CNU conference focuses on cities

Editor’s note: more coverage of CNU VII appears on page 20 of this issue. The seventh annual Congress for the New Urbanism, the largest ever, concentrated exclusively on city issues. “There are no suburban projects being shown at CNU VII and that is a big step forward,” said CNU executive director Shelley Poticha during the opening session of the event in Milwaukee in June. Poticha later added that planning and building new neighborhoods and towns in the suburbs is important, and “we’ll focus on that later — but for now we’re focusing on the revitalization of cities.” Poticha contends that CNU has given too much attention to suburban and “greenfield” projects like Seaside, Kentlands, Celebration, and Northwest Landing. Devoting a whole Congress to cities is a way of correcting that imbalance, she explained. CNU’’s endorsement of such projects has been too “haphazard,” she added. The organization needs to work with regional groups to examine where growth should go outside of the city. mayors attend Key participants at CNU VII were five city mayors, all of whom are active in promoting new urbanist principles: John Norquist of Milwaukee (CNU board member and host of the event), Glenda Hood of Orlando, Roxanne Qualls of Cincinnati, Susan Savage of Tulsa and Bret Schundler of Jersey City. The mayors, who were interviewed together at the conference by Talk of the Nation radio host Ray Suarez, see new urbanist design as a powerful tool to restore vitality and quality of life to their cities. The Milwaukee RiverWalk, initiated by Norquist and designed by Ken Kay, is located adjacent to the conference venue and serves as an example of how a city can be transformed by high quality public infrastructure. The $13.8 million RiverWalk, funded 80 percent by the city and 20 percent by property owners, has played a key role in raising property values, luring tourists and drawing new residents to the downtown in recent years. The public sector should support improvements in the public realm with tax dollars, if necessary, according to Norquist. “The River- Walk is the kind of infrastructure that the public wants because they use it,” he said. An arterial road, on the other hand, generally requires funding from private developers in the form of impact fees — “ because the public doesn’t want it,” he explained An article jointly written by Norquist, a Democrat, and Schundler, a Republican, appeared in the Washington Post on June 5, during the Congress, making many of the same points that the mayors made in Milwaukee. “It’s no secret that Americans are yearning for a genuine sense of community that seems to have been lost over the last 50 years. ... It’s no accident that the loss of community coincides with the rampant sprawl of our cities into sterile pods of tract housing and strip malls. ... The price we’ve paid for this separation is a high one. The house on the isolated cul-de-sac that people have been working toward has driven them from the very communities that they want. ... This desert island approach makes us completely dependent on our cars, even for tasks as simple as getting a newspaper or a loaf of bread.” government hand in sprawl Norquist and Schundler make the point that sprawl is not a free-market response, but dictated by “the heavy hand of government itself.” Public policy encourages isolated development on the fringe while forbidding “any other type of housing or commercial centers,” they say. Amazingly, the mayors note, some theorists have come to the vigorous defense of sprawl. One such theorist is Kenneth Green, of the libertarian Reason Public Policy Institute, who debated new urbanists at the conference. Among Green’s many arguments was that sprawl is good for children, because the constant car chaperoning required in the suburbs translates into more parental control. While Green is a defender of the suburbs, some critics complain that too many new urbanist projects are outside of cities in suburban and rural areas, posing a new challenge to cities. But the mayors don’t see greenfield New Urbanism as a threat to cities. “Most of the development is going to be on the edge (of metropolitan regions),” said Norquist. “So it might as well be decent development. And the New Urbanism legitimizes the form of the city.” According to Qualls, “It’s not a matter of New Urbanism in the city versus New Urbanism in the suburbs. What it comes down to is this — the biggest threat to both the city and the suburbs alike is sprawl.”