CNU 33 Congress Focus

A Problem Space for CNU 33: The Congress Focus

The preamble of the Charter begins with, “The Congress for the New Urbanism views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.”  New Urbanists recognize that our vision demands complete communities – including every context within the transect, and inclusive of all people.  As we gather in a part of the country that has continuously adapted over centuries, CNU33 New England at Providence will face that interrelated community-building challenge with a Focus on the hope of Coherent Metropolitan Regions.  

The authors of the Charter of the New Urbanism devoted an entire category to the metropolitan region because they understood that our vision of walkable, sustainable, equity-supportive urbanism relies on the integration of complementary systems and an abundance of opportunities for connection.  And whether it is availability of attainable housing, or access to car-free transportation, or resilience in the face of climate change, this past year CNU members demonstrated overwhelming support to amend our vision in order to intentionally include principles that must begin with rational regional responsiveness.

If the complete New Urbanist vision for a coherent metropolitan region is going to help solve our interrelated community-building challenge, we will need community-supportive regional systems of housing supply, development opportunity, natural resources, and economic production.

At CNU 33, we will explore the importance of regional connectivity, collaboration, and coherence using many examples from New England. However, the problem space also provides a unique opportunity to explore the ways that different regions approach problem-solving, acknowledging that state legislative regimes and local regulatory structures play a significant role in how the built environment is planned, developed, preserved, and administered. Together, we intend to build a more robust understanding of this foundational element of successful urban fabric. 
 

The Focus in Programming:

Coherent Metropolitan Regions as the Focus for CNU 33 provides everyone in our community of practice with the opportunity to engage in this year’s Congress programming:

• Urban designers and planners will have the opportunity to engage with every scale of urban intensity, and explore both timeless historical towns and neighborhoods as well as contemporary examples of both the earliest and more recent successful New Urbanism built in this country.
• Architects and developers will share their most innovative strategies for improving the ways urban development integrates into contextual surroundings, supporting the work-from-home lifestyles and work-life balances that our post-pandemic world more fully embraces.
• Both transportation and community development champions will have opportunities to connect their respective areas of impact, establishing new methods for understanding the relationship between mobility and opportunity, and encouraging innovative ways of breaking down barriers.
• Policy reform advocates will collaborate on regulatory solutions that de-silo decision-making and coordinate strategic outcomes across local, county, state, and federal regimes, from the central metropolis to the surrounding cities and small towns to the natural wilderness that lies beyond.
• Those focused on implementation will explore systemic solutions that increase livability in ways that reduce overcrowding and reinforce well-being for every member of society, from the unhoused to the housing-vulnerable to the workforce to those without existing housing burden.

As the new urbanist movement comes to New England to establish a hopeful vision for the metropolis, we will be considering key questions throughout our sessions, workshops, meetings, and Main Stages:

• In what ways have New Urbanists embraced the role that regionality must play in implementing our vision, and how can we better integrate regional coherence into our methodologies, our priorities, our understandings, and our practices?
• What systems have withstood the test of time and evolved along with society, from timeless methods of building to interconnected networks of movement to rural-to-urban relationships?
• How can New Urbanists engage with our environmental, social, economic, and cultural allies to inform urban adaptation in ways that will meaningfully accelerate resilience to climate change?
• What connections have been lost to the lure of modernity, and should be revitalized to more comprehensively support the health, wealth, and well-being of all members of the community?
• How can New Urbanists design strategies that expand access to attainable housing, and support shared prosperity across metropolitan regions and throughout the country as a result?
• What systems have not yet been created that could help communities thrive, and how can the many stakeholders of the metropolis collaborate on a network of policies that are supportive?
• In what ways can the hope of a coherent metropolitan region lessen the fear that can come with change, and support the systemic evolution needed for the intersectional urban crises we face?

New England represents a diverse urban fabric that includes some of the oldest colonial settlements in the United States, overlaid upon thousands of years of Native American settlement patterns and wisdom of the land.  As the location for our 33rd Congress, the city of Providence will provide the hub for our exploration of the surrounding hamlets, villages, towns, and cities of New England that have experienced an urban morphology unlike any other.  As its name suggests, Providence provides a strong example of “timely preparation for future eventualities,” demonstrating an impressive regional resilience that has carried New England through centuries of extreme weather events and economic upheavals.  At CNU33, New Urbanists will scrutinize this complex metropolitan region, understanding how it has developed the capacity to withstand, adapt, and recover from external pressures in ways that have produced thriving walkable, sustainable, equity-supportive neighborhoods, towns, and major municipalities.
 

Understanding a Congress Focus

What is the Congress Focus?

In conjunction with each Congress since its 30th in 2022, CNU has identified an aspect of the vision of the Charter that demands further work by the New Urbanist movement.  Each Congress Focus reflects the unique context of the local host city or region, and provides a platform for all aspects of the delivery of the Congress to be built.  Far more than a theme or content organizing tool, the Focus is a problem space around which the organization chooses to center the impact of its flagship annual event, demonstrating to CNU members, partners, funders, and supporters the specific and locally-responsive ways that we are working to meet our mission as a nonprofit.

What is the process for developing the Focus?

Determination of each Focus begins with reflection on the ways in which the practice of New Urbanism addresses – or fails to address – principles of the Charter.  CNU executive leadership considers the mission of the organization, the current strategic objectives established by the CNU Board of Directors, and the vision that the Charter describes against the common challenges that neighborhoods, towns, and cities across the country are facing, in identifying critical problem spaces or particular urban conditions that would benefit from the focused attention of the New Urbanist movement.  With input and feedback from the Local Host Committee to ensure relevance of the topical area to the local conditions as well as the ability of the surrounding region to provide ample built examples and compelling discussion subjects, CNU then refines the narrative explanation of the Focus and develops a comprehensive suite of content to help communicate its importance to all stakeholders of the annual Congress.

How is the Focus used to guide the delivery of each Congress?

• Identification of intended impact: the Focus is the obstacle to our shared vision that the outcomes and outputs of each individual Congress are seeking to address.  As a nonprofit organization, CNU is compelled to respond to the urban challenges that cities, towns, and neighborhoods are facing, demonstrating the ability of our movement to make meaningful change.  The intended impact of each Focus should be recognizable to CNU members from across the country, mission-aligned CNU partners who work with the organization, grantors and sponsors who financially support the programs of CNU, and local communities that benefit from the work that the organization and its volunteers provide.
• Keynote and Main Stage Conversations: the Focus provides the broad frame within which key ideas and/or critical questions are explored during the primary all-attendee content events of the Congress.  Directly responding to some aspect of the Focus, each Keynote and Main Stage Conversation offers CNU the opportunity to bring nationally renowned experts to the Congress podium to help New Urbanists unpack the problem space of the Focus.  These sessions help attendees understand the reasons that successful implementation related to the Focus has remained elusive, and invite discussion about solutions to problems we are facing in our work.
• Congress Program: because the content of each Congress is co-created with the broad audience of multidisciplinary practitioners who submit session proposals, the integration of the Focus into the overall session content is a multi-staged process that is led by the Congress Program Committee and carefully curated by CNU staff.  Once sessions have been reviewed and selection recommendations have been made by the committee, CNU works closely with each session proposer to ensure that their content remains relevant to the Focus and provides breadth and/or depth to the discourse that the program altogether offers attendees.
• Education and Outreach: attendees expect the Congress to be an opportunity to further their understanding of New Urbanist best practice and the key concepts embedded in the Charter.  As a result, the Focus must be a platform that helps every practitioner improve their work and likewise helps every attendee better engage with the local host city or region.  The Focus should elevate an urban challenge that is engaging to every Congress-goer, spanning the vast differences in experience with New Urbanist principles and practice and hailing from every corner of the country and around the globe as well.
• Workshops and Working Sessions: in order to provide valuable experiential learning opportunities, Congress workshops and working sessions are an important way that attendees can directly contribute to the real-world solutions that the Focus problem space demands.  Collaborating with fellow attendees on directed solution-building, the participants of Congress workshops and working sessions are able to provide their own technical expertise toward specific design and/or policy problems that the Focus daylights in the local host city or region.
• Legacy Projects: as an immediate and direct example of local impact, the Legacy Program is perhaps the most evident way that the problem space of the Focus is made tangible through each Congress.  CNU staff consider the Congress Focus as they review Local Host Committee recommendations for potential Legacy Projects and then works closely with pro-bono service providers, connecting these practice experts with real world communities seeking design and/or policy expertise, specifically related to the Focus problem space, and that would otherwise be unavailable to those communities without the direct support of CNU and its partner firms.

How is the Focus communicated?

CNU leverages its variety of communications tools and platforms and carefully differentiates its communications strategy in order to explain the Focus, the impact that the organization hopes to achieve with that Focus, and the ways that engaging with the Focus at the Congress will be relevant to the work of every member of the New Urbanist movement.  The organization crafts a narrative description of the Focus to explain the problem space, develops framing of the Focus relative to the host region that illustrates CNU’s intended impact, prepares a syllabus to support a shared understanding of the state of the practice relative to the Focus, identifies key questions that the movement should be considering when engaging with the Focus, and clarifies the relevance of the Focus to the primary communities of practice within the New Urbanism.