David Walters is an English architect, urban designer, town planner and a tenured full professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the USA. Walters qualified as an architect in 1972 after completing undergraduate and graduate degrees with honors in architecture and urban design from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

For eleven years Walters taught and practiced in England, where he won national awards for housing and urban design. In 1983 he resigned his Senior Lectureship at Plymouth Polytechnic, now Plymouth University, and moved to the USA, teaching and practicing in Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma before joining the Charlotte faculty in 1990. 

He has helped many North Carolina towns to create new town plans and zoning ordinances that incorporate “Smart Growth” development practices, and his work in the towns of Davidson, Cornelius and Huntersville in north Mecklenburg County has been featured in a PBS documentary.

In 2001, Walters wrote sections of a “Smart Growth Toolkit” for the Atlanta Regional Commission dealing with Traditional Neighborhood Development and Transit-Oriented Development. Since becoming Senior Urban Designer with The Lawrence Group of St, Louis, MO, and Davidson, NC, in 2000 Walters has been the lead urban designer in a multi-disciplinary team that has won three planning awards from the North Carolina Chapter of the American Planning Association for Smart Growth planning and sustainable urban design projects in the state, and he has created development regulations and zoning guidelines for the City of Raleigh, NC, and other jurisdictions around the state’s capital city.

Walters is the author (with his wife, artist and writer Linda Luise Brown) of Design First: Design-based Planning for Communities, published by the Architectural Press (2004). Two new books, Designing Community: Charrettes, Master Plans and Form-based Codes, and The Future Office (the latter edited with Christop Grech, RIBA) are scheduled for publication in the UK in the spring of 2007 by the Architectural Press and Spon Books respectively.