Morning
First-time attendees are invited to participate in this informational orientation breakfast. Leaders of the Congress for the New Urbanism will guide you through Congress events and sessions.
New urbanists measure success by aligning practical strategies with the principles most identified with places people love. Andres Duany, one of the founders of the movement, talks about the components of community, the failure of post-WWII planning to deliver them, and what new urbanists have learned about restoring relationships between planning, design, and great places.
Andrés Duany, Principal, DPZ Partners
Architecture, sensitively designed, can reinforce the special character of the places where it is built. In this exciting hands-on class you’ll get to roll up your sleeves, grab drawing supplies and then learn step-by-step how to produce new contextual architecture.
First, we’ll focus on methods for identifying the physical DNA of a place’s existing architectural vocabulary, from overall building massing to the articulation of building elements and details.
Then, we’ll utilize this information to methodically inform the creative design of new architecture that is sensitive to its context.
James Dougherty, Director of Design, Dover, Kohl & Partners Planning Eric Osth, AIA, Principal, Urban Design Associates
This session will demonstrate how principles of modern retail development can be combined with the best practices of traditional urban planning and landscape architecture to create successful and sustainable mixed-use urban commercial centers and historic town centers. In addition, this program will discuss integrating large format retailers in the city and new town centers.
Participants will learn the nuts and bolts of how to program, plan, and develop both historic downtowns and new urban town centers, including market research, site selection, land use, office, residential, parking, building, site planning, streetscape, zoning, tenant mix, and store design. The participant will gain an insider's look at how leading shopping center developers, retailers, department stores, and architects program, plan, design, and manage some of the highest-performing commercial centers in the business.
This session is ideal for architects, developers, planners, retailers, and public officials.
Robert Gibbs, President, Gibbs Planning Group Terry Shook, FAIA, Founding Partner and Principal, Shook Kelley, Inc.
To truly engage your community, communication plans need to be less billboard and more pop-up shop. Learn how to establish quick and nimble tactics for your team to help the public solve a problem and organically build a voice for change in your town. If you feel your department lacks community advocates for your plan, this session is for you!
In Innovative Public Engagement, a 202-level session, participants will learn how to select and use new public outreach methods to engage community members. Ordinary citizens are tired of conventional communications plans—public notices in the local newspaper just don’t cut it—and most don’t have the time or desire to wait through a long city process. This session will teach attendees why it’s important for community members to ‘see it to believe’ in what you are trying to accomplish and how to show it to them in the most effective way.
Samantha Armbruster, Main Street Program Manager, City of San Marcos Matthew Lewis, Assistant Director of Planning & Development Review- Urban Design Long Range Planning, City of Austin
Detroit is the king of lean urbanism ideas and methods, both intentionally and unintentionally. Lean Codes seriously up equity and social justice in a sort of do-it-yourself urban way.
This day-long workshop will take Lean Codes that have been written in 2015-2016 as inspiration, and write one to apply to a neighborhood that is walkable from the venue. Advance preparation for the workshop would include a webinar series before CNU 24 begins, to explore concepts, have discussions, and lay the foundation for a day of coding.
Hazel Borys, Managing Principal, PlaceMakers Susan Henderson, AIA, LEED AP, CNU-A, Principal, PlaceMakers LLC Jennifer Hurley, AICP, NJPP, CNU-A, President & CEO, Hurley-Franks & Associates Marina Khoury, Partner, DPZ Partners Matthew Lambert, Partner, DPZ Partners
Join us on a walking tour of downtown Detroit’s rich history, architecture and public places. Tour participants will explore some of the great contributions of notable architects and experience the 1805 Baroque hexagonal plan laid out by Judge Woodward. Detroit's architecture is recognized as being among the finest in the U.S. with one of the largest surviving collections of late-19th- and early-20th-century buildings. The National Trust for Historic Preservation lists many of Detroit's skyscrapers and buildings as some of America's most endangered landmarks.
Mark Farlow, Director of Design, Hamilton Anderson Associates Michael Tunte, Landscape Architect and Urban Designer, Design Workshop
Downtown Ann Arbor is a place with unique character, different from other cities in Michigan and the Midwest. Its attractiveness is largely derived from the diversity of residents – 43,000 University of Michigan students and 117,000 permanent residents covering a wide range of professions, ethnicities, and ages.
CNU Founder Peter Calthorpe’s 2005 report for the Downtown Development Strategies Project takes an integrated approach to balancing economic development, land use, environment, accessibility/mobility, and urban design. This tour will showcase the improvements made to design, housing opportunities, and multimodal transit infrastructure in Ann Arbor, as well as the integration of the University of Michigan campus into the urban fabric. Participants will make a stop at the world famous Zingerman's Deli for an opportunity to grab lunch or a snack on their own.
Mid-Morning
Over 80 percent of Americans now live in cities or suburbs—getting our communities right has never been more important. Kaid Benfield, author of People Habitat: 25 Ways to Think About Greener, Healthier Cities, takes a more holistic, solution-based, example-oriented approach to planning our communities sustainably—ecological and socially.
Kaid Benfield, Senior Counsel for Environmental Strategies, Placemakers
In New Urbanism, one-size-fits-all strategies are off the table. From the beginning, the movement has developed and implemented strategies that strengthen communities through choice and diversity. Learn how pioneering tools such as form-based codes and the SmartCode are employed to incrementally and intelligently plan cities and towns while honoring the complexities of human settlement.
Susan Henderson, AIA, LEED AP, CNU-A, Principal, PlaceMakers LLC
Check out the food truck options and take your lunch outside in the tactically-activated Opera House parking lot.
Afternoon
Dive deep into Detroit’s music heritage on this four-hour, mission-driven Detroit music heritage tour. From Paradise Valley to United Sound Systems, you’ll experience historic districts and reflect on the challenges and opportunities involved in preserving Detroit’s musical legacy. Participants in this tour will break out of downtown to explore music-related spaces in Detroit’s West Side, East Side, Woodward Corridor, North End, New Center, Cass Corridor, and Midtown neighborhoods, plus Highland Park and Hamtramck. This tour is designed to not just teach participants about the bebop history of the Blue Bird Inn and the house parties of Detroit’s North End, but to also shift their gears from musical observation to sonic activism—making this tour an essential experience both for savvy visitors and Metro-Detroit cultural allies.
Carleton Gholz, Sound Writer, Scholar, Activist, Detroit Sound Conservancy
Transforming our suburban landscapes is a major planning and development priority of the 21st century. Suburban areas are not destined to remain filled with strip malls and excess parking lots—they represent enormous opportunities to rescale sprawling landscapes into diverse and thriving pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods. Explore the challenges and best practices of retrofitting sprawling areas into pockets of walkable urbanism.
Truly understanding a site is crucial to generating a compelling urban design. We’ll begin by learning techniques for on-site documentation. We’ll then explore techniques for turning this information into clear, useful site analysis drawings that can convey important site information to a range of audiences. We will base our study on a real site in Detroit.
James Dougherty, Director of Design, Dover, Kohl & Partners Planning Arti Harchekar, Associate, Opticos Design, Inc Cailin Shannon, Senior Designer, Opticos Design, Inc
Open Streets initiatives temporarily close streets to automobile traffic so that people may use them for walking, bicycling, dancing, playing, and socializing. With more than 130 documented initiatives in North America, open streets are increasingly seen in cities large and small as an innovative way to achieve environmental, social, economic, and public health goals.
This introductory session will provide an overview of the open streets movement, share best program development practices, and go behind the scenes with two cities -- Detroit and Windsor -- launching programs in the summer of 2016.
Mike Lydon, Principal, The Street Plans Collaborative Lisa Nuszkowski, Executive Director, Detroit Bike Share Michael Cooke, Manager of Planning Policy, City of Windsor
In recent years, Corktown has seen an exciting commercial resurgence. New businesses like Slow’s BBQ, Astro Coffee, and Two James Distillery have received national attention and brought exciting buzz to Detroit’s oldest neighborhood. This growth has happened in spite of a built environment that favors automobiles over people.
The ability for Corktown to flourish is severely limited by the presence of a state highway that runs through the center of the neighborhood—the result of a 1939 highway expansion along all of Detroit’s spokes. To counter this, and to bring back the essence of the historic fabric that will put people first, Corktown has recently embarked on a two-pronged strategy to transform Michigan Avenue into a complete street:
- Traditional strategic planning will transform Michigan Avenue into a complete street and create a framework that will allow other institutional stakeholders to plug into the efforts in Corktown.
- Community engagement through tactical urbanism interventions to promote place-based economic growth and demonstrate progress in the short-term.
Perhaps more importantly, these interventions serve as tangible community engagement opportunities to help better understand the needs and desires of the entire community. The tour will stop at some of Corktown’s most vital businesses, and will showcase neighborhood tactical urbanism interventions installed as part of the Congress.
Chad Rochkind, Founder & Principal, Human Scale Studio
Do you have a great idea to make your community stronger and more sustainable? Whether you’re dreaming of building new urban farms in food deserts, making streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians of all ages, or activating vacant spaces, crowdfunding could be a great way to fund your idea with fast cash. Last year, crowdfunding platforms raised more than $34 billion globally in investment for new projects, causes, ideas, and inventions.
Join ioby co-founder Erin Barnes for a crash course on crowd-resourcing—a unique blend of crowdfunding and resource organizing that allows residents to tap the financial, human and social capital they need to bring their projects to life from within the community itself. Erin and co-founders built their platform specifically to support community-led, neighbor-funded projects that make neighborhoods stronger and more sustainable.
If you have a burning idea — whether it’s a half-baked daydream or backed by a trove of research, renderings, and master plans — this session will teach you how to successfully fund it. This course will be tailored to the participants’ needs based on survey results, and will make sure that everyone leaves with a full understanding of crowdfunding, online communications planning, and campaign planning.
Erin Barnes, Executive Director/Co-Founder, ioby
The concept of house-scale medium-to-high density housing types known as Missing Middle Housing has caught fire since the last session at CNU in Dallas. It was most recently highlighted in NextCity’s online article titled, "Will U.S. Cities Design Their Way Out of the Affordable Housing Crisis? “Missing middle” architecture could ease rents — and allow more Americans to build real estate wealth.” This session will bring a panel with diverse areas of expertise in housing design and development to present and discuss the following:
- Examples of innovative small-scale residential infill housing from across the country;
- The role of modular housing in the future of Missing Middle types;
- How sustainability and green building design can inform the MMH conversation;
- What zoning changes need to be made to enable these types to respond to the demand;
- Comparing approaches in infill contexts versus new communities; and,
- How conventional development classifications of multi-family or single family housing may need to adapt to address these types.
Christopher Calott, Robert and Millicent Lalanne Chair of Real Estate Development, Architecture & Urbanism, University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design Michael Lander, President and Founder, Lander Group Jason Laub, Vice President, Nautilus Group, NEMO Building Systems Daniel Parolek, AIA, Principal, Opticos Design, Inc.
Described as one of the most beautiful architectural destinations in the World, Cranbrook has been one of the nation’s leading graduate schools of art, architecture, and design since its conception by newspaper mogul George Booth in 1928. Some of the world’s most renowned architects, designers, and artists—including Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Edmund Bacon, Charles and Ray Eames, and Katherine McCoy—have called Cranbook home.
Located on over 300 acres, the campus had evolved by the 1940s into what Saarinen called a “historic document” of his developing sense of “American” architecture. More than 70 outdoor sculptures by world-renowned sculptor and faculty member Carl Milles complement Saarinen's architecture. Many resident artists, as well as those commissioned by Booth and Saarinen, designed Cranbook’s gates, light fixtures, and interior furnishings. In the twentieth century, the work emanating from Cranbrook changed the way people live and the way they understand art and design.
