David Walters

Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Urban Design

David Walters is Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Urban Design at UNC Charlotte. Walters qualified as an architect in England in 1971 and has practiced and taught in both England and America, including spells in Arkansas, Mississippi, Dallas TX, Oklahoma, and since 1990 at UNC Charlotte, where he taught architectural design, housing design, urban history, and urban design and planning. He was the Founding Director of the Master of Urban Design Program for six years until his retirement in 2014.

In the mid-1990s he served as planning consultant to several North Carolina towns, including Davidson (1995) and Huntersville (1996), for whom he co-authored master plans and groundbreaking “form-based” zoning codes which were amongst the first of their type in the USA.

From 2000-2014 he was senior urban designer at the North Carolina office of The Lawrence Group, headquartered out of St. Louis and more recently with the Charlotte office of the Stantec Urban Places Group, headquartered out of Boston.

Walters helped lead teams that have garnered two national awards and a dozen state awards for planning and urban design, and is the author, co-author and editor of four books, “The Future Office” (with Chris Grech), “Design First: Design-based Planning for Communities” (with his wife, Linda Luise Brown), the “Region A Toolbox: The Mountain Landscapes Initiative” – a handbook for sustainable urban design and planning in the North Carolina mountains, with Craig Lewis, and “Designing Community: Charrettes, Masterplans, and Form-based Codes”.