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How do you create character and a sense of place in an area that wasn’t built for it?

On a Saturday evening last summer, I took my kids to check out The Bowl at Ballantyne. I heard it had a play area and figured they could burn off some energy before we grabbed dinner at one of the planned community’s new restaurants. Every family within a 5-mile radius must have had the same idea. Stream Park was crawling with kids, and almost every restaurant was packed.

In addition to the restaurants and 6-acre park, The Bowl has an amphitheater (“The Amp”) and access to the Lower McAlpine Greenway. In some ways, it feels very Charlotte. You can grab a beer at Olde Mecklenburg Brewery or have a latte at Fly Kid Fly, the new coffee shop from Hex Coffee Roasters. Get your hair cut at Arrow, the Raleigh-based barber shop with locations in South End and Park Road Shopping Center, or work out at [solidcore] Pilates Studio, a national chain with three other Charlotte locations.

You’ll find a good mix of food and retail tenants, too. It’s the same idea as Camp North End or Optimist Hall, with one obvious difference: Every structure is brand-new. It even has that new-construction smell. No quirk, no history. Wide sidewalks invite foot traffic, but it lacks the energy you’d find in Plaza Midwood or NoDa’s street scene.

The Bowl is part of a project called “Ballantyne Reimagined,” which started in 2017 when Northwood Investors purchased the 535-acre Ballantyne Corporate Park for $1.2 billion. Johnny Harris and Smoky Bissell developed Ballantyne in the early ’90s, and it became one of the most successful planned communities in the country. Over the past seven years, Northwood has transformed this 2,000-acre plot, known for its office parks, golf course, and namesake hotel, into a walkable urban village with a 100-acre green space called Ballantyne’s Backyard. Today, it has all the right pieces: restaurants, retail, and entertainment. But when you don’t have buildings to renovate and adapt, how do you create character or sense of place?

“About 17,000 people a day come there just to work, so we knew what we were—a suburban office park that wants the same type of amenities you’d find in the city,” says Ward Kampf, president of Northwood Retail. “Over time, it’s gonna feel less and less suburban and grow into the area. If you take a 20- to 30-year approach, this will be a small city.”

The greenway extension was another big win for Ballantyne. “Walkability is huge,” says Christina Thigpen, senior vice president of marketing and communications for Northwood Office. “We already had the established community. Restaurants and retail were the missing ingredients. It was about changing the mindset of this nine-to-five fixture into a 24-hour place.”

Clifton Coble, Northwood Develop­­ment’s senior vice president, challenged the team at 505Design (now Cooper Carry) to make the new construction look like more than just … new construction. “It was like a design contest with themselves,” he says. During the three years it took to remove the golf course and add roads and other infrastructure, they revised the design multiple times to try to establish a unique identity. “A food hall is one building with a lot of operators,” he says. “We have nine separate buildings, and each one has a different facade.”

They workshopped the name of this reimagined campus, too. “The previous owner called it ‘The Resort Bowl’ because it was the golf course area outside the hotel,” Coble says. “After a lot of conversations, it stuck—we just dropped the ‘Resort.’ If you look at it from Google Earth, it actually does look like a bowl.”

Kampf, who’s behind successful mixed-use developments in California, Texas, and Tennessee, knew The Bowl needed a mix of national restaurant brands and local eateries. “North Italia and Flower Child give you the validation, then the local spots give you 80% of the character,” he says. “Between Bossy Beulah’s, Rooster’s, Harriet’s, … it’s the best group of locals who are also thoughtful first-movers.”

Another guaranteed way to add local flair, whether or not a structure is old or new? Public art. Northwood tapped “mural ninjas” Michelle “Bunny” Gregory and MyLoan Dinh to create a 65-foot staircase mural and partnered with Blumenthal Arts to paint the old golf tunnels that connect The Bowl to Ballantyne’s Backyard. ArtPop Street Gallery is responsible for the billboard-sized banners that hang along the construction fencing, and Charlotte Is Creative installed a selfie station for visitors to snap photos to post to the ’gram.

As of late September, this pocket of Ballantyne still felt very much under construction, with high-rises surrounded by scaffolding and cranes. But The Bowl definitely has a miniature downtown feel, where it’s hard to tell residents from visitors. Instead of nostalgia, there’s a sense of anticipation.

And behind the slides and rock wall where my children played, a pedestrian bridge connects The Ballantyne Hotel to Stream Park, as if to merge the old with the new.