Conversation – Michael Gallis

Michael Gallis’ work studying urban networks has changed the way cities and transportation systems have been built nationwide. But today as he works quietly at a long red table among his books stacked around ornate pieces of his African and Chinese art collection, he looks more like a philosopher, an academic, a historian – all apt descriptions.  His right hand scrolls through e-mails on his sleek silver MacBook. His left hand gently pets Lili, his wife’s chihuahua, whose bed sits on a chair next to his.

Gallis’ passion for exploring history, his ability to see beyond boundaries and identify spacial relationships has made him an expert in his field. He has helped shape the vision for U.S. transportation in the 21st century. His uptown Charlotte firm paved the way for how people commute from New York to Orlando, Fla., to Detroit and Memphis, Tenn., which also has a new economic development strategy thanks to him.

But he is also a writer, working on a book about friends who went to Vietnam and returned very different people. He is a historian, able to quote Bible verses and war battles.  And he is passionate about the environment and the impact of global warming.

“It’s apparent to all of us we have a daunting challenge ahead of us,” he says.

Gallis, 66, was born in San Francisco to a Chinese-born Russian father who operated a general goods and timber company that expanded to Oregon.  When the company collapsed during the Great Depression, Gallis’ father moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Oregon. His mother was Swedish. Her family operated timber companies as well. The two had met at International House at the University of California at Berkley and married a short time later.

Gallis, who crewed on a rowing team when he was young, also developed an appreciation for history and art, courtesy of his parents who had their own Chinese art collection. He bought his first piece – a pair of African figurines – from an L.A. art dealer he discovered while buying supplies for a freshman architecture project at a lumberyard next door.

“The importance of collecting art from different parts of the world to me is that it was created as a result of different kinds of ideas,” Gallis says.

Today his first floor office in the Boxer Building uptown resembles a gallery, with hundreds of pieces of Tribal and African art displayed on shelves and whitewashed walls. Feathered masks with shells, carved wooden shapes and masks with cutout eyes fill the library.  But the collection doesn’t stop there. Metal statues tucked between floor plants fill the hallways and decorate desks along with a chair hand carved from a single tree. One of Gallis’ favorite pieces of art is a colorful painting of Chinese letters that hangs in the conference room.

“If you only stick to your own culture, you never expand your mind,” he says. “By collecting different art you get a better understanding of your own history and a deeper appreciation for your perceptions and values.”

Gallis studied art history and earned his architecture degree from the University of California at Berkley and a master’s in architecture and planning from the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to teach at the University of Miami and came here in the early 1970s when a college friend asked him to teach at the newly formed college of architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

He was an associate professor there for 20 years before starting his own company, which he called Noah Studios – a name he chose after reading the Bible and recalling Jesus’ first prophet, Noah.

“That little company was our arc,” he recalls. “Noah put trust in God to guide the arc and we left it up to God to get our little company off the ground.”
Decades later, Gallis has been recognized nationally for motivating governments to integrate regional, national and global strategies. His firm’s latest study – the first of its kind – provides insight into coping with nature’s evolution and how man-made systems can evolve efficiently so the two can co-exist.

The framework for his most recent study and those before it stem from lessons learned while watching Charlotte transform from a tiny city into the country’s 21st largest.
Gallis began studying Charlotte in depth in the mid-1980s.  It was transforming quickly from a city to a metropolitan area and people were confused over how to deal with planning as political coalitions emerged and development patterns changed.

“When I arrived here, Charlotte was just a small city with a lot of country roads around it,” Gallis says. “In the course of the next three decades it transformed into a major metro area – it was a great urban learning laboratory.”

His staff crafted a development plan for Rock Hill, S.C. And it was during that research when growth patterns began to emerge.

Using a pen on old hand drawings, Gallis circles little yellow blobs on a map that represents Gastonia, Concord and others. They were getting bigger. And a grid of highways and superhighways was beginning to develop, he says.

The cities were not just growing but they were merging as one big unit or urban network, and the future of any city is related to where it sits inside the network.
This would require new theories and approaches, Gallis says.

A decade later city leaders formed committees to study growth in the region. Rather than build more highways, the Gallis research suggested Charlotte choose building a transportation system along its centers and corridors, which became the transit lines the city has today.

“The key to the future was understanding how these urban networks grew and changed and then how we could affect their future through different policies, regulations and investments,” Gallis says.

He retired from teaching in 1997 to work full time at the newly formed Michael Gallis & Associates, which suddenly began getting nationwide attention for its innovative and efficient strategies.

The firm began studying connections between Connecticut, New York and Boston and discovered relationships between politics, urban economics and geography.  Soon, Gallis and his staff were traveling the country compiling research on numerous regions.

Through this work the firm developed what Gallis calls a systems approach to networks such as transportation, tourism and the environment. The concept is similar to the systems within the human body, each with a purpose and function.

It was through this lens that Gallis and his people determined that the environment was so unique that it should be treated separately.

“We discovered that we knew less about the environment than we did about any other system,” Gallis says. “And it occurred to me that we needed to study the interaction of (the environment and manmade systems), which had never been done before.”

What had been done before simply was man’s impact on the environment such as air pollution and water runoff. But no one had studied how people were building urban ecosystems, Gallis says.

Wearing a crisp white button-down and gray paisley tie, Gallis pops up out of his chair to fetch a book to illustrate his point. He glances pensively through his collection of topics from painting to ocean liners and railroads.  At 6-foot-4, he towers over some of the highest shelves, which include the 1929 plans for New York City, a collection of 19th century atlases and the book that created the Federal Aviation Administration.

In the mash of books, Gallis can’t find what he’s after, but it’s hardly needed. He recalls most of the details he’d hoped and explains how his firm began researching the way cities were growing compared to the patterns of nature. First his staff looked at the Southeast, from Birmingham, Ala., to southern Virginia as well as Atlanta, Columbia, S.C., Charlotte, Raleigh and the Tennessee Valley. On a global scale, Gallis & Associates took the research to another level looking at the relationship between natural and human systems.
“You could see where – as we built human networks such as roads and buildings – we never built either to fit the natural system. We took the environment for granted,” Gallis says. “It is only now we are able to fully appreciate our relationship with nature.”

Currently nature and man-made systems are in conflict with each other, he says.

“We have to move toward co-evolving.”

By identifying effects of growth on the environment such as erosion, depletion, extinction and pollution, Gallis & Associates has identified strategies for action to include new policies, incentives and regulatory procedures up to the federal level.

“The bottom line is we have to rethink the way we manage the growth of our cities,” Gallis says. “We have two systems in conflict and we are facing problems people haven’t grasped.”
Based on its global research and findings, Gallis & Associates is one of several organizations working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to study the physical, socioeconomic and ecosystem impact of significant changes in sea levels along the Eastern seaboard.

“We are looking at some of the potentials of dramatic changes that people think will happen in small increments but could be of significant size,” Gallis says. “If we don’t try to understand them we won’t be prepared for them.”

~ Victoria Cherrie