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Relationships Between the Major State
Functions and Adjacent Smaller Scale
Developments
The State Fairground has been well established over
many decades, and it needs large land areas for its
activities, ranging from agricultural shows and com-
petitions to funfair rides and concerts. (The scale of
the operation is many times that of the Neshoba
County Fair described in Chapter 4.) There are no
permanent residential buildings, but several large
communal structures for commercial and educa-
tional purposes do exist. Indeed, one of these, the
Dorton Arena, dating from the 1950s is protected
as a historic structure on account of its advanced
reinforced concrete shell roof design. At the time of
the State Fairground’s original construction, the site
was fully rural as befitted its purpose. Now it sits
uncomfortably with a variety of suburban uses that
have surrounded it on many sides. Only to the east,
where the fields and campus of the N.C. State
University School of Veterinary Medicine are located,
does any remnant exist of the original open landscape
that once characterized this area. Other fields to the
west of the main Fairground site are used to accom-
modate peak car parking demands, but these sit
awkwardly next to established low-to-middle income
residential neighborhoods.
The adjacent large sports facilities represent typical
suburban planning of the pre-Smart Growth era: that
is, locate a piece of open land near a freeway, con-
struct a large building with all its requisite car park-
ing, and make everybody drive to and from the
events. One of the main issues in this case study was
to seek alternative patterns of land use and transit
that could reduce this complete car dependency.
Even with the extensive freeway network that sur-
rounds the study area, the traffic congestion before
and after major sporting events creates substantial
problems. This in turn burdens residents and workers
with considerable difficulty travelling to and from
homes and workplace.
THE CHARRETTE
This master plan was developed during a highly inten-
sive, public design charrette over a four-day period in
December 2000 (see Figure 8.2). The charrette was
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conducted at a temporary design studio set up in bow-
els of the Entertainment and Sports Arena (not an
easily accessible space for the public to find), where the
multidisciplinary design team consisting of planners,
urban designers, architects, landscape architects, trans-
portation planners, traffic engineers and market ana-
lysts conducted a series of meetings with the interested
stakeholder groups. According to our standard prac-
tice, each day we developed design alternatives that
directly reflected the public input.
These stakeholder groups included representatives
from the Raleigh Planning Commission, the Raleigh
Appearance Commission, the Raleigh Department
of Transportation, the NC Department of Trans-
portation, NC State University, NC State Surplus
Property Office, the Centennial Authority that oper-
ated the arena, the TTA, environmental interest
groups, business owners and residents. The resultant
plan was truly a collaborative effort balancing, to
the extent practical in a market-driven context, the
various and diverse visions and desires of the