The tour will include Cranbrook’s noted schools, museums, homes and plazas including the Kingswood School, the Upper School, Graduate Architectural Studio, Science Center and Art Museum.
Robert Gibbs, President, Gibbs Planning GroupMid-Afternoon
Cities are beginning to see the value of their urban form and analyzing the relationship between building design and tax production. In doing so, they are realizing the economic potency of their downtowns and Main Streets. Joe Minicozzi discusses using methods such as property value analyses, retail tax studies, and revenue forecasting to help local officials understand the economics of walkability and mixed-use for cities, counties, and regions.
Joe Minicozzi, Principal, Urban3, LLC
Today’s car-oriented cities are often strewn with awkward leftover fragments of outdoor space. We’ll examine specific physical design techniques for choosing a leftover space and transforming it into a signature public place. Our emphasis will be on cost effective, quickly buildable methods.
Jennifer Garcia, Town Planner, Dover Kohl & Partners Kenneth Garcia, Town Planner, Dover, Kohl & Partners Mike Lydon, Principal, The Street Plans Collaborative JJ Zanetta, Founder, Zanetta Illustration
The headlines about cities celebrating their resurgence—with empty nesters and Millennials alike investing in our urban areas, moving away from car dependence, and demanding walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods. But, in reality, these changes are taking place in a scattered and piecemeal fashion. While areas of a handful of cities are booming, most US metros continue to follow old patterns of central city decline and suburban sprawl. As demographic shifts change housing markets and climate change ushers in new ways of looking at settlement patterns, pressure for change in urban policy is growing. More and more policy makers are raising questions about the soundness of policies that squander our investment in urban housing, built environment, and infrastructure while continuing to support expansion of sprawling, auto-dependent development. As they do so, the Canadian experience grappling with these issues can offer valuable lessons for US policymakers. This session will highlight that experience, and specific policies that can help those who manage US cities and metro regions or plan their future, address these central challenges. .
Alan Mallach, Senior Fellow, Center for Community Progress Ray Tomalty, Principal, Smart Cities Research Services
Around the world, cities that have welcomed pedestrians and cyclists have reaped enormous benefits: improved public health, revived local economies, more resilient neighborhoods, and happier citizens. Walkable City author Jeff Speck lays out what it takes to get people out of their cars and onto their feet, exploring a wide range of best practices to make cities and towns more walkable, bikeable, and successful.
A book signing will immediately follow.
Jeff B. Speck, CNU-A, AICP, LEED AP, Honorary ASLA, Principal, Speck & Associates LLC
Evening
Join us for drinks and light refreshments at The Fillmore before we commence the 24th annual Congress for the New Urbanism.
CNU opens the 24th annual Congress for New Urbanism in Detroit at the historic Fillmore Theater. Former Charleston Mayor Joseph "Joe" Riley, Jr., one Of America's longest-serving mayors, addresses the Congress.
Mayor Joseph Riley Jr. was first elected mayor of Charleston, S.C., in December 1975 and ended his 40 years in office earlier this year. Riley has led a city government with an impressive record of innovation in public safety, housing, arts and culture, children’s issues, the creation of park and other public spaces, and economic revitalization and development. Charleston is recognized as one of the most livable and progressive cities in the United States.
Prior to Mayor Riley, Carol Coletta, a leading expert on urban transformation policy and newly named Senior Fellow at The Kresge Foundation, examines philanthropy's role in shaping great places and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan welcomes attendees to Detroit.
Carol Coletta, Senior Fellow, American Cities Practice, Kresge Foundation Doug Farr, CNU-A, President and Founding Principal, Farr Associates Architecture & Urban Design Lynn Richards, President & CEO, CNU Mike Duggan, Mayor, City of Detroit Joseph Riley, Former Mayor, City of Charleston
A CNU tradition! Make new friends and catch up with the old ones on the annual NextGen pub crawl. Meet from the CNU reception at The Fillmore and head to Corktown on the westside of downtown.
Check the CNU 24 App for location details. Brought to you by CNU NextGen.
Morning
Experience Detroit at street level. Join Victor Dover and John Simmerman on a morning run around town! This no-drop run will be no more than 4 miles, and will get you back to the hotel in plenty of time for morning sessions. We will form a couple of pace groups if desired, including a slower one and a moderately-paced one, so runners of all speeds and experience are welcome.
Meet us outside of the Hilton Garden Inn. Don't be late!
Victor Dover, CNU-A, Principal, Dover, Kohl & Partners John Simmerman, Co-Founder, President & CEO, Active Towns
Enjoy a continental breakfast inside or on the patio of the beautiful Gem Theatre.
In the first half of the 20th century, Detroit was variously called “The Paris of the West” and “The Arsenal of Democracy”. Booming industry and a rapidly expanding population quickly elevated Detroit to the fourth largest city in the country. Building upon a L’Enfant-inspired hexagonal grid, enigmatic architecture designed by the nation’s prominent architects arose throughout the core city. A 10-story department store, a comprehensive streetcar system, unrivaled arts and entertainment districts, endless employment opportunities, and the spirit of invention defined and characterized Detroit’s peak years.
Yet despite the great feats of early industrial Detroit, auto-mobilization and suburbanization quickly and dramatically altered the course of the Motor City. Piercing highways, self-contained buildings, pervasive parking, infamous demolitions, widened roadways, and urban renewal left Detroit as the poster-child for rust belt cities.
This walking tour of Detroit’s core will explore both eras of urban planning in Detroit. Participants will learn about projects, buildings, and stories of urban evolution and devolution unique to Detroit. Equal parts visual and oral history, this tour is a must-see for experiencing Detroit in 2016.
Kent Anderson, Architect, KH ANDERSON PC
Join us on a walking tour of downtown Detroit’s rich history, architecture and public places. Tour participants will explore some of the great contributions of notable architects and experience the 1805 Baroque hexagonal plan laid out by Judge Woodward. Detroit's architecture is recognized as being among the finest in the U.S. with one of the largest surviving collections of late-19th- and early-20th-century buildings. The National Trust for Historic Preservation lists many of Detroit's skyscrapers and buildings as some of America's most endangered landmarks.
Paul Urbanek, Vice President & Director of Design, SmithGroupJJR
Scholars from the University of Michigan offer a definitive history of Detroit's rise, decline, and current renaissance. The story includes Detroit's importance to American history and leadership in the global automobile industry. The city was shaped physically by a unique geography, urban planning, and world-class architecture. The trials and triumphs of black Detroit, from redlining, riots, southern emigration, and music history are a key aspect to the discussion. The city's population loss led to its bankruptcy and, now, offers room to grow and a place for new urban pioneers.
Robert Fishman, Professor and Author, University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning Doug S. Kelbaugh, FAIA, Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan June Thomas, Centennial Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, Taubman College, University of Michigan
When someone tells you "That's a nice idea but the numbers don't work." What do you do? Learn how to use the static pro forma, a tool for demonstrating how a building makes or loses money. Walk through the pro forma line by line with paper handouts (excel files available for download). Explore the common deal structures developers use with investors. Hear lessons learned from a new developer's first mixed use infill project from concept through design, financing and the start of construction. Watch a rookie developer pitch the project from the pro forma session to a prospective investor and to a bank. A sample pitch package PDF is available for download.
This session is intended for urbanists interested in creating their own small development projects and for design and policy professionals who need to understand the mechanics of the developer's side of a project. Attendees can meet the instructors in the Opera House Cadillac Cafe for additional Q&A. Instructors will also review and critique attendees' development projects, (current or aspirational) after the session.
John Anderson, Principal, Anderson|Kim Architecture + Urban Design Matthew Petty, Principal, Fayetteville Infill Group
People see their world in perspective - not plan view. When designing great places for people, consideration of the three-dimensional composition of the urban realm is critical. Join is for a fast-paced, hands-on boot camp in the important principles of designing beautiful urban compositions.
David Csont, Architectural Illustrator, Urban Design Associates James Dougherty, Director of Design, Dover, Kohl & Partners Planning JJ Zanetta, Founder, Zanetta Illustration
Pretty designs are easy to sell, while impactful designs need more careful thought. These OI sessions are centered on the philosophies, data, and markets of good design. Learn how local concerns of jobs and safety can be addressed with thoughtful community design. Explore the Charter of the New Urbanism through the lens of social impact. And participate in a brief digital design workshop to activate abandoned spaces. Talks include:
- Design on a Dime: How to Promote and Achieve Good Design in Weak Markets
- The Charter Though the Lens of Community Design
- Milieu: Simplify, Connect, and Empower for Inclusive City Building
Mallory Baches, Urban Designer, The Civic Hub, The Civic Hub Ashley Flintoff, Planner, Wayne State University Victoria Ho, Urban Planner, Milieu Luisa Ji, Co-Founder, Designer, Milieu Edward Orlowski, Associate Professor, Lawrence Technological University Lee-Michal Pronko, Co-Founder, Strategist, Milieu Monique St. Pierre, Architectural Designer, Milieu
CNU members and allies will join together to establish climate change mitigation and adaptation goals for the organization and beyond.
In previous congresses, members have met to formulate a response to climate change. Motivated to accelerate and deepen CNU's involvement in addressing climate change, a small group of expert practitioners came together in early 2016 to identify new goals and advocacy efforts for the new urbanism movement. The group recognized several issues. First among them was: While reconfiguring urbanism cannot solely address climate change, climate change cannot be altered without addressing urbanism. And time is of the essence for both mitigation and adaptation.
An important outcome of this three-hour forum will be to finalize a CNU statement on climate.
Currently, climate change is not within the organization’s strategic plan. This leaves CNU, at this stage, largely in the role of accelerating communications and incorporating climate in ongoing education efforts. The goal of this group then will be to:
- Bring awareness to CNU members and other allied groups know that there is a strong contingent within the movement that is focused on climate
- Update members on the current state of climate change work worldwide and discuss CNU’s role within it
- Motivate and recruit others to join this coalition; solidify this group for future activities
- Develop a climate module for CNU’s education agenda largely aimed at city leaders
- Support and contribute to the development of a New Athens Charter, a compact document based on the Charter and the Canons
- Identify strategies to elevate this issue within CNU, perhaps expand CNU’s planned activities
- Develop tasks that an organization(s) other than CNU can undertake in the meantime
Hank Dittmar, Director, Dittmar Associates Limited Doug S. Kelbaugh, FAIA, Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan Michael Mehaffy, Executive Director, Sustasis Foundation Elizabeth Moule, Principal, Moule & Polyzoides Architects & Urbanists Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Principal, DPZ Partners Shelley R. Poticha, Director, Urban Solutions, Urban Program, Natural Resource Defense Council
Across the country, state, and local leaders want to create vibrant communities that support jobs, foster economic development, and are attractive places for people to live, work, and play. What local governments are discovering is that their own development codes—from zoning laws and building regulations to parking and sidewalk ordinances—are barriers to achieving these goals. Outdated or poorly built codes create major barriers to building thriving, prosperous communities, and often they even incentivize financially ruinous sprawling development.
As a movement, we need to collaborate more to remove barriers to better development. With 75,000 units of local government, far too many places still have codes in place that promote or foster low-density dispersed development patterns. How can we begin to turn that tide? How can we reach all local governments in the next 5 years?
Proposed goal: Within five years, we have touched 75,000 units of local government to enable to great places to be created anywhere. It’s bold and audacious—and we can do it.
The purpose of this session is to start this effort: agreeing on the goal, building a coalition of CNU coders, creating a common vocabulary of community and coding attributes, and determining next steps for this multi-year effort.
