Canons of Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism

At a Time of Growing Concerns about the Future of the Planet, a Document that Builds on the Vision of Sustainability Inherent in the Charter.

The Charter of the New Urbanism is the guiding document of the new urbanist movement. Although it offers an encompassing vision of sustainable urbanism from the scale of the region to the block and building, three leading CNU members, including two who had a central role in drafting the original Charter, undertook an effort to clarify and detail the relationship between New Urbanism and sustainability.

The resulting document, The Canons of Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism, is designed to serve as a set of operating principles for human settlement that reestablish the relationship between the art of building, the making of community, and the conservation of our natural world.

The CNU board has adopted the Canons for education, field-testing, and refinement in 2008 and 2009. During this time, members are welcome to sign onto the Canons to show their endorsement of its principles. The first signers are the authors: Elizabeth Moule, Hank Dittmar, and Stefanos Polyzoides, who incorporated comments and suggestions from numerous urbanists. The authors thank Mary Walp for her role in editing and designing the document.

GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE and habitat destruction, accelerated by global settlement patterns of sprawl, pose significant challenges requiring a global response. The scale and extent of these problems has come into sharp focus in the decade since the execution of the Charter of the New Urbanism. Timely action is both essential and presents an unprecedented opportunity.

THESE ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES complicate equitable development the world over. Holistic solutions must address poverty, health and underdevelopment as well ecology and the environment.

TOGETHER, the transportation and building sectors account for the major- ity of energy and non-renewable resource usage, making the design and planning of the totality of the built environment essential in tackling these problems.

SMART  GROWTH, GREEN  BUILDING  AND  NEW  URBANISM each have produced advances in resource and energy efficiency. Yet they alone are insufficient and are sometimes even at odds with one another in tackling this challenge. It is time for each of their specific strategies to be integrated.

THE CHARTER OF THE NEW URBANISM provides a powerful and enduring set of principles for creating more sustainable neighborhoods, build- ings and regions. They have provided guidance to policy makers, planners, urban designers and citizens seeking to address the impact of our towns and cities on the natural and human environment. Meaningful change has been achieved by simultaneously engaging urbanism, infrastructure, architecture, construction practice and conservation in the creation of humane and engaging places that can serve as models.

YET THE PROFOUND NATURE of the environmental crisis calls for amplification and more detailed enrichment of the Charter. It is imperative for a unified design, building and conservation culture to advance the goals of true sustainability.

AS A SUPPLEMENT to the Charter of the New Urbanism, a set of operating principles is needed to provide action-oriented tools for addressing the urgent need for change in the planning, design and building of communities. These practical principles shall be global in scope and in information sharing. In their application, actions must respond to local conditions and be contin- uously developed and refined over time.

WE PROPOSE THESE Canons as time-honored operating principles for addressing the stewardship of all land and the full range of human settlement: water, food, shelter and energy. They simultaneously engage urbanism, infrastructure, architecture, landscape design, construction practice and resource conservation at all scales.

Signers of the Canons