “Cities for People.”

What, you say? All cities are for people. But are they?

During our meeting with the Gehl team, we learned how they study the ways people use streets by doing a bit of a walkabout in downtown Miami. They instructed us to pay attention to what was actually happening on the sidewalks. How many people were stopping and talking? Sitting on a bench? Was there shade? Were there children playing? Older folks strolling?

And then we did some thinking together about what was missing from these streets in comparison to places we love. I live in Charlotte’s Dilworth neighborhood. So, my mind immediately went to its shady streets, sidewalks and the grocery store and other shops in walking distance.

The exercise prompted me to think about how North Tryon could be different from South Tryon—if we worked at it a bit. Could it be developed at a human scale, to use Gehl’s term – with more focus on people than cars? And if so, what might be possible?

Several members of the Gehl team will be in Charlotte in May to explore these and other questions with members of the group working on the master plan.

The community will be invited to a free showing of “The Human Scale,” a documentary that focuses on the ways people live in cities, while they’re in town (We’ll announce the details later).

With much of the world now living in highly urbanized areas, how to make cities more comfortable for people to interact is a good issue to explore. And it seems just the right issue for Charlotte to explore as we look to the future of Uptown.

We invite you to join the conversation as we bring in others to make Charlotte an even greater place to live for all of us.

Susan Patterson, Charlotte program director at Knight Foundation