CNU 21: Living Community registration opens
CNU 21:Living Community is where the top designers, developers, planners, architects and advocates of walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods meet. Join CNU in Salt Lake City, Utah, May 29-June 1, 2013, and help shape the design of our communities.
CNU 21 focuses on the theme of Living Community, which balances the demands of physical, social, economic, and environmental values by connecting people to place and awakening a stewardship for our land and each other. It is measured by how well we care for the people around us, the places we make, and the land that hosts us. It is Living Community.
Our challenge and opportunity is to (re)discover methods for growth that will enhance regions and communities, and, in turn, the lives of all people in an age of constricting economic and natural resources and in an environment of continual change. We must cultivate places that enable our welfare today while enhancing prospects for future generations. The New Urbanism pragmatically seeks to balance these forces. Our approach will evolve as we learn and create in a collaborative framework of policy makers, developers, designers, administrators, and community at large. Together we realize and experience the Living Community.
Utah’s approach to visioning its future illustrates this inclusive and continuously evolving approach. Salt Lake City has embraced dynamic change. The region has the fastest growing rail transit system in the United States. The region is implementing Envision Utah’s regional plan, which received early guidance from CNU co-founder Peter Calthorpe. And development patterns are responding to the increased demand for urbanism as forecast by the University of Utah’s demographer and researcher, Chris Nelson. The city—cradled by the mountains and at the edge of vast waters and deserts—challenges us to a Living Community that embraces the relationship between human and natural habitats, as described by author Richard Louv.
Louv, Nelson, and Calthorpe will all be at CNU 21. Engage with them and participate in interactive sessions in tracks on the Environment, Systems, City, Form, Places, and a new special track called Together, which examines how regional approaches interact to create social, environmental, and economic prosperity.
Registration for CNU 21 is now open. Join us: www.cnu21.org/register
Louv confirmed as plenary speaker
Richard Louv is a journalist and author of eight books about the connections between family, nature, and community. His book The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin Books, 2011), offers a new vision of the future, in which our lives are as immersed in nature as they are in technology. This future, available to all of us right now, offers better psychological, physical, and spiritual health for people of every age. Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin Books), has been translated into 10 languages and published in 15 countries, and stimulated an international conversation about the relationship between children and nature.
Louv is co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Children & Nature Network (www.childrenandnature.org), an organization helping build the movement to connect today’s children and future generations to the natural world. Louv coined the term Nature-Deficit Disorder® which has become the defining phrase of this important issue.
In 2008, he was awarded the Audubon Medal, presented by the National Audubon Society. Among other awards, Louv is the recipient of the Cox Award for 2007, Clemson University’s highest honor, for “sustained achievement in public service” and has been a Clemson visiting professor.
Louv has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London, and other major publications. He has appeared on many national TV and radio shows. Between 1984 and 2007 he was a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and has been a columnist and member of the editorial advisory board for Parents magazine. He is on the board of directors of ecoAmerica and a member of the Citistates Group. He has appeared at major governmental and professional conferences, nationally and internationally, and as keynote speaker at the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference.
In April, Richard gave the closing keynote at the first White House Summit on Environmental Education. CNU welcomes Louv as a plenary speaker for CNU 21: Living Community.
For more information, visit the registration page.
