Applying New Urbanism principles to harness future growth
Good afternoon! I am Mallory Baches, and it is my honor to be the President of CNU and welcome each of you to Northwest Arkansas! Alongside my co-lead, CNU’s Executive Director Margaret Gattis, I am proud to lead this organization that offers such a profound sense of hope for communities: a vision for places that love people, where every person can walk to their daily needs, play with their kids in a nearby park, and live a happy, healthy, more prosperous life no matter their age or race or income or career or lifestyle. CNU is the only nonprofit organization in the world that for 34 years has cultivated the forum and stewarded the connections necessary for this movement of change-makers we call the New Urbanism to build places that love people.
On behalf of the CNU Board of Directors, my humble team of eight fellow CNU staff members as well as the huge number of dedicated volunteers you’ll see in orange tee shirts across CNU34; on behalf of our extraordinary list of sponsors for this year’s Congress including our partnership with the Walton Family Foundation; on behalf of our host cities of Fayetteville and Bentonville as well as Rogers and Springdale; on behalf of our steering committee that includes our partners at Northwest Arkansas Council and the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission and the University of Arkansas and ULI Northwest Arkansas; and especially on behalf of the tireless team of our local host committee, and my two co-pilots in bringing this groundbreaking Congress to y’all, CNU34 Local Host Committee co-chairs John McCurdy and Ward Davis, I am thrilled to officially kick off CNU34 here at our Opening Keynote!
What you have already begun to experience at CNU34 is a renewed way of participating in this annual gathering of the New Urbanist movement: one that is fundamentally rooted in fostering radical change, and designed to ensure that we make a lasting impact in every host region we come to from here on out. I grew up a Chicagoan, so my whole life, I’ve known that Daniel Burnham said, “Make no small plans, they haven’t the strength to stir men’s spirits,” and in crafting this year’s Congress, we have truly pulled out all the stops.
Yesterday, over 200 folks chose to sign up for one of three simultaneous day-long specialty educational programs, each one aimed at audiences we know are pivotal to expanding the reach of our work: Local Government staff and elected officials, and Builders and Real Estate Developers, and those seeking to formalize their New Urbanism credentials with CNU-A accreditation. Here in this room and again on Friday in Bentonville, you’ll get to hear from some truly phenomenal Keynote speakers whose work demonstrates that our vision has the potential to make a monumental difference in people’s lives. And in between, you’ll have the chance to choose which Main Stage Conversation you will get the most from, each designed to reflect the session consent of the city you choose for your Dual Spoke Day experience here at CNU34.
Folks interested in state legislative strategy that supports our vision spent this afternoon workshopping, and folks interested in aligning fire and life safety with walkable, sustainable urbanism will do the same on Friday. Also on Friday, we will host a follow-up gathering to carry on the work that began at New Urban Council IX back in February, which was the first Council in more than a decade. In a nearby room, you’ll be able to see the final presentations of the three Legacy Projects that brought pro-bono technical assistance to Northwest Arkansas as a part of this year’s Congress impact. And all of this can be found on the CNU34 app, where I’m sure that by now, everyone has explored the program of more than 80 deeply curated sessions and celebrations and social events and of course … the parties. I hope everyone made it to the Opening Party in Rogers last night, and if you didn’t … we might still have some of that custom-brewed Desire Line Lager from Ozark Beer Company, but I can’t make any promises!
There are just a few people in this room who have never missed a Congress, and I am extraordinarily grateful for and humbled by their dedication—I see y’all out there.
But there are many people who are just beginning their streak, and so I would like to ask that each person who is attending a CNU Congress for the first time, please stand.
Each of you represents the future of this movement, and my sincere hope is that CNU34 will be the dividing line in your practice—the AD to your previous BC—“Before Congress.”
Now I would like to ask that each person who is here today from the state of Arkansas, please stand.
This is CNU’s first visit to your home state, though by no means is this the first time the ideas of New Urbanism have come to Arkansas—and as those of us from out of town are finding out, y’all have been doing the hard day-to-day work of implementation for a long time now. Each of you are a part of why everyone else traveled from across the country and even across oceans, to attend CNU34. I wish I could capture the excitement of the many, many people I have already talked to this week who are visiting for their first time, so that each of you could enjoy their words of encouragement and curiosity and downright charm about NWA.