Susan Henderson, AIA, LEED AP, CNU-A, Principal, PlaceMakers LLC Bill Lennertz, Executive Director, National Charrette Institute Mary E. Madden, Principal, Ferrell Madden Lewis, LLC Marcy McInelly, AIA, President, Urbsworks, Inc Lynn Richards, President & CEO, CNU Daniel K. Slone, Esquire, Partner, McGuireWoods LLP Jim Tischler, Community Development Policy Director, State of Michigan
Windsor, Ontario, a city composed of many small towns with their rich and unique history. Walkerville and Ford City, two neighbouring communities are no exception. Both labour towns, Walkerville was named after Hiram Walker, who was known for his Canadian Club Whiskey brand. Walker continued to build the town to support his labour force and Walkerville remains to this day one of Canada’s best-preserved neighbourhoods built on a garden city plan. Walkerville thrives with tree-lined streets, beautifully restored homes and a vibrant commercial district. Neighbouring Ford City was home to thousands of Ford plant employees during the same time. The town is composed of primarily small single family homes on a tight urban grid with a main-street style commercial district at its heart, but the neighbourhood went into a deep decline and has struggled for decades. Today Ford City is beginning to turn itself around but still faces issues of blight, poverty and crime. These two neighbourhoods, separated only by a single street are experiencing two very different realities.
Join us for a panel discussion about the challenges faced by urban neighbourhoods in post-industrial cities, followed by a tour on bicycle of these two contrasting communities.
Historical Continental Breakfast $12.50 per person
Fresh fruit, mini muffins, mini breakfast breads, croissants, mini scones with fruit preserves and butter, coffee, tea and assorted juice.
T.J. Auer, Community Planner, Ford City Neighborhood Renewal Thom Hunt, Executive Director, City of Windsor, Planning and Building Services Department Dorian Moore, Vice President, Archive DS Karlene Nielson, Community Coordinator, Ford City Neighborhood Renewal
Travel along the Cass Avenue and explore a neighborhood in the midst of a renaissance. The Cass Corridor was once notorious as a red-light district plagued by crime and drugs. Now, through dedicated work by Midtown Detroit Inc., various local institutions, and concerned citizens, Cass Avenue has transformed into Midtown, a neighborhood that offers thriving retail, restaurant, and residential uses in a walkable environment. Residents enjoy cultural amenities such as the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Historical Museum, and Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History all within walking distance of their homes.
Director of Midtown Detroit Inc. Sue Mosey will guide participants along Cass Avenue to see many of the changes that have occurred. Starting at the Masonic Temple, participants will see projects such as Cass Plaza, a residential building saved from the wrecking ball; the Iconic Building, a redeveloped commercial center representing one of the last pieces of Detroit’s Chinatown; and the Auburn, a new construction multiuse building that embraces local businesses. The tour will also feature stops at notable new retailers Shinola and Carhartt, and iconic architectural gems like the McGregor Memorial Conference Center at Wayne State University and the Fisher Building in New Center. There will also be a small break at Avalon International Breads for coffee and baked goods.
Sue Mosey, Executive Director, Midtown Detroit, Inc Lawrence Williamson, Real Estate Manager, Midtown Detroit, Inc
Mid-Morning
Leaders in Detroit's revitalization will examine real estate economics in the Motor City, touching upon the impact of employers large and small who are setting up shop in the 7.2-square-mile Greater Downtown. Detroit's Central Business District has experienced significant growth from firms like Quicken Loans and Blue Cross/Blue Shield, spurring a rebound in the development industry. The story of how a $20 million loan helped spur the downtown renaissance offers lessons to other cities. Public-private partnerships have helped the city recover as government has been hampered by bankruptcy and dwindling resources.
Kate Beebe, President, Katherine Beebe & Associates Rodrick Miller, President & CEO, Detroit Economic Growth Corporation Sue Mosey, Executive Director, Midtown Detroit, Inc Eric Larson, CEO, Downtown Detroit Partnership
Though abandoned by major supermarket chains, Detroit, like many inner city communities, has rich social and environmental capital that has been largely untapped or underutilized in addressing food security for the people in its communities. Spurred to act, local entrepreneurs have been rolling up their sleeves, digging in the dirt to making their own rich compost from food scraps, growing food across dozens of urban farms, rekindling a desire for slow-cooked food…and teaching other Detroiter’s along the way.
Today, Detroit is seen as a leader in developing and implementing innovative urban agriculture practices. But there is much more to the city’s food justice. Detroiters are also securing access to healthy foods, using food and cooking to contribute to community sustainability, and creating jobs. This session explores innovations in the growing, selling, cooking, and disposing of food in Detroit with the local innovators leading the way.
Ashley Atkinson, Co-Director, Keep Growing Detroit Devita Davison, Marketing and Communications Director, FoodLab Detroit Pashon Murray, Owner & Co-Founder, Detroit Dirt
Incremental development reduces many of the barriers to implementing urbanism. Small is beautiful, but it must also be functional. Come to learn specific techniques for designing elegant, practical compact architecture well-suited to small scale development.
David Kim, Co-founder & Principal , Anderson|Kim Architecture+Urban Design
For more than 60 years, sprawl has been the status quo for growth across the North America. Wild areas and agricultural land are still being lost, flooding and drought are rampant, and our traditional social structures are breaking down.
Change is possible. CNU to lead a strategic attack to shorten this period of remediation. It’s not enough to incentivize new urbanism, we need to disincentive the reproduction of sprawl—at all levels. Join prominent new urbanists to discuss the scope of the problem, progress on retrofits, current actions to incentivize better development, and strategic goals for reducing sprawl.
Scott Bernstein, President, Center for Neighborhood Technology Ellen Dunham-Jones, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Georgia Institute of Technology Doug Farr, CNU-A, President and Founding Principal, Farr Associates Architecture & Urban Design Jennifer Hurley, AICP, NJPP, CNU-A, President & CEO, Hurley-Franks & Associates Marcy McInelly, AIA, President, Urbsworks, Inc Michaele Pride, Professor & Associate Dean for Public Outreach and Engagement, School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico Daniel K. Slone, Esquire, Partner, McGuireWoods LLP
Check out the food truck options and take your lunch outside in the tactically-activated Opera House parking lot.
In the first half of the 20th century, Detroit was variously called “The Paris of the West” and “The Arsenal of Democracy”. Booming industry and a rapidly expanding population quickly elevated Detroit to the fourth largest city in the country. Building upon a L’Enfant-inspired hexagonal grid, enigmatic architecture designed by the nation’s prominent architects arose throughout the core city. A 10-story department store, a comprehensive streetcar system, unrivaled arts and entertainment districts, endless employment opportunities, and the spirit of invention defined and characterized Detroit’s peak years.
Yet despite the great feats of early industrial Detroit, auto-mobilization and suburbanization quickly and dramatically altered the course of the Motor City. Piercing highways, self-contained buildings, pervasive parking, infamous demolitions, widened roadways, and urban renewal left Detroit as the poster-child for rust belt cities.
This walking tour of Detroit’s core will explore both eras of urban planning in Detroit. Participants will learn about projects, buildings, and stories of urban evolution and devolution unique to Detroit. Equal parts visual and oral history, this tour is a must-see for experiencing Detroit in 2016.
Communities across the country are recognizing that traditional zoning, based on use, is often an obstacle to creating the kind of connected, walkable, mixed-use communities that provide transportation and housing options and stimulate economic development. As a result, many localities are turning to form based codes (FBCs) to create great places where people want to live, work, visit and play. In this session, expert practitioners who write and use form based codes will explore the key components of these codes and how they can be applied in new communities, cities, neighborhoods and redevelopment areas. Public officials interested in adopting FBCs will learn code fundamentals and standards, how to communicate and build support for FBCs, what FBCs can accomplish and how to address some of the challenges they present. Practitioners will hear about the latest innovations in coding, strategies to incorporate market research into code updates, and successful implementation. The session will feature the 2016 winner of the Form Based Codes Institute Driehaus Award, as an example of a successfully implemented FBC.Sponsored by the Form Based Codes Institute
Michael Hathorne, Senior Planning Manager, Suburban Land Reserve Marina Khoury, Partner, DPZ Partners Jim Tischler, Community Development Policy Director, State of Michigan Susan Henderson, AIA, LEED AP, CNU-A, Principal, PlaceMakers LLC Lisa Wise, AICP, President, Lisa Wise Consulting, Inc. Joseph Kohl, Founding Partner, Dover Kohl & Partners
Later this year, the UN's Habitat III conference will adopt a “New Urban Agenda" for the next twenty years -- a period of rapid urbanization presenting critical challenges, including climate change adaptation and mitigation, urban equity, local empowerment, sustainable economic development, and urban quality of life. Join CNU members and their colleagues in the Council for European Urbanism (C.E.U.) and the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU), to develop a "New Athens Charter” that can constructively guide our profession, transitioning from a "Modernist Urbanism" to a "Humanist Urbanism". We will draw on the CNU Charter and Canons, as well as other key documents.
Andrés Duany, Principal, DPZ Partners Doug S. Kelbaugh, FAIA, Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan Michael Mehaffy, Executive Director, Sustasis Foundation Elizabeth Moule, Principal, Moule & Polyzoides Architects & Urbanists Joanna Alimanestianu, Principal, Joanna Alimanestianu Architect ~ Urbanist
CNU’s work in transportation reform stands for the revitalization of streets in our communities. This session is intended to be an active discussion on national transportation trends that may affect street design and the quality of our urban public spaces. Initial presentations will be provided as a catalyst to the discussion.
This discussion is intended to serve as a foundation for a future CNU’s transportation reform work.
The CNU Members’ Christian Caucus (CNU-MCC) is a new initiative whose mission is to support CNU by extending the concepts and practices of New Urbanism to the Christian community. CNU-MCC identifies a nexus of overlapping concerns and values that are central to both Christian faith and New Urbanism. They are social justice, creation care/environmental sustainability, and urbanism that begets community wellbeing and serves the common good. CNU-MCC, therefore, will prioritize its work in these areas.
As a new initiative the focus of this working session is meeting others who want to be involved in CNU-MCC, taking further steps in its organization, and identifying and prioritizing projects members want to undertake to build bridges between CNU, New Urbanism, and the Christian community.
For more information about CNU-MCC go to HERE or e-mail Chris Elisara atchris@center4eleadership.org. Let us know if you plan to attend.
Attention all seasoned and new small-scale developers: Join the leaders of the Incremental Developers Alliance (IDA) for a working session on the group’s upcoming projects.
This working session will follow up on the Open Innovation session on the Theory of Change. The Theory of Change is a member-led initiative organized to inform future CNU strategic plans. The approach has two basic parts:
- Identify a clear end state you want to achieve (e.g. every community in the US is walkable.)
- Reverse engineer the steps needed to bring about the given outcome.
- Project for Code Reform
- Project for Transportation Reform
- Financing 3 and 4 Story Mixed Use Buildings
- Emergency Response
- Suburban Retrofit
Karen Parolek, Principal at Opticos Design, Inc, will present recommendations for a refined & standardized transect for citywide zoning and comprehensive plan application. Then, participants will discuss and debate the recommendations.
Karen Parolek, Principal, Opticos Design, Inc Matthew Lambert, Partner, DPZ Partnersa Kevin Klinkenberg, Executive Director, Savannah Development and Renewal Authority
#MovetoDetroit became a popular hashtag soon after Patti Smith declared that New York City had "closed itself off" to the young and struggling and suggested artists find a new city - like Detroit - to inhabit. But 2010 was far from the birth of the art scene in Detroit.
