Four new members build CNU Board’s strength in design and development for a new era of leadership

The Congress for the New Urbanism continued to emphasize forward-looking leadership by naming four new members to its Board of Directors at the board’s May meeting in Philadelphia. The new appointments complete a transition in which all seven CNU founders moved to emeritus status, making room for new representatives on the board. With 10 of 21 members joining within the past two years, the CNU board is very much a renewed entity.
Recognizing the urban design expertise of founders who will retain important-but-less-active roles on the board (as emeritus members they retain voting rights but are not required to attend meetings and don’t count against a quorum), the board’s nominating committee used the appointments to maintain a high level of design expertise. New board member Victor Dover leads a prominent and award-winning town planning firm and Douglas Kelbaugh is the Dean of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan with experience leading major planning projects in Seattle and other cities. The board also continued making itself more development-savvy by adding successful developers Steve Maun of LeylandAlliance and Katharine Kelley of Green Street Properties.

What they bring
Here is more on the four new members and what they bring to the CNU board:
Urban designer and town planner Victor Dover, AICP, is a charter member of the Congress for the New Urbanism. As principal-in-charge of Dover, Kohl & Partners, a leading new urbanist town planning firm based in Coral Gables, Florida, Dover has was won multiple CNU Charter Awards, including one for the widely praised town of I’On in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Dover-Kohl took home two awards from this year’s awards ceremony in Philadelphia, one for a traditional-neighborhood-based citywide plan for fast-growing Fayetteville, Arkansas, and the other for a brownfield redevelopment in Antigua, Guatemala, a joint submission with Castillo Arquitectos. Dover has led more than 100 charrettes and spearheaded planning in Ocean Springs, MS, following Hurricane Katrina.
Dover served as the founding chair of CNU’s first and largest chapter, CNU Florida. He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture, his alma mater, and is one of five CNU representatives on the LEED-ND core committee.  He was also a member of the founding board for the National Charrette Institute and has been instrumental in establishing the Form-Based Codes Institute. Dover says, “The first key distinction between the New Urbanists and the usual professional design circles is that CNU is interdisciplinary, crossing boundaries and growing skillful generalists. That’s how we’ll meet the global community-building need and focus on the urgent environmental challenges.”
Douglas Kelbaugh, FAIA, is Dean and Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan’s A. Alfred Taubman College. With experience both in academia and as a practicing architect and planner, Kelbaugh has helped establish innovations such as the new urbanist design charrette. Working with CNU emeritus board member Peter Calthorpe and other practitioners, Kelbaugh has garnered numerous awards, including a national honor award from the American Wood Council and several