As UNC-Chapel Hill begins developing Carolina North, the largest expansion for the University since its founding, leaders are working with experts to set a vision for what the learn-live-work-play campus will feel like.

Carolina has hired Gehl, a global urban strategy and design consultancy, to develop the “place strategy” for Carolina North. Gehl has brought on Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, a landscape architecture firm, as a consultant on the project.

The Well visited with members of the team while they were on campus in June to learn more about their work and why it’s important for Carolina North’s success.

Place strategy is the process of deciding how a place should feel and how people should experience it, before deciding exactly what is built. A master plan may look at a project from a bird’s-eye view, but place strategists envision what people experience at the ground level.

Intentionally done early in the process, this work establishes a vision for Carolina North that can stand throughout the entire process. Place strategy doesn’t determine every building or feature but instead creates the principles that will guide those decisions. It focuses on what happens in the public space — the paths, parks, gathering areas and shared places where campus life thrives.

“A success test we’ve been thinking about is whether people are going to feel like they have to go to Carolina North because that’s where their class is or because they’re excited to go there and feel like they experience something different,” said Blaine Merker, senior project director, head of climate and partner at Gehl. “It should be a place that feels good to go to, a place that feels kind of sticky.”

Many institutions and companies skip this step, said Gullivar Shepard, partner at MVVA. Because the Carolina North development, consisting of approximately 230 acres, will take shape over years to come, the University needs a shared vision that can guide decisions even as individual buildings, partnerships and uses evolve.

“What’s unusual about this step, before a master plan, is creating a North Star to help steer future planning and design processes,” Shepard said.

Merker said developing a campus like Carolina North is more than just arranging buildings. The space must be a clear destination in people’s minds. What is the look and feel of the environment that helps people feel like they’re at Carolina? That’s just one of the key questions Gehl and MVVA are helping leadership consider.

Gehl is a global place strategy firm based in Copenhagen, Denmark, that has worked with cities and universities across the world. Carolina is working with one of Gehl’s American-based teams.

MVVA has worked with Carolina before, most recently on a landscape framework plan that examined the campus, studying circulation, site water, woodland canopy and social space.

“Those are four big investments we’ve really studied on the main campus that we can use as a set of tools for Carolina North,” Shepard said.

Representatives from Gehl and MVVA spent a week at Carolina in June, conducting detailed, structured interviews with dozens of students, faculty, staff, business owners, nearby residents, local families and other community leaders. These interviews took them everywhere from key campus locations to Chapel Hill favorites like The Purple Bowl and Brandwein’s Bagels to local residents’ front porches.

The observations focus on the human experience at Carolina. They asked questions like:

• What makes you stay and linger on campus?
• Where do you take a walk to clear your head?
• Where do you run into colleagues and friends?

A student’s favorite place to study, a community member’s midday walk and the interactions one has while picking up coffee or lunch may seem like small details, but together they show what makes a campus feel alive.

“That’s what we do at the beginning to really understand the place on the ground, to get the DNA of what makes UNC special and how that transfers to Carolina North,” said Krzysztof Sadlej, senior program manager for urban activation at Gehl.

The goal is to create a space where people not only use state-of-the-art facilities but have a high quality of life around them.

Using the information gathered on campus and across both Chapel Hill and Carrboro, Gehl and MVVA will create a draft place strategy to serve as a set of guiding principles and recommendations about how people will experience Carolina North. They’ll share that this fall with leadership, the Carolina North Stakeholder Advisory Committee and community members for their feedback.

Blaine emphasized that this is creating a roadmap for future engagement. Their work now is more of an operating manual than a strict set of rules.

Through their conversations, they are identifying different groups of people — students, researchers, staff, nearby residents, local business owners, community leaders — whose feedback will help shape the development that’s expected to break ground in 2027.