Experience the Detroit art scene firsthand with a guided tour by Lynn Crawford, fiction writer and art critic. Go beyond the mainstream media reports to explore the depth and diversity of art being made and seen in Detroit. From locally-owned galleries to MOCAD to the Dabl's African Bead Gallery, this tour will provide attendees with a deeper knowledge of the role art plays in Detroit today.
Lynn Crawford, Writer & Art Critic, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
Economic development that builds local wealth happens at the neighborhood scale through the small, incremental actions of many. This session will show how people are the software of successful cities and cultivating social capital into economic prowess is a neighborhood's core functionality. Anderson will explain how local entrepreneurs who own their own real estate are the guardians of strong neighborhoods, Johnson will show how storytelling and the art of makeshift creates value rooted in place and Hintz will provide examples of how local economic activities go from good to great through the careful staging of impactful experiences.
Monte Anderson, CEO/President, Options Real Estate Investments, Inc. Daniel Hintz, Founder and Chief Experience Architect Gracen Johnson, Founder, Ministry of Makeshift
The CNU Charter reads, “Within neighborhoods, a broad range of housing types and price levels can bring people of diverse ages, races, and incomes into daily interaction, strengthening the personal and civic bonds essential to an authentic community.” In most cities, the diversity of housing choice has substantially declined, and with it, so has many neighborhood’s natural affordability.
DPZ, along with many leading New Urbanism practitioners, has been committed to designing affordable housing since the beginning of their practice. Affordable housing typologies all have one thing in common: they are innovative. Some skirt the untouchable such as mobile homes, others showcase the technical and typological aspects of modernism, and others are housing types that do not commit to urbanism.
Andrés Duany, Principal, DPZ Partners
In many ways Detroit is a tale of two cities. While downtown surges forward, neighborhoods pull themselves up by their bootstraps with community led building rehabilitation, vacant lot activation, creative arts programs, and urban agriculture. A lightning round of talks will show that, despite media characterizations, neighborhoods in the city are beginning to come back. Minority businesses, developers, and community leaders have been a key to this revival.
Physical design is usually communicated best with images - not just words. In this session, we will examine specific drawing techniques designers use to communicate with the public, the project team and with themselves during the design process. We’ll begin with graphic techniques for initial brainstorming, and then show how drawing can be used to iteratively develop and refine designs from start to finish.
Kenneth Garcia, Town Planner, Dover, Kohl & Partners Arti Harchekar, Associate, Opticos Design, Inc Michael Mabaquiao, Designer, Torti Gallas & Partners David Csont, Architectural Illustrator, Urban Design Associates
Mobility drives urban growth, and today’s city dwellers have more options than ever before. Learn trends in parking management, shared-vehicle use, transit and pedestrian planning, and more are challenging the urban mobility paradigm. Talks include:
- Fusing the Practical and the Symbolic in Trains
- The Future of Mobility of the Motor City
- A Toddler's Guide to Improving Downtown Legibility
- Walking in the Modernist City
- The Hidden Dangers of Vision Zero in Texas
- What if We Based Parking Decisions on Actual Data
- Building your Own Mobility Hub and Reducing Carbon Emissions
Peter Baird, Senior Planner, Perkins + Will Patrick Braga, Student, Cornell University Daniel Emerine, Transportation Planner, DC Office of Planning Tim Frisbie, Communications & Policy Director, Shared Use Mobility Center Michael Johnson, Principal Urban Designer, SmithGroupJJR Matthew McNicholas, Architect & Urbanist, MGLM Architects Robert Munson, Founding Board Member, CNU Illinois Paul Nichols, Urban Planner
This session will examine the explicit means by which Architecture applied incrementally, one project at a time, can construct an urbanism of significant places. Places that engage the public. Places that people return to.
Its focus will be on examining in terms concrete and specific, the design patterns that work best when individual buildings are introduced into existing urban settings, or when they are intended to seed new ones. In the best traditions of CNU discourse, this will be an open, collegial and spirited exchange of ideas.
Vinayak Bharne, Director of Design, Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists Gary Brewer, Partner, Robert A.M. Stern Architects John Massengale, Principal, Massengale & Co LLC Ellen Dunham-Jones, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Georgia Institute of Technology Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Principal, DPZ Partners Stefanos Polyzoides, Principal, Moule & Polyzoides Architects & Urbanists Paddy Steinschneider, President & Founder, Gotham Design & Community Development Ltd. Galina Tachieva, AICP, Partner, DPZ Partners Samir Younés, Professor, School of Architecture, University of Notre Dame Kenny Craft, Founder, Craft Design Studio, LLC
Mid-Afternoon
Windsor has for decades been labeled ‘The Automobile Capital of Canada”. A city in the shadows of a major American metropolis, Windsor shares not only a history of manufacturing with Detroit, but also a larger number of the unfortunate realities that face post-industrial cities today. Like many border cities, Windsor faces unique challenges when it comes to urban planning. Separated by only 1 mile of water, Windsor and Detroit share an intimate dynamic unlike any two cities, all the while struggling to overcome an invisible wall, the international border that continually drives the two apart.
Robert Freedman, the principal of Freedman Urban Solutions, is also a Board Member for the Council for Canadian Urbanism and a past Director of Urban Design for the City of Toronto for over 11 years. Mark Nickita, president of Archive Design Studio in Detroit has been practicing on both sides of the border and internationally for over 2 decades. Both Freedman and Nickita will be coming together to offer perspectives from each side of the border, and addressing these unique conditions found only in the Windsor-Detroit region. You’re invited to learn about this dynamic relationship in a classroom setting overlooking the border that divides Windsor and Detroit and offering a view of Downtown Detroit seen only from the Canadian side of the border.
Robert Freedman, Principal, Freedman Urban Solutions Mark Nickita, President, Archive Design Studio
By now, there’s broad consensus around the connection between community design, beneficial social interaction and even economic viability. The benefits are especially apparent in Pocket Neighborhoods, where small groups of houses or apartments share a commons area, such as garden courtyards, pedestrian streets or an indoor space. They incorporate an intermediate zone between the street and the home — a space for spontaneous conversations, children’s play, gardening and community potlucks.
In this session, we will explore the design patterns that foster sociability while respecting the need for privacy. We’ll examine how these patterns translate into site plans across a range of transects, sites and sizes, including infill cottage courts, urban apartment courts, and large neighborhood developments. What is it about these neighborhoods that make them appealing and inspire feelings of ownership, pride, safety, etc. among residents? And how can designers and policy-makers address the increasing demand for such places? Presenters will offer lessons learned from the field, highlighting not only best practices in design, but also strategies that address regulatory and entitlement barriers, rental vs. ownership choices and community and cultural contexts. Workshop participants are encouraged to submit a site plan in process and an area plan within ¼ mile of the site indicating existing uses and activities in that radius for review and discussion at the end of this session.
Ross Chapin, Principal, Ross Chapin Architects Grace Kim, Founding Principal, Schemata Workshop Bruce B. Tolar, P.A., Architect, Architect Bruce B. Tolar, P.A.
The New Urbanism movement first emerged as a design-driven critique of the data-obsessed culture of urban planning. Although planners were awash in information, little of it was connected to the realities of place or community. By showing how then-current development regulations promoted sprawl and its associated negative impacts, New Urbanist practitioners followed their hunches to convince municipalities to adopt more sustainable urban design and transportation policies. Today, a plethora of analytical tools is validating the effectiveness of strategies first proposed by New Urbanists. Uses of data are also going well beyond performance analytics to help cities manage key assets such as downtown parking and public transportation, and also to power apps that make urban living more convenient and affordable.
Peter Katz, Consultant and Author, The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community Matthew Lambert, Partner, DPZ Partners Jeffrey Tumlin, Principal, Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates
Find out where Detroit is heading from two dynamic leaders in planning and implementation. Detroit's internationally recognized planner Maurice Cox lays out a grand vision for the city. Helping to realize that vision, Anika Goss-Foster of Detroit Future City is all about getting things done with the support of major foundations, Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, and the City of Detroit. A city on the move, Detroit is a place where visions are becoming reality.
Maurice Cox, Director, Planning and Development for Dertoit Anika Goss-Foster, Executive Director, Detroit Future City John Gallagher, Journalist & Author, Detroit Free Press
While walkable urbanism has at its foundation a practical design language, through sensitive composition it can become something even greater. Artful composition of the public realm can reinforce a community’s sense of identity, and lead to sublime moments that elevate the experience of people’s daily lives. In this session, learn advanced physical master plan design techniques for crafting a transcendent and uplifting sense of place.
Andrés Duany, Principal, DPZ Partners
Explore the social side of urbanism: The imperative of meeting urban affordability, the social agenda inherent in the Charter, the impacts of bad land-use policy on the human condition, lessons from immigrant communities’ inversion of the typical suburban single-family enclave into walkable, multi-family neighborhoods and more. Talks include:
- The Next Baby Boom: Affordable Urban Lifestyles for Millennials with Kids
- The Charter's Social Agenda
- Social MRI for Cities
- Introducing the Douglas C. Allen Institute
- Setting a State to Launch Lean Urbanism
- Learning from Los Chinos- Sustainable SubUrbanisms
- Only Up-Rising From Bad Rankings
Bruce F. Donnelly, Urban Planner, Office of Bruce F. Donnelly Stephen Fan, Founding Director, s!fan designs Milton Friesen, Program Director, Social Cities at Cardus Jennifer Griffin, Founding Principal, J Griffin Design, LLC Paul L. Knight, AICP, CNU-A, Urban Designer & Architect, Historical Concepts Robert Orr, FAIA, LEED, Principal, Robert Orr & Associates LLC Breanna Shell, Planner, City of Huntington, WV
Take a hardhat tour of the Wurlitzer Building, a previously abandoned 14-story property constructed in 1926 that is being restored and repurposed into a 106-key boutique hotel. Tour leaders ASH NYC recently opened the Dean Hotel in Providence and are also currently in development of a 71-key hotel in the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans. Learn about the economic trends that drove this small development group into boutique hotel development, the product and brand that has been informed by these trends, the future of these trends, and why Detroit, and specifically the Wurlitzer building, was perfectly positioned for the expansion of ASH NYC’s hospitality portfolio.
Ari Heckman, CEO, ASH NYC Elizabeth Knibbe, Principal, Quinn Evans Architects Steve J. Maun, Principal, Leyland Alliance D.J. Monahan, Principal, The Monahan Company
Evening
Join us for cocktails and light refreshments before the 2016 Charter Awards Ceremony in the Gem Theatre.
Drinks x Design is a monthly open studio that provides exposure and networking opportunities for Detroit’s creative community. Held in a new location on the second Thursday of every month, Drinks x Design offers an opportunity for creative businesses throughout the city to open their doors and share their work with the public. Attendees come to meet new people, make connections, promote their creative endeavors and learn about other projects in their community.
For the month of June, Drinks x Design will be activating the University of Detroit Mercy (UDM) Fountain Lounge and Patio with a celebration of Urban Design. Programming includes displays from organizations and urban planners that are working to enhance the quality of life and economic opportunity in Detroit.
More information and RSVPs can be found at HERE.
Brought to you by DrinksxDesign, Detroit Future City, and CNU NextGen.
Let's think big about going small.
We believe that small-scale, incremental development projects make our communities vibrant, and do so in a way that is financially sensible and environmentally responsible. That's why we're looking to celebrate the coolest, cleverest, and, most innovative small-scale projects of the past year.
The inaugural Big Ideas + Small Projects Happy Hour will feature presentations by: Claire Nowak-Boyd, Tommy Pacello, Ryan Terry, Daniel Swartz,… and more to be announced soon!
Big Ideas + Small Projects is sponsored Key Public Strategies, and Incremental Development Alliance, and Model D and proud to be a part of the CNU NextGen lineup.
