Influential NU allies address New York Congress

CNU’s ninth Congress highlights regionalism and the environment. While attendance was down slightly compared with last year’s Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), the 1,100 people gathered in New York City saw ample evidence that the New Urbanism’s sphere of influence is widening, both nationally and internationally. Keynote speakers Gov. Parris Glendening of Maryland and Mayor Brent Coles of Boise, Idaho, addressed the Congress not only as elected officials, but also as the current leaders of the National Governors’ Association and the US Conference of Mayors. Glendening and Coles have pushed smart growth to the top of the agenda in their respective organizations and have drawn on new urbanist principles to reenvigorate the local and national debate on growth issues. Glendening enumerated the many accomplishments of Maryland’s smart growth laws: the majority of school construction funds now go to improvement of existing facilities; in 2000, the state preserved more land than was lost to development; and the last two legislative sessions has allocated $3 billion to public transit. “The state will not continue to subsidize sprawl,” Glendening said, and added that developers who wish to build outside the state’s priority funding areas will have to pay for the infrastructure. The governor put the need for change in perspective with a particularly effective series of maps showing the decade-by-decade growth in developed land parcels in Maryland. The 19th and early 20th century patterns of concentrating development around urban centers held steady until the 1970s, but in the last two decades the dispersal of growth has been explosive. “It’s the amoeba that ate Maryland,” Glendening said. If the trend is not reversed, he added, growth in the next 25 years will consume more land than was consumed in the first 368 years of the state’s history. Mayor Coles stressed the need for collaboration between local governments within a region, a goal he has pursued in the Boise area through the Treasure Valley Compact. The compact brings cities together to, among other things, compare and coordinate comprehensive plans. Coles acknowledged that politicians often “sell smart growth to get elected — but people are holding us accountable.” The tide may be changing, he said, noting how voters in Idaho recently voted for higher property taxes to preserve open space. CNU’s international reach was evident at the first annual Charter Awards ceremony, where projects from Australia, Italy, and Nicaragua were among the recipients. Many participants pointed to the session on Western Australia’s Liveable Neighborhoods Community Design Code as one of the highlights of the Congress. All told, nearly 70 participants came from outside the US, including delegations from the Ivory Coast and Columbia. Regional and environmental agendas The New Urbanism’s growing impact on regional planning loomed large at the conference, exemplified in presentations on plans and initiatives from the New York City region, Utah, Minnesota, and Maryland. Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution’s Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy sketched the context in which the New Urbanism operates. He noted that cities are still growing more slowly than suburbs and that employment continues to decentralize. However, older suburbs are becoming more diverse, Katz said, and now share many of the problems that city centers are experiencing. Smart growth on the regional level has to be about leveling the playing field between old and new communities, he concluded. The most heated debate of the weekend concerned the relationship between environmental values and the New Urbanism. Several speakers and participants argued that environmental restrictions are too inflexible to discriminate between good and bad urbanism, and that the environmental review process has become the preeminent tool to slow down worthy projects. According to Architect Stephanos Polyzoides, the delays from environmental lawsuits proved harmful to the Playa Vista project in Los Angeles, but Hank Dittmar of the Great American Station Foundation countered that the same process that put the brakes on Playa Vista has stopped highway projects that would have been an anathema to new urbanist principles. The discussion will undoubtedly continue at the 10th Congress for the New Urbanism, to be held in Miami Beach in 2002.