• Video: 27 Charter of the New Urbanism principles

    CNU is celebrating its 30 th anniversary in 2023—a generation after the organization founders met in Alexandria, Virginia, and began to outline a new philosophy of city building. Writing the Charter of the New Urbanism required three years and three congresses, where the three scales of the New...Read more

  • Storytelling, urban design, and saving a city

    How places from Seligman, Arizona, to Buffalo, New York, have become aware of their history and charms—including planning and design—to turn urban failure into success.
    John Paget, a filmmaker from Seattle who lived and worked in Buffalo for many years, makes the case for how the simple act of storytelling can bring a city back to life. In a TED talk called “How to keep your hometown from becoming a ghost town,” Paget reports that cities are destroyed by many...Read more

  • Healing small cities through land use and transportation

    On the Park Bench experts reveal how to overcome barriers to healthy, thriving cities in America’s heartland.
    “We don’t know how. It costs too much. It won’t work here.” These three objections are raised by public officials when confronted with the need to reform land use and transportation, according to Mark Fenton, who presented on CNU’s On the Park Bench webinar Healing Small Cities . Fenton and co-...Read more

  • A wall rises in Buffalo

    Even a city that is getting better makes mistakes, such as a massive concrete wall around a development in a city where population and urbanism are growing.
    In early March, 2020, days before the entire nation came to a sudden pandemic halt, I was in Buffalo, New York, for a charrette co-sponsored by CNU. It was brutally cold—as Buffalo can be in winter—and that may have contributed to my poor judgment (it’s hard to think clearly about urbanism when...Read more