Those of you seated around these folks who are at their first Congress, or who are from Arkansas, I hope you will take the opportunity to get to know them after this session. I’m sure you’ll find some of the wonderful things that y’all have in common in your work, and experience, and commitment to making cities, towns, and neighborhoods that foster human connections.
Since I became President, I have come to view the organizing of each Congress as something similar to writing a dissertation. Each year the context of our gathering changes, and so do the challenges and the possibilities for the impact we can make. My task is to take the strategic plan of CNU, and the goals of the Local Host Committee, and the innovations and examples that each of you have developed (or are wanting to see from others), and with the help of the Congress co-chairs and the guidance of the Congress Program Committee, stitch those threads together into a complete and coherent design for how the principles of New Urbanism can best respond to the needs of the communities across the host region, and regions much like it.
So, my thesis for CNU34 is: we are gathered in the most likely of what might otherwise be unlikely of locations, a unique moment in the kind of place that we can recognize has already happened again and again across this country, from Nashville and Austin to Phoenix and San Jose. It’s the circumstances of growth pressure and available land, that serve as the breeding ground for exactly the kind of placeless, unfettered sprawl that we fight against. Here in Northwest Arkansas, we are on the frontier of the future of cities. We have a chance to make a radical difference, and we should also be honest with ourselves: it might feel like we are already too late. But we *have* to try, otherwise what is the point of our mission in the first place?
New Urbanists know that place matters. We recognize that the design of our built environments has a profound impact on our health, and our wealth, and our well-being. Whatever way we work to improve the built environment—whether that is designing spaces, or writing regulations, or advocating for reforms, or building communities, we do so with a true love of place which we bring wherever we go, to join with those already working away, to take up the ranks alongside.
You can see that the intellectual ascendency of the ideas of New Urbanism has occurred in so many places—you can witness our ideas having taken root as now-commonplace in every road diet and zoning reform and missing middle housing strategy. And yet I would guess that not one of us in this room would describe our work as easy, or that the vision we are working towards represents business-as-usual. We continue to gather—this time being our 34th—to congress with each other, believing that together as a movement, we can find solutions to the persistent community-building challenges that we face.
Where we need answers, we turn to the Charter of the New Urbanism. The Charter describes a way of thinking differently about how we build and rebuild our regions, cities, towns, and neighborhoods, block by block and building by building. It acknowledges that not all communities are—or should be!—the same, and that unlike sprawl where urban conditions are traded away in favor of car dependency, that urbanism offers a declension of intensities that support community-building. This is where the Transect comes into our work, and as the Focus for CNU34: a tool to improve the way communities across NWA can build authentically and urbanistically, helping the region maintain the unique character of both its urban centers and rural landscapes as it harnesses its impending growth.
The impact that CNU34 is able to make in Northwest Arkansas—and the innovations in the way that CNU is supporting the New Urbanist community of practice at this Congress— wouldn’t be possible without each of you, making the choice to come and be a part of this change-making.
I want to thank each of the sponsors that made this event possible—without your financial support, CNU could not provide this week-long endeavor to change the conversation in NWA. The community in Northwest Arkansas, and the New Urbanist community, have shown that the work we are doing here in this place matters deeply: CNU34 raised more money from sponsorships than any other Congress ever has, with over $425,000 raised from the companies and firms and even individuals you see on the backdrop screens. The people who are doing the work on the ground here in NWA, and the people who have come to support that work, are all-in on the value of the vision we are working so hard to spread, and I am sincerely grateful.
I want to thank the CNU34 Local Host Committee, who have been the workhorses of making this dual-spoke Congress happen. They have been quietly committed to creating each example of New Urbanist ideals you will see in your time here, and they should be incredibly proud to show off everything that they have accomplished – across NWA and in delivering CNU34.
I want to thank the CNU Staff, who work behind the scenes to make all of what CNU provides possible. As I said before, this organization operates with only a team of 8 individuals making sure that each of you receives membership support, and educational resources, and programmatic initiatives, and helpful communication, and timely reporting on the work of the movement. This year especially, Margaret and I are so grateful to each member of our staff.
Finally, I want to thank the CNU Board of Directors for their tireless support over the past year. I am inspired by the commitment to the future of this organization that they are bringing to their own, often thankless, volunteer work for CNU. We could not succeed without each of them.