The CNU Charter Awards recognizes exemplary work in architectural, landscape, urban, and regional design, as defined by the Charter of the New Urbanism. Join this year's jury chair Hank Dittmar for an evening honoring this year's Charter Awards recipients.
At the ceremony, the 2016 Congress Legacy Project teams—all former and current Charter Awards recipients—will present their final reports to their legacy communities. The second class of CNU Fellows will also be announced.
Prior to the Charter Awards, the Driehaus Award will be presented by The Form-Based Code's Institute, the Groves Award will be presented by the Transect Code Council, and the Barranco Award will be presented by the New Urban Guild.
Join us after the Charter Awards Ceremony in Century Theatre for a “pin-up” and discussion of the 2016 Legacy Charrette projects.
Join us in the parlor for urban exchange! Thursdays 6pm in Detroit. Hosted by Claire Nelson & Wayne Ramocan. Locals & travelers welcome!
Follow us @urbanconsulate or visit urbanconsulate.com.
Urban Consulate
4470 Second Avenue
Detroit, MI 48201
James Howard Kunstler is a household name among planners, architects and neighbourhood activists alike. Author of The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency, Kunstler has been offering a critical analysis of the manner in which we have built our towns and cities during the latter half of the twentieth century and in to present day. Kunstler’s writing presents us with a harsh reality that the manner in which we’ve been arranging the human environment lacks the environmental, social and economic sustainability that our ancestors possessed when they built the traditional towns and cities we’ve now come to cherish.
Join us for a compelling evening and learn about the role that small towns and cities will play moving into an uncertain future, and how communities with close connections to agricultural land and major waterways hold a unique advantage over others with renowned author James Howard Kunstler.
James H. Kunstler, Author, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition
The New Urbanism Film Festival showcases short and feature length documentaries about the urban environment. Held every Fall in Los Angeles, audiences are engaged in new urbanism theory, history, and practical case studies. This event showcases the winning films from the 2015 festival.
For a complete line up of films, check out newurbanismfilmfestival.com/detroit.
Join us after the Charter Awards for beverages, bites, and mingling, compliments of HAA.
Location:
Hamilton Anderson
1435 Randolph Street in Harmonie Park
The Fit 2 a T: Transect-based Fashion Show is back for the second year in a row--brought to you by Do Tank DC, the same crew who is partly (ir)responsible for Cards Against Urbanity. In keeping with our goal of making urbanism fun and approachable, Fit 2 a T is a new way of looking at the transect--through the lens of fashion!
Watch your friends - both male and female - walk the runway while wearing appropriate clothing for each transect. Do you know what's appropriate for T-2? or T-4? Come find out! This year, outfits will have a special Detroit flair--don't miss it! Brought you by Do Tank DC and CNU NextGen.
Top 5 code hacks for Zoning and Building Code workaround by practioners. Brought to you by IncDev Alliance and CNU NextGen.
Comedians, magicians, snake charmers, dancers, musicians, storytellers whose talents celebrate urbanism. This year’s talent show line up includes:
- Multi-lingual Recitation – Stefanos Polyzoides
- “Tell It Like It Is” and “Fightin’ Side of Me" – John Norquist and Bill Tuyn
- Skateboard Ballet – Matt Lewis and Howard Blackson
- “City of Our Dreams”: original song – Rob Steuteville
- “My Experience with Cougars at CNU”: Original Story – Dan Slone
- "Dancing In the Streets” - The Ladies
- Stand-Up Comedy – Jim Kunstler
Ellen Dunham-Jones, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Georgia Institute of Technology
Back for more and with new cards for CNU 24. Brought you by Do Tank DC and CNU NextGen.
Morning
Experience Detroit at street level. Join Victor Dover and John Simmerman on a morning run around town! This no-drop run will be no more than 4 miles, and will get you back to the hotel in plenty of time for morning sessions. We will form a couple of pace groups if desired, including a slower one and a moderately-paced one, so runners of all speeds and experience are welcome.
Meet us outside of the Hilton Garden Inn. Don't be late!
Victor Dover, CNU-A, Principal, Dover, Kohl & Partners John Simmerman, Co-Founder, President & CEO, Active Towns
Enjoy a continental breakfast inside or on the patio of the beautiful Gem Theatre.
Lafayette Park, Detroit’s first Urban Renewal project, is a Modernist mixed-use development situated immediately east of Detroit's Central Business District. In contrast to other projects completed in the United States under the Urban Renewal program, Lafayette Park is generally regarded as a success, due in part to the level of attention paid to site planning, architecture, and landscape design. These elements were, in fact, produced by some of the notable practitioners of the time: Mies van der Rohe served as architect for the initial phase of the development, and Lafayette Park contains the world’s largest collection of Mies buildings occupying a single site.
Intended to bring the quiet and spacious suburban lifestyle into the urban core, Lafayette Park was planned within walking distance of entertainment and employment. The site has been preserved to a degree rarely achieved, allowing visitors to experience the development in a state of maturity in-sync with the designers’ original vision. The National Park Service recognized it as a National Historic Landmark in 2015. This walking tour will allow participants to experience Lafayette Park from the viewpoint of a 26 year resident while receiving an overview of its history from conception to completion and beyond. The tour will include the interior of a residential unit in the high-rise 1300 tower (A later addition to Lafayette Park designed by Gunnar Birkerts [1961-1964]) as well as a townhouse residential unit designed by Mies.
Adam Cook, Principle Research & Planner, Seamless Collaborative Neil McEachern, Retired Teacher and Principal, Detroit Public Schools
Tour the primary developments within the Downtown core, Midtown, and New Center districts, including the Guardian Building, Riverwalk, New Center, and Woodbridge, to name a few. This approximately 12-square mile area has seen dramatic changes over the last few years with thousands of new residents, dozens of new businesses, hundreds of retails spaces and restaurants, and billions of dollars of new investment. See firsthand the redevelopment of these areas including both private and public enhancements, as well as major infrastructure improvements.
Mark Nickita, President, Archive Design Studio
Developers are often faced with numerous hurdles in delivering urban-oriented projects. Federal regulations that restrict the amount of commercial space in mixed-use projects, under Fannie, Freddie, or HUD’s 220 and 221(d)4 programs, impede market development for urban product. Often, banks view mixed-use as adding risk rather than creating opportunity. Perhaps there aren't comparables in a given market.
Could real estate crowdfunding help developers meet market demand? A result of the Obama Administration’s 2012 JOBS Act (Jump Our Business Start-ups), real estate crowdfunding is a nascent industry that has grown from nothing in 2012 to an anticipated $3.5 billion in 2016. How can this tool and the platforms that use it be utilized to bring urbanistic projects to life? This session gives an overview of the current real estate crowdfunding regulations, and highlights how one platform, Small Change, and a developer using its service, are catalyzing the development of projects.
Eve Picker, President & Founder, Small Change Mark Roderick, Attorney, Flaster-Greenberg, P.C. Jonathan Tate, Architect/Urban Designer, Office of Jonathan Tate Ben Schulman, Communications Director, Small Change
The calamity of millions of displaced people has generated hardly a murmur from city planners and urbanists. Stop-gap measures seem doomed to turn immigrant populations into communities of fury, isolation and despair. The town- building heritage that underlies New Urbanism provides abundant models for the opposite: assimilation, opportunity and hope. It is time we became advocates for our own history.
Daniel Solomon , Principal, Mithun | Solomon
Record high obesity rates continue to wreak havoc on our public health and finances due to the high costs of diabetes, heart disease, stroke and other obesity-related maladies. The culprits are eating too much, eating the wrong things, and a lack of physical activity. Efforts to reduce the obesity rate have failed despite campaigns to promote exercise and nutrition. What appears to work the best is providing people places where they can easily walk, bike, and take transit as part of their daily routine.
In this session we will provide a comprehensive overview of how your community can make active living easier and more common—covering urban design techniques, the latest tools to measure progress, how to team up with public health officials, leveraging the latest research, and building the political will for active living infrastructure funding.
Steve A. Mouzon, AIA, LEED, Principal, The New Urban Guild Nathan Norris, CEO, Downtown Lafayette
Technology is rapidly changing the way people move around their cities. Car-sharing, autonomous automobiles, urban sensing and intelligent streets -- can these rapidly emerging innovations foster better urbanism and safer more livable streets or are they inevitably going to harm cities, promote sprawl and entrench automobile dependence even more deeply? Join leaders in this conversation to learn where all of these new and rapidly emerging transportation technologies and services fit into creating walkable places. The opportunity to positively affect the regulation and design of these platforms to benefit the creation of sustainable, urban places is now. This session will address the fundamental question of whether new automobile services and technologies are shaping up to be good or bad for urbanism and what's the best way for progressive urbanists to begin to influence the direction that these companies are moving.
Russell S. Preston, Design Director, Principle Group Andrew Salzberg, Global Mobility Policy Lead, Uber Susan Zielinski, Managing Director, SMART (Sustainable Mobility & Accessibility Research & Transformation)
Climate change is real and it’s impacts on cities has already proven to be severe. Using case studies, this session offers recommendations for climate change adaptation and explores the alignment of climate change mitigation and New Urbanist principles. Talks include:
- A Plan for Resilient Housing in NYC
- Climate Change as a Driver for New Urbanism
Jessica Cheung, Architect and Urban Designer, nARCHITECTS Tzu Yi Chuang, Architect and Urban Designer, GRO Architects Laura Clemons, founder & CEO, Collaborative Communities Stephen Coyle, AIA, LEEP-AP, Owner, Town-Green Garrett Craig-Lucas, Student, Cornell University James Khamsi, Principal, FIRM Architecture and Design
A gathering of developers and aspiring developers interested in building smaller scale and incremental urban projects. Catch breakfast first and head to the meetup to expand your network and reduce your learning curve. Seasoned developers, come and help rookies avoid your mistakes! The Cadillac Café is right off Broadway in the Detroit Opera House. Sponsored by the Incremental Development Alliance.
The Civic Tech Forum is a collaborative space that connects communities facing local challenges with organizations that have the tools to solve these problems. Participants in the Civic Tech Forum will have the chance to showcase and demonstrate how their technology can help create great places. Presenters will also engage in one-on-one sessions with CNU’s vast network of placemakers to discuss how their technology can be utilized to transform more cities and towns.
See participating organizations and learn more on the Civic Tech Forum page. Garlin Gilchrist, Deputy Technology Director, Civic Commmunity Engagement, City of Detroit Sarah A. Lewis, R.A., CNU-A, LEED AP, Architect & Urban Designer, GreaterPlaces Lisa Nisenson, Co-Founder, GreaterPlaces
Learn how Detroit became a food sovereign city while exploring community gardens, farm plots, orchards, and a cut-flower farm. Participants will travel by bus to three different neighborhoods to experience the adaptability of agriculture to an urban setting.
Take in views of downtown Detroit while wandering through the Plum Street Market Garden. Learn about nationally-recognized programs including the Garden Resource Program (GRP) and Grown in Detroit (GID) operated by the staff of Keep Growing Detroit (KGD). Visit the Georgia Street Community Collective, on Detroit's East Side, to experience a five lot, non-profit garden including a fruit orchard and community center. Finally, explore the two-farm plot of Jefferson Chalmers Community Food Systems, in the Jefferson Chalmers Neighborhood. The first plot is “The Garden”, a 3-acre farm located within a 12-acre City-owned parcel and CSA program that provides organically grown local produce to 40 local families; while the second plot, "Detroit Abloom", produces and markets specialty cut flowers.
