Extend your learning opportunities (and your stay) at the Philadelphia Congress

With a focus on traditional urbanism and the lessons of our most treasured older cities, the formal Thursday-evening-through-Sunday CNU XV program is fully loaded with expert urbanists sharing valuable knowledge, but there are great reasons to arrive earlier.
An expanding array of related offerings now add to the Congress experience, including the Next Generation Congress on Wednesday and a record number of Thursday New Urbanism 202s advanced seminars and Urban Laboratory sessions.

Next Generation
Put on independently by new urbanists in their 20s and 30s with the wholehearted encouragement of CNU, the Next Generation event is becoming a Wednesday fixture of Congress week. NextGen4 will feature a morning panel wrestling with how new forces ranging from green to gentrification and reinvestment to recoding will interact with tradition to shape “the next iteration of urbanism.” An interactive afternoon session is designed to stimulate brainstorming about emerging topics. Highlights of past NextGen events and updates on NextGen4 are found at cnunextgen.org.

New Urbanism 202s
Member interest in these advanced mini courses has led to an expanded set of New Urbanism 202 sessions; this year CNU offers 12. Available for an additional fee, these three-hour sessions allow practitioners to learn about a single subject in-depth from some of the most prominent leaders in the movement. Space is limited, so sign up now at www.cnuxv.org
Here is a generous sampling of what you can expect from this year’s 202s:
Market analyst Laurie Volk and urban designers Gianni Longo and Tom Comitta will explore Lancaster County’s dynamic housing industry, cutting-edge plans, and new TND development. In another hot 202, landscape architects and town planners Stephanie Bothwell, Rock Bell, and Mike Watkins will unearth the secrets of creating successful civic spaces, a critical piece of development that too often is treated as an afterthought and winds up undercutting project and community performance.
If transportation reform is your passion, don’t miss two seminars devoted to street design and policy.  Boulevard builders Allan Jacobs and Elizabeth Macdonald will discuss their work in Vancouver and San Francisco making multiway boulevards legal again. Their savvy approaches to traffic management and beautiful designs will leave attendees motivated to try this at home. A full lineup of transportation all-stars — including Pennsylvania DOT Secretary Al Biehler, prominent Glatting Jackson transportation engineers Walter Kulash and Troy Russ, University of Connecticut associate professor Norman Garrick, and New Jersey’s DOT Commissioner Kris Kolluri — will discuss how the CNU/ITE manual and other tools from the trenches are enabling communities to approach transportation design holistically to tame traffic and create beautiful, valuable places. Eric Dumbaugh whose latest research is on how street trees can reduce accidents (See New Urban News Septemer 2006), will also join this talented lineup.
Developers Steve Maun and George Valanos will also put their experience to work getting through the loopholes on permitting barriers. The Charrette Institute is offering the first in a series of seminars that will enable participants to become certified charrette leaders. Join charrette experts Bill Lennertz and Steve Coyle to learn how to engage the public effectively and turn conflict into a successful way to gain public input.
Planners and public officials will find plenty of take-home tools in two 202s focused on  form-based codes and comprehensive plans. Architect David Sargent, attorney Bill Spikowski, and law professor Chad Emerson will focus on the details of implementing form-based codes. Then join top planners Jonathan Barnett, Alan Loomis, and Matt Raimi and municipal planning directors Peter Park of Denver and Rick Bernhardt of Nashville as they illustrate how comprehensive plans are a useful mechanism to implement new urbanism.

Urban Laboratories
As reported in last month’s New Urban News, after debuting last year in Providence, the innovative concept of Urban Labs — part tour, part workshop serving CNU’s host city — are back again by popular demand. Sandy Sorlien of New Urban Codes and Matt Schelly of the Montgomery County (Pa.) Planning Commission have assembled four sessions focusing on the Francisville neighborhood in North Philadelphia. Historic Francisville survived the twentieth century’s roller coaster ride of prosperity and disinvestment and has recently attracted investment again for its location between Center City and Temple University. Urban labs include lunch and require separate registration. Here’s a quick look at what’s in store for lab participants and Francisville: Coding for Neighborhood Evolution features members working alongside experts to actively calibrate the form-based SmartCode to unique neighborhood conditions — narrow alleys, shallow lots, new infill development, and plenty of quirky angles; in People and Process, acclaimed CNU facilitator Laura Hall will help participants consult local residents and businesspeople while making progress towards design and non-design solutions for local problems; Creating Living Urban Spaces will put Christopher Alexander’s ideas about the generative design and development of urban spaces to work in understanding Francisville and designing a piece of site-specific civic infrastructure; in Ridge Avenue Retail Resurrection, urban retail expert Bob Gibbs and local development guru Jim Hartling will determine new ways to bring life to the vacant lots along a still-riot-scarred corridor that connects Francisville to transit and the city beyond.

Tours
Philadelphia’s location at the nexus of three states, dozens of rail lines, and three centuries of urbanized development creates a wealth of opportunities to experience amazing urbanism, and the local host committee is capitalizing on this opportunity with 17 captivating tours. More than in past years, CNU XV’s tours are sprinkled throughout Congress weekend, but Thursday is still the day with the most tours, nine altogether. Thursday tours cover city neighborhoods and extend deep into Philadelphia’s celebrated region, to streetcar suburbs such as Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, and Collingswood, New Jersey, and points beyond such as Princeton and the Plainsboro Village Center in New Jersey. Tours on Thursday and throughout the weekend have started filling up, so if tours appeal to you, it makes sense to register for them as soon as possible.
See for yourself why these early offerings are growing in popularity. Book a flight or train that gives you plenty of time in Philadelphia, and visit www.cnuxv.org to reserve your space today.