Charter Awards deliver new urbanist message

The winners of CNU’s Charter Awards don’t just look good in magazine spreads. By embodying the principles of the Charter, they illustrate how New Urbanism improves and enriches our built landscape. This fall the educational value of the awards program will grow thanks to initiatives that will put the annual Charter Awards publication in architecture school libraries as well as in the hands of top urban design and development journalists. This year’s Charter Awards chief juror, Ellen Dunham Jones, Director of the Architecture Program at Georgia Institute of Technology, made getting the awards book into academic libraries a top goal. After CNU received a serial identification number from the Library of Congress, a donation from Dunham Jones made it possible to mail a full set of 2001-2004 Charter Awards books to more than 110 architecture school libraries in the country. With publications such as the Windsor Forum on Design Education acknowledging that college programs shortchange the design of the urban environment as a whole, the annual awards publication represents a valuable learning tool. “I’m concerned that the next generation has the opportunity to learn about CNU and see good work. This is an important way for them to have access to the work and ideas,” says Dunham-Jones, a participant in the Windsor Forum. “My only regret is that we won’t yet be getting the books into libraries serving other disciplines. CNU encompasses many disciplines — real estate, law, and public policy — so this is just a start.” Dunham-Jones says members might collaborate in funding ongoing distribution of the books to a wider set of libraries. Each year a panel of seven distinguished urbanists reviews 130 or more blind submissions, choosing projects that best exemplify the Charter of the New Urbanism. With projects selected at each of the three scales of the Charter, the awards highlight new urbanist approaches working in settings ranging from urban cores to new towns on the metropolitan edge. The profiles show practitioners using a range of architectural styles in achieving new urbanist goals such as repairing damaged urban fabric, building dense and lively cores around transit nodes, and creating or enriching public space. Since the awards offer valuable lessons for many disciplines, CNU is also distributing the 2004 awards book to 75 top architecture critics and urban design writers. “There’s a body of good work that extends far beyond this group of award winners. But the awards are a great starting point for showing the principles of the Charter in action and for making sure perceptions keep pace with advances in the practice of New Urbanism,” says CNU President and CEO John Norquist. “If anyone still thinks it’s all about front porches, they need to take a second and third look.” u