Ashley Atkinson, Co-Director, Keep Growing Detroit Mark Convington, Chairman, The Georgia Street Community Collective Lydia Rae Levinson, Planning & Technical Program Manager, Michigan Community Resources Tom Milano, Director, Jefferson Chalmers Community Food System
Description coming soon.
Brought to you by CNU NextGen.
Build Bazaar is a rotating pop-up marketplace celebrating emerging entrepreneurs from our Build Institute programs. From artisanal candles and soap, to fresh baked goods and handmade wares, every event will feature an exciting and diverse range of local vendors. Shop the bazaar and support the small business economy in Detroit!
Mid-Morning
City building is an amalgamation of laws, market forces, and human need. Done well, city building results in places shaped by and for all people. This session will explore the influences of multiple actors on city building. Several thought-provoking presentations examine effective ways multiple actors—developers, city planners, advocates—can meet community needs. Talks include:
- Right to the City- Placemaking
- Considering the Hierarchy of Community Needs
- The Art of Entitlement
- Can Small Investors Build Better Communities?
Mallory Baches, Urban Designer, The Civic Hub, The Civic Hub Katherine Kittrell, Principal, mirco.villas Michael Mabaquiao, Designer, Torti Gallas & Partners Delma Palma, Architectural and Urban Designer, Torti Gallas and Partners Laura Poncelet, Architect, Torti Gallas & Partners Stephanie Reed Zurek, Associate, Union Studio
Jane Day is modeled after the highly successful TED Talk format and its purpose is to get the CNU back to its roots—a full day of high-level, challenging talks about the broader placemaking movement.
Lynn Richards is President and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Ms Richards will open Jane Day with a President's Report on the Congress for the New Urbanism.
Lynn Richards, President & CEO, CNU
Cities are birthplaces of civilization; centers of culture, trade, and progress; cauldrons of opportunity—and the home of eighty percent of the world’s population by 2050. As the 21st century progresses, metropolitan areas will bear the brunt of global megatrends such as climate change, natural resource depletion, population growth, income inequality, mass migrations, education and health disparities, among many others.
In his talk based on his forthcoming book, The Well-Tempered City, Jonathan F. P. Rose will distill his work in cities, interdisciplinary research, and the ideas that he first presented at CNU # 1 into a five-pronged model for how to design and reshape the hardware and software of our cities with the goal of equalizing their landscape of opportunity. Drawing from the musical concept of “ temperament” as a way to achieve harmony, Rose argues that well-tempered cities can be infused with systems that bend the arc of their development toward equality, resilience, adaptability, well-being, and the ever-unfolding harmony between civilization and nature. These goals may never be fully achieved, but our cities will be richer and happier if we aspire to them, and if we infuse our every plan and constructive step with this intention.
Jonathan F.P. Rose, President, Jonathan Rose Companies LLC
Historic demographic shifts in age, race, and household type have huge implications on how we plan and design communities today and tomorrow. These changes have put a new emphasis on planning for place, but more importantly, planning for people. What does this mean to planners and designers and what does planning for people look like. This talk will answers those questions and more.
Mitchell Silver, AICP, Commissioner, NYC Parks, City of New York
Lafayette Park, Detroit’s first Urban Renewal project, is a Modernist mixed-use development situated immediately east of Detroit's Central Business District. In contrast to other projects completed in the United States under the Urban Renewal program, Lafayette Park is generally regarded as a success, due in part to the level of attention paid to site planning, architecture, and landscape design. These elements were, in fact, produced by some of the notable practitioners of the time: Mies van der Rohe served as architect for the initial phase of the development, and Lafayette Park contains the world’s largest collection of Mies buildings occupying a single site.
Intended to bring the quiet and spacious suburban lifestyle into the urban core, Lafayette Park was planned within walking distance of entertainment and employment. The site has been preserved to a degree rarely achieved, allowing visitors to experience the development in a state of maturity in-sync with the designers’ original vision. The National Park Service recognized it as a National Historic Landmark in 2015. This walking tour will allow participants to experience Lafayette Park from the viewpoint of a 26 year resident while receiving an overview of its history from conception to completion and beyond. The tour will include the interior of a residential unit in the high-rise 1300 tower (A later addition to Lafayette Park designed by Gunnar Birkerts [1961-1964]) as well as a townhouse residential unit designed by Mies.
Adam Cook, Principle Research & Planner, Seamless Collaborative Neil McEachern, Retired Teacher and Principal, Detroit Public Schools
Tour the primary developments within the Downtown core, Midtown, and New Center districts, including the Guardian Building, Riverwalk, New Center, and Woodbridge, to name a few. This approximately 12-square mile area has seen dramatic changes over the last few years with thousands of new residents, dozens of new businesses, hundreds of retails spaces and restaurants, and billions of dollars of new investment. See firsthand the redevelopment of these areas including both private and public enhancements, as well as major infrastructure improvements.
Mark Nickita, President, Archive Design Studio
Check out the food truck options and take your lunch outside in the tactically-activated Opera House parking lot.
The third annual meeting of the Urban Landscape Architects Council will continue the discussion begun at the CNU Climate Change Council. The Climate Change Council meeting will take place on June 9th from 9-12 the day before our meeting. We will review and make recommendations relating to the Council's proposed document and actions and address other agenda items. It would be helpful if you could have attended the Climate Change Council meeting in anticipation of our meeting.
Stephanie Bothwell, FCNU ASLA, Stephanie Bothwell Urban and Landscape Design LLC
Bill Schultheiss has focused his career on the transformation of unsafe, automobile-dominated communities into equitable places. Learn from country’s top bike facility designer and complete streets engineer about tapping into the potential for bicycles to strengthen urban places. Learn what the world’s most urban cities are doing to comfortably accommodate and encourage cycling. Learn about state-of-the-art bicycle facility design techniques being applied in American cities. Bill will also do some useful myth-busting and help expand your street design vocabulary for urban settings, while facing contemporary challenges.
Bill Schultheiss, Principal Engineer, Toole Design Group
Is there a role for the CNU in international urbanism? Are we interested in sharing our experience over the last 25 years in transforming the process and the form of the built world? Can we translate our American Experience to other cultures? What are the mechanisms we need to help make a better world in rapidly urbanizing parts of the world? Can the CNU adjust it's morphology to a denser, more rapidly built model?
The silence from the CNU is deafening! Join CNU members working domestically and abroad in a conversation about international urbanism—and help shape our voice!
John Torti, President, Torti Gallas & Partners, Inc. Michael Mehaffy, Executive Director, Sustasis Foundation Vinayak Bharne, Director of Design, Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists Samantha Chundur, Associate, Calthorpe Associates Mitali Ganguly, Associate, Calthorpe Associates
From the United States Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx, to health departments, to regular citizens, to people concerned about taxes, and to enlightened professionals, the call to deal with highways in cities has never been louder. Highways have become obstacles to progress in cities but, unfortunately, they come with enormous baggage which make the solutions challenging.
Starting in 1993, Ian Lockwood has led highway removal projects. When Peter Park was the Planning Director for Milwaukee, he led the staff effort to remove the Park East Freeway. Ian and Peter have studied highway infrastructure domestically and abroad and lecture on the topic at universities. Learn from their practical experience, stakeholder involvement strategies, key principles, and value sets. Communities that remove their highways are far better off afterwards, every time! Help your city achieve better outcomes. Attend and enable yourself to become part of the conversation!
Ian Lockwood, Livable Transportation Engineer, Toole Design Group Peter Park, Professional Planner, Peter J. Park LLC
Today, major hospitals and health systems are seeking ways reduce healthcare costs by improving the health and well-being of their employees, patients, visitors, and neighbors. CNU’s Health Districts project builds on this momentum to find solutions that remove the barriers between neighborhoods and health systems, and encourage collaboration among the professions of urban design, health planning, and architecture.
Join CNU members and representative from Detroit’s Henry Ford Health Systems to learn about the principles and benefits health districts planning and join in an in-depth discussion on how these principles can be applied in practice.
Jason Harper, Associate Principal, Perkins + Will
Growing numbers of young and old Americans prefer to live in communities where they can walk to stores, school, services, parks and transit. But federal housing rules make it difficult to meet this demand. By capping the amount of commercial development permitted in federally-backed mortgages and programs, the rules make it hard to finance construction or renovation of three-to-four story buildings in many mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods.
For over 10 years CNU led efforts—supported by many allied organizations and CNU members—to correct the bias against mixed-use in federal housing finance programs. With many of these leaders attending, this in-depth session will focus on how this work is paying off. The session will include the history and long-term impacts of the rules, an overview by its co-author of RPA’s new report, The Unintended Consequences of Housing Finance; discussion of how market preferences and risk changed since the rules were created, review of 2016 changes to HUD’s MAP Guide; related efforts in Congress; information on Freddie Mac’s new, friendly-to-mixed-use Small Balance Loan program and Fannie Mae’s Small Apartment Loan program, and more. Welcome Freddie staff and hear directly from them how their programs advance mixed use, mixed-income and affordable housing. Dive into the reform efforts and lend your expertise.
Jane Day is modeled after the highly successful TED Talk format and its purpose is to get the CNU back to its roots—a full day of high-level, challenging talks about the broader placemaking movement.
Afternoon
Mobility apps; shared use; self driving cars; drones; “Mobility-as-a-Service”. The transportation space is transforming before our very eyes. At the Congress, Sue Zielinski, one of the pioneers and leading experts on New Mobility, ponders what Jane might have made of all this and how we could use her wisdom more than ever.
As New York City's transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan did what could have been deemed impossible: transform a network of streets that had long been dominated by the car into spaces safe for pedestrian and bicyclists. Starting with simple paint cans, she and her team made the streets quantifiably safer and unquestionably more dynamic, increasing foot traffic, reducing congestion, and improving the bottom line of businesses practically overnight. She encapsulated these strategies in recent book Streetfight: A Handbook for an Urban Revolution, with co-author Seth Solomonow.
At the Congress, Janette breaks down what it took to fully realize these changes and showcase how cities around the world are taking back their streets to shape active and successful public spaces. A book signing to immediately follow.
Janette Sadik-Khan, Principal, Bloomberg Associates
Mid-Afternoon
Cities have the capability of creating something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody. - Jane Jacobs
Tony Garcia, co-author of "Tactical Urbanism: Short-Term Action for Long-Term Change" and Principal of Street Plans Collaborative, and Erin Barns, cofounder of neighborhood crowdresourcing platform ioby and 2012 Jane Jacobs Medal for New Technology and Innovation, take a deep dive into the democratizing of urban planning. Erin and Tony explore how residents and municipalities across the country are embracing Tactical Urbanism and new investment tools to design and build better neighborhoods together—and in the process, changing the way governments think about community engagement and placemaking.
Erin Barnes, Executive Director/Co-Founder, ioby Anthony T. Garcia, Principal, The Street Plans Collaborative
As associate director of advocacy and influence at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Scot Spencer works to advance strategies that create more opportunities for kids and families in low-income communities to succeed. He also coordinates policy strategy to spur community and economic development in the Foundation’s hometown of Baltimore.
Scot Spencer, Associate Director, Advocacy & Influence, Annie E. Casey Foundation
Dr. Manuel Pastor examines how inequality stunts economic growth and how bringing together equity and growth requires concerted local action.
Combining data, case studies, and emerging narratives on multi-sector collaborations in 11 metro regions, Dr. Pastor offers a powerful prescription not just for metros, but for our national challenges of slow job growth, rising economic inequality, and sharp political polarization.
Manuel Pastor, Director, USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity
Mid-Afternoon
The Canadian experience offers innovative approaches to the problems affecting contemporary urbanism. The speakers, representing the Council for Canadian Urbanism as well as CNU Ontario Chapter, present a number of key issues of the practice of urbanism with focus on the Greater Toronto and Ontario experience including:
- Regional planning
- High-rise neighbourhoods
- Innovative approaches to affordable housing and equitable development
- Climate change mitigation and adaptation, sustainable and healthy development
- Specific tools for creating complete, walkable, transit oriented communities, for integrating heritage, for local character and identity
Particular attention will be paid to strategies for “urbanizing suburbia” with examples including sustainable mobility, higher order transit, planning for suburban centres, and planning and design for intensification corridors and complete new urban extensions.
Robert Freedman, Principal, Freedman Urban Solutions Mark Guslits, Principal, Mark Guslits & Associates, Inc. Ute Maya-Giambattista, Principal, SGL Planning Alex Taranu, City of Brampton, ON, CanadaEvening
Come join other CNU members working in your area at the first Annual Chapter Block Party. Chat with other Chapter members in a temporarily activated outdoor space while unwinding over a drink.
Made possible by the support of the following CNU Chapters:
PechaKucha Detroit (PKD) is partnering with CNU to celebrate creative and business-minded talent in Detroit and beyond that may not otherwise have an outlet to share their inspirations, creations, and ways they've changed a community.
PKD has been providing its creative community a voice since 2008.
Please join us for a special evening of robust conversation over dinner at the new Urban Consulate in Detroit. Led by community planner Lauren Hood of Live6 Alliance, Dinner & Dialogue allows conference attendees the opportunity to discuss the Detroit story with actual Detroiters. Enjoy a family-style Creole meal prepared by a local Detroit chef with New Orleans roots. Commune with small business owners, artists & activists as we engage in an open dialogue about where Detroit is, how we got here, and where we're going!
Seating is limited. Menu & directions will be emailed to guests in advance.
Tickets: $75 per person
Registration: Sign Up Here.
Urban Consulate
4470 Second Avenue
Detroit, MI 48201
The Debates are keeping to their edgy roots. Loud music: check. Audience voting: check. Snarky panel: check. Oh, and beer. A hardcore mashup of Oxford Debating meets American Idol. Match-ups to be announced soon.
See what topics are up for debate and sign-up to argue for or against by checking out Strong Towns’ Call for Contestants.
Brought to you by Strong Towns and CNU NextGen.
Charles Marohn, Jr., P.E., AICP, President, Strong Towns
Join DJ's PlaceMakahs and Farrside for the CNU 24 Dance Party.
Get your ticket here for the VIP lounge at the PlaceMakers | Farr Dance Party, while supplies last. Wristband will be in your CNU 24 registration package in Detroit. If you lose your wristband, it is not replaceable. Today’s VIP lounge price of $30 is good until Tuesday, June 7, at 5 pm EDT. After that, the price goes up to $50, and you’ll have to find Hazel Borys hazel@placemakers.com or Doug Farr doug@farrside.com at CNU Detroit to get your wristband.
Get your VIP ticket HERE.
Morning
Don't skip breakfast and don't miss the Saturday morning plenary. Join us for a hardy breakfast at the historic Fillmore.
Eastern Market, Detroit’s beloved public market district, has been serving up great food and conviviality since 1891. Since 2006, the nonprofit Eastern Market Corporation has managed and operated the market under an agreement with the City of Detroit. More than $40 million has been invested in market capital improvements and district infrastructure upgrades. EMC will launch its 2025 Development Strategy late in 2015 focused on equitable development, public realm enhancement, and organizational capacity building. The goals for 2025 are centered on expanding the market’s local diversity and regional food enterprise, while maintaining the authenticity of the place as a place for genuine economic democracy.
Eastern Market is already one of the nation’s most comprehensive regional food hubs, and EMC’s goal is to become even more inclusive, robust, and resilient while continuing to nourish Detroit. Bike over to the market on Saturday morning with this tour to experience the market for yourself; supporting the local economy is encouraged.
All Saturday tours depart from The Fillmore, 2115 Woodward. Please meet in front of the marquee.
Daniel Carmody, President, Eastern Market Corporation Michael Tunte, Landscape Architect and Urban Designer, Design Workshop
Riverside Drive, once a thriving commercial street separating downtown Windsor from the Detroit River Waterfront, is now utilized by speedy motorists as a quick way to move across the City of Windsor. Recently the subject of debate, turning this four-lane highway of sorts into safer and more comfortable place for people has offered an immense challenge to Windsor’s urban planners hoping to better connect the city centre with a world class riverfront park.
The Windsor Region Society of Architects in association with the City of Windsor and the Downtown Farmers Market will leverage tactical urbanism to calm traffic on Riverside drive and reactive the space for pedestrians, cyclists and merchants. Demonstrating that a street can function as a both a corridor for transportation while accommodating other users, the road diet will reactive Riverside Drive for a day with tactical urbanism demonstrations, opportunities to participate in the construction of guerrilla street furniture and play host to a pop-up farmers market. Learn more on the event page.
Buses to Windsor, ON will depart from The Fillmore, 2115 Woodward one (1) hour before tour departure.
Kick-start the final day with a thought-provoking look at Lean Urbanism, a movement to lower the barriers to community-building and provide more attainable places to live and work. The Project for Lean Urbanism is devising tools to work around the onerous financial, bureaucratic, and regulatory processes of community-building.
Andrés Duany will provide an introduction to Lean Urbanism, followed by the announcement of pilot projects and the debut of new tools.
Andrés Duany, Principal, DPZ Partners Matthew Lambert, Partner, DPZ Partners Brian Falk, Director of Publications, Center for Applied Transect Studies John Anderson, Principal, Anderson|Kim Architecture + Urban Design
Explore the West Village and Indian Village Neighborhoods of Detroit on foot while learning about Missing Middle Housing. We’ll document Missing Middle Housing types, such as duplexes, fourplexes, and multiplexes, and complete photographic and sketch documentation, while discussing the following: location of types within blocks and neighborhoods; typical lot sizes and associated densities; and unit sizes and layout of rooms. In addition, we’ll discuss the important role of these types in providing diverse housing choices and revitalizing Detroit’s neighborhoods. This exercise will leave you with the tools and knowledge to explore, recognize and document other Missing Middle Housing throughout Detroit or in your community. We’ll take public transit to the location and back, likely sharing a cold drink at one of the local establishments to wrap up the discussions.
Interested in further exploring the Missing Middle in Detroit? Join the launch at CNU 24 to start building a database of MMH:
- Tweet or Insta photos of great Missing Middle Housing examples you find in Detroit with hashtags: #MissingMiddle #Detroit #CNU24
- Use our survey to contribute great examples to the new Missing Middle Housing map. Find links to the survey and more about these efforts at missingmiddlehousing.com/cnu24!
All Saturday tours depart from The Fillmore, 2115 Woodward. Please meet in front of the marquee.
Dara O'Byrne, Deputy Director, Land Use & Policy, Detroit Future City Daniel Parolek, AIA, Principal, Opticos Design, Inc. Karen Parolek, Principal, Opticos Design, Inc Cailin Shannon, Senior Designer, Opticos Design, Inc
Mid-Morning
Old Sandwich Towne is one of the oldest established communities in all of Ontario and the setting of many historically significant events. This diverse history includes links to First Nations, Black, French and British settlements.
As part of the commercial and civic section of Sandwich Town, Sandwich Street is quite distinct architecturally from other districts in Windsor. Many of the buildings in Sandwich Towne exhibit Classical Revival, Georgian, and Tudor influences in their roof forms, timber detailing, brick exteriors, and window and door styles. These architectural styles can be identified in prominent buildings such as the Duff-Baby Mansion (1798), the McGregor-Cowan House (1806), Jules-Robinet Winery Building (1895), Sandwich Towne Hall (1912), the Sandwich Post Office (1906), Mackenzie Hall (1855) and St. John’s Church (1871).
Participate in a leisurely 4 kilometer bicycle ride through Windsor’s Riverfront park system adjacent to the historic Detroit River, followed by a walking tour to discover numerous buildings of interest in the historic Sandwich neighborhood. Discuss the evolution of the Town’s streets, the unique architectural features of the building structures, the prominent residents that worked and lived in each, and how they played an important role in shaping this community. A focus will placed on its resurgence and future, including the redevelopment and repurposing of some of the buildings in the area.
Buses to Windsor, ON will depart from The Fillmore, 2115 Woodward one (1) hour before tour departure.
Frank Perissinotti, Professor, St. Clair College
How can a major Detroit intersection, and the surrounding neighborhood, be transformed to welcome pedestrians and support transit? This session includes a short tour of 8 Mile and Gratiot. In a table exercise, participants will focus on principles of street redesign, pedestrian-oriented infrastructure, and how to connect two sides of a street. Ideas from this session will be transferable to other jurisdictions dealing with similar issues.
This session is timely because the new regional transit authority has slated Gratiot as a future Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor, just as 24-hour bus service has recently been restored.
A visit to the NorthEnd and Oakland Avenue Urban Farm will explore strategic financing of community development projects like urban gardens and art; sustainable community asset development; and neighborhood planning, safety, beautification, and engagement.
Participants will learn about an approach to strategic neighborhood development that is robust, sustainable, and targeted at diverse residents. Neighborhood activists are collaborating to overcome barriers and implement solutions in an African American and working-class neighborhood.
How can communities use small-scale interventions—the rehabilitation of a single house, physical improvements on a block, small-scale job-training or skills education, for example—to spur greater neighborhood impact?
A brief walking tour of target residential and commercial properties in the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood will highlight new areas of growth as well as remaining challenges to overcome. Organizations working in the neighborhood will set the context for these challenges and discuss their initiatives that promote building rehabilitation and community engagement as a strategy for neighborhood stabilization. Participants will then join a guided conversation in how to leverage these investments in the area to bring financial and civic wealth to the neighborhood, sharing best practices from other cities across the nation.
A trip to the immigrant community of Banglatown will explore urban farming, community planning, and data visualization—and how these impact neighborhood revitalization. Global Detroit and its Banglatown partners will reveal ways to break through cultural and language barriers to community planning processes in immigrant and low-income neighborhoods.
Examples of community outreach, data utilization, and creative and successful community planning outcomes will form the basis for a larger discussion. Participants will tour Power House Productions project spaces, explore how arts and culture informs community development, and examine infrastructure challenges.
A place cannot be a place unless there are people there, so how do architects and urbanists make places where people want to be? What works, and what doesn’t? Who is in the details; God or the Devil?
Come to this free flowing discussion with Hazel Borys, Howard Blackson, John Massengale, Marianne Cusato, Michaele Pride, and Steve Mouzon. Moderator Paddy Steinschneider will make sure that there is plenty of audience engagement in this follow-up to the infamous “Is CNU Burning?” session at CNU 23 in Dallas.
Howard Blackson, Urban Design & Community Planning Manager, RBF Consulting, a Company of Michael Baker International Hazel Borys, Managing Principal, PlaceMakers Marianne Cusato, Associate Professor of the Practice, School of Architecture, University of Notre Dame John Massengale, Principal, Massengale & Co LLC Steve A. Mouzon, AIA, LEED, Principal, The New Urban Guild Michaele Pride, Professor & Associate Dean for Public Outreach and Engagement, School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico Paddy Steinschneider, President & Founder, Gotham Design & Community Development Ltd.
What build work has worked and what has not worked? What are the mechanisms needed to succeed? Where are the barriers? Land Disposition? Zoning Control? Regional Views? How do we synthesize the Charter to make it International? How do we shift the need to house the millionaires in gated enclaves the create great neighborhoods for the slowly emerging middle and migrating lower classes.
The silence is from the CNU is deafening! Join CNU members working domestically and abroad in a conversation about international urbanism—and help shape our voice!
Doug S. Kelbaugh, FAIA, Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan Stefanos Polyzoides, Principal, Moule & Polyzoides Architects & Urbanists John Torti, President, Torti Gallas & Partners, Inc. Paul Whalen, AIA, Partner, Robert A.M. Stern Architects LLPFollowing the plenary announcement of pilot projects and debut of new tools by the Project for Lean Urbanism, join the the leaders of the projects and the developers of the tools in a casual setting. Over coffee and snacks you can learn what the projects entail and how the tools will be used. Ask questions, make suggestions, or engage in friendly debate.
Andrés Duany, Principal, DPZ Partners Susan Henderson, AIA, LEED AP, CNU-A, Principal, PlaceMakers LLC Matthew Lambert, Partner, DPZ Partners Brian Falk, Director of Publications, Center for Applied Transect Studies John Anderson, Principal, Anderson|Kim Architecture + Urban Design
Mid-Afternoon
Old Sandwich Towne is one of the oldest established communities in all of Ontario and the setting of many historically significant events. This diverse history includes links to First Nations, Black, French and British settlements.
As part of the commercial and civic section of Sandwich Town, Sandwich Street is quite distinct architecturally from other districts in Windsor. Many of the buildings in Sandwich Towne exhibit Classical Revival, Georgian, and Tudor influences in their roof forms, timber detailing, brick exteriors, and window and door styles. These architectural styles can be identified in prominent buildings such as the Duff-Baby Mansion (1798), the McGregor-Cowan House (1806), Jules-Robinet Winery Building (1895), Sandwich Towne Hall (1912), the Sandwich Post Office (1906), Mackenzie Hall (1855) and St. John’s Church (1871).
Participate in a leisurely 4 kilometer bicycle ride through Windsor’s Riverfront park system adjacent to the historic Detroit River, followed by a walking tour to discover numerous buildings of interest in the historic Sandwich neighborhood. Discuss the evolution of the Town’s streets, the unique architectural features of the building structures, the prominent residents that worked and lived in each, and how they played an important role in shaping this community. A focus will placed on its resurgence and future, including the redevelopment and repurposing of some of the buildings in the area.
Buses to Windsor, ON will depart from The Fillmore, 2115 Woodward one (1) hour before tour departure.
Frank Perissinotti, Professor, St. Clair College
Seeing a great design solution out in the field and then remembering it for later use is a tremendous asset to those involved in making new walkable places. Join us to learn hands-on techniques to improve your “visual design library”. Grab your sketch pad, pencils, brushes, camera and other graphic tools of choice as we head outside for a quick guided session to practice sketching and painting in the field. Leading practitioners will provide helpful tips and demonstrations of techniques.
David Csont, Architectural Illustrator, Urban Design Associates James Dougherty, Director of Design, Dover, Kohl & Partners Planning Arti Harchekar, Associate, Opticos Design, Inc Cailin Shannon, Senior Designer, Opticos Design, Inc JJ Zanetta, Founder, Zanetta Illustration Kenneth Garcia, Town Planner, Dover, Kohl & Partners
Described as one of the most walkable downtowns in the Midwest, Birmingham has successfully implemented innovative urban planning since the 1920s, beginning with the City Beautiful movement. Today, the historic streetcar city has become one of Detroit’s most desirable suburbs.
Although the city has a small population of 20,000, it has over three million square feet of commercial property and a transect of urban building types. For the past 20 years, the city has been implementing Andres Duany’s 2016 Master Plan, one of America’s pioneering form-based codes. Walk the historic downtown core, the City Beautiful Civic Park, and multiple residential and commercial districts for a true Birmingham experience. Noted mixed-use buildings, parking structures, civic art, and traffic calming measures will be illustrated.
All Saturday tours depart from The Fillmore, 2115 Woodward. Please meet in front of the marquee.
Robert Gibbs, President, Gibbs Planning Group
A facilitated discussion will explore the sometimes-fragile relationship between anchor institutions and their surrounding neighborhoods. While the focus will be on public/private partnerships and grassroots community relationships, participants will play an active role in this conversation and brainstorming exercise.
Of the many capstone projects generated by Denby High School graduates since 2013, one has risen to the top: The plan to create a community green space adjacent to the school. Residents have rallied behind this project as much as students, but the challenge is building it.
The session will explore ways a community can design, build, and maintain a neighborhood park. Participants may suggest mechanisms to fund repairs and maintenance, and help to design a parcel across from the park. The plan calls for a botanical garden aligned with science curriculum.
See firsthand how a small neighborhood in northwest Detroit—site of a CNU Legacy Charrette—is experiencing a rebirth of the entrepreneurial spirit. Tour a coworking space, green parking lot, multi-tenant building, new property acquisition, and a site under consideration for purchase and development. This is a story of placemaking and construction in a place with few resources. Grandmont Rosedale is a case study in improving a commercial corridor without waiting for the market to support substantial new development.
How can mixed industrial communities be designed to protect health and improve quality of life? Can "buffers" and implementation reduce the impacts of nearby heavy and light industry?
Leaders from Delray, a Southwest Detroit community, share ways to address these challenges. The community seeks expert advice on best practices and new ideas on policy and implementation on a pressing issue: The community faces increasing industrial encroachment and potentially negative health impacts.
Sprawl poses a massive challenge, and tackling the issues can be a long and daunting process. Over two days in Miami leading professionals with extensive experience in reshaping and improving the suburbs came together to consider ideas that could help implement sprawl retrofit faster, cheaper and more equitably.
The Build A Better Burb Sprawl Retrofit Council was a great success. During this interactive session the Council’s summary report and the practical tools identified for five Areas of Opportunity will be presented and discussed.
- Municipalities: How do we help small to mid-sized towns and suburban municipalities?
- Citizens: How do we help citizens go from "No way" to "Yes please!”?
- Developers: How do we help developers to achieve successful retrofit through small, incremental steps?
- Finance: How are the sprawl retrofit projects financed?
- Equity: Can incremental Sprawl Retrofit provide cost-effective, widely applicable strategies for affordable housing and workplace?
Ellen Dunham-Jones, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Georgia Institute of Technology Xavier Iglesias, DPZ Partners Eric Kronberg, Principal, Kronberg Wall Architects Michael Mehaffy, Executive Director, Sustasis Foundation Scott Polikov, President, Gateway Planning Group Galina Tachieva, AICP, Partner, DPZ Partners June Williamson, Associate Professor of Architecture - Spitzer School of Architecture, The City College of New York/CUNY
Half a century ago, Christopher Alexander asked that famously provocative question. Since then, New Urbanists have answered: grid-networks, diverse social systems, self-organization, "generative" spatial networks. But what are the practical issues? How does the "New Urban Agenda" incorporate Lean Urbanism, Agile Design, Tactical Urbanism, Sprawl Retrofit and other innovations? Join long-time New Urbanist thought leaders to help identify conclusions.
David Brain, New College of Florida Andrés Duany, Principal, DPZ Partners Douglas Duany, Professor of the Practice, University of Notre Dame Michael Mehaffy, Executive Director, Sustasis Foundation Bruce F. Donnelly, Urban Planner, Office of Bruce F. Donnelly
Municipal codes are the teeth behind land use and planning decision making. Gain a deeper understanding of the power of municipal code by exploring its special uses and districts. Study transect planning, form based codes, and character-based codes in the US and abroad, from the scale of the building to the region. Talks include:
- The Sports Economy
- Burning Man
- What's So Special About Special Districts?
- Transecting Buffalo
- Tuning the Transect
Scott Douglass, Architectural & Urban Designer, Principle Group Wale Emmanuel, Founder, Chicago Basketball Academy Gerald Erion, Professor of Philosophy, Medaille College, Buffalo, NY Doug Farr, CNU-A, President and Founding Principal, Farr Associates Architecture & Urban Design E. Stephen Goldie, City Planning Advisor, Al Ain City, Abu Dhabi Dept of Municipal Affairs Matthew Lambert, Partner, DPZ Partners Russell S. Preston, Design Director, Principle Group Kara Wilbur, Urban Designer & Code Writer, Principle Group
Afternoon
New Urbanists have gotten really good at single-family detached houses, sometimes to the detriment of attached building. As demographics shift and more and more American’s demand non-conventional dwellings, we all have to get better and desigining and building those “missing middle” attached buildings. Creating a variety of styles, sizes, and locations can meet the market demand, strengthen community cohesion, and provide stability for citizens. Talks include:
- What Millennials Want- Redesigning the One Bedroom Apartment
- Four-Plexes: Relic of the Past, Guerilla of the Present, Solution for the Future
- The Secrets of Attached Building Types
Eric Brown, Principal, Brown Design Studio Charles- Bernard Gagnon, Architect, Principal and Founder, Cargo Architecture Katherine Kittrell, Principal, mirco.villas Steve A. Mouzon, AIA, LEED, Principal, The New Urban Guild Richard Sammons, Architect & Urbanist, Fairfax & Sammons Architects Jeremy Sommer, Architect & Urbanist, Sommer Design Studios Bruce B. Tolar, P.A., Architect, Architect Bruce B. Tolar, P.A.
As the demand for walkable places grows across the country, so too does the need for a local advocacy. Join well-rooted CNU Chapters from across North America for an idea exchange on how new urbanists are making a difference locally and improving CNU’s ground game. Talks include:
- How to Launch a CNU Chapter
- Frenemies No More—Benefits of a Staffed Chapter
- CNU New York Satellite Chapters
- By Design Charrette Value
- Civic Voice: Advocating with Community Partners
Robin Bergstrom, Executive Director, CNU New England Howard Blackson, Urban Design & Community Planning Manager, RBF Consulting, a Company of Michael Baker International Larry Gould, Principal, Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates, NY Michael Mullins, President, Mullins Management Company Lee Sobel, Principal, Director of Public Strategies, RCLCO David Newsome, Director of Operations, CNU New England Mateo Barnstone, Managing Director, CNU Central Texas Cid Galindo, President, Centurion Property Manager
Phoenix Multicultural Academy is set to close at the end of the 2016 school year. Across the street from the school is a vacant warehouse on Pershing Street and a vacant lot near the viaduct on Central. Vacancies like these are too common in economically distressed communities. Many cities are asking: How can public infrastructure be re-used or repurposed for the public good or for private business?
This session will study the Phoenix, Pershing, and Central areas to make recommendations on avoiding vacancies and to formulate a long-term reuse strategy for the school.
This session includes a short tour of three buildings of different sizes, each zoned light industrial, along a half-mile strip in the Cody Rouge neighborhood of Detroit. The community's economic development plan centers on the green industry.
Together with local leaders and new urban experts, participants will brainstorm on how these buildings can be reused. The floor will be open to any and all ideas on how "going green" can lead to growth.
Economic development is happening in just a handful of Detroit Neighborhoods—but that list doesn't include Osborn. With the help of new urban experts, neighborhood leaders seek advice on creating an economic development plan for their community that can spur construction in Osborn. This brainstorming session will focus on stabilizing and restoring the residential area, priming it for small-scale real estate investment, and adaptive reuse of vacant buildings.
How can residents and small business owners work together to activate vacant places along the struggling, yet vital commercial corridor of Michigan Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares in Detroit?
Participants will engage in a hands-on, collaborative session to examine tactical interventions and projects that can connect to other activity along the corridor. The immersive discussion will relate to previous AIA Urban Priorities Committee work in this neighborhood.
Evening
Join your fellow Congress-goers and local Detroit residents for an evening of fun to close out the 24th annual Congress for the New Urbanism. The closing party is located at Campus Martius, in the heart of Downtown Detroit.
This event is free and open to the public.
Menu 1
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Menu 2
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Menu 3
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