We'll take New York

CNU’s ninth Congress comes to the nation’s largest metropolis and will focus on both the good and the bad aspects of the city’s urban development. This summer, CNU launches its invasion of the cultural capital, New York. We will share our ideas with the metropolis, while we learn from the region's many layers of urbanism. From June 7 to 10, New York will be the site of CNU's ninth annual Congress, this year titled “From Neighborhood to Region: Politics, Policy, and Design.” The title indicates the event's four specific foci: Region, neighborhood, design, and codes. Plenary and breakout sessions will be devoted to each topic. They will explore the issues in the context of the New York experience, and in their relationship to the Charter of the New Urbanism. Throughout the event, every session will address the themes of environment, economy, and equity. Following recent Congresses, CNU has heard members complain that they wanted more education directly from the movement's most influential figures. This year, we respond to that need, putting the movement's top names front and center in fewer, larger sessions. Board members, task force chairs, and experienced members will moderate or speak at most of the major sessions. This Congress also adds a full-day session, New Urbanism 101, for newcomers to the movement. NU 101 will offer a solid grounding in the principles of the Charter, so that discussions for the next three days can assume a shared core of knowledge. In a return to the informal, collegial atmosphere of the first Congresses, informal salons will have a larger presence than in recent years. In addition to an evening of scheduled salons, CNU is booking an ongoing Salon Lounge, to provide space for informal discussions, presentations, and critiques. Why new york? The New Urbanism movement is gradually increasing in popularity among elected officials, planners, and citizens throughout the Northeast. In New York, the need for the movement is clear. The city has its mixed-income neighborhoods, but there is a powerful tendency for neighborhoods to become exclusively rich or poor. The city’s natural environment — including rivers, forests, cliffs, and marshes — is a remarkable asset that has been largely ignored, walled off, or destroyed. (A session on the New York waterfront will explore ways to develop this resource while enhancing the environment.) The Congress will analyze the causes of the good and bad urbanism of the region, and seek models for development in other regions. The New York region has many walkable neighborhoods and America’s highest level of transit use, but it also has the nation’s longest history of freeway-driven sprawl. The city’s problems with traffic congestion and air pollution are legendary. New York City adopted a comprehensive planning code in 1916, codifying the development of its solid, respectable neighborhoods. By 1950, urban renewal and highway czar Robert Moses pushed for freeways east into Long Island, north into Westchester County, and south into New Jersey. In the process, the city’s middle class drained into new suburbs like Levittown. Even the much beloved Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village was briefly slated to become an on-ramp. In every borough, dozens of blocks were bulldozed for futuristic redevelopment schemes. New Urbanists will do well to heed the lessons of these projects, with their good intentions and wildly mixed results. Urban tours The Congress will take advantage of its host city’s architectural history in several ways. CNU and the local host committee resisted having the event in a cloistered conference hotel. Instead, meetings will be held in two historic warehouses in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. On the opening day, 13 tours are being offered. They will enter a range of neighborhoods, including the New Urbanist antecedents of Forest Hills Gardens, a garden city, and Battery Park City, an imaginative and livable high-rise neighborhood from the 1980s. The Beaux-Arts Grand Central Terminal, the Victorian town of Ocean Grove, New Jersey, and the late 19th-century brownstones of Harlem will all be open for inspection on Congress tours. An awards dinner at the Congress will recognize the winners of this year’s Charter Awards. The awards will be given to developers and designers of projects that do an exemplary job of implementing the principles of New Urbanism.