About

About the Explorer

The Carolinas Regional Explorer is a community-data analytical platform developed by the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. With roots in the Institute's longstanding collaboration with the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County on the Quality of Life Explorer, the Regional Explorer expands that footprint to the 14-county region surrounding Charlotte.

What you can explore

The platform carries dozens of indicators across themes: demographics, economy, education, housing, transportation, health, environment, and civic engagement, for every tract in the region. You can map any indicator, watch it change over time, compare neighborhoods and counties, and look at how two measures relate or where values cluster in space. Every indicator has a plain-language "why it matters" page with sources, and the full dataset is free to download.

The application and its data pipeline are open source and use no proprietary GIS. We treat statistical uncertainty as a first-class concern: survey estimates carry their margins of error, low-reliability values are flagged, and model-based estimates (such as the CDC health measures) are shown as levels rather than trends where the source does not support comparison over time. How every number is produced, and its limits, is documented on the Methods page.

Get involved

This Explorer is a project of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute and partners, designed to grow as more counties, data, and community input come in. To contribute data or partner with us, visit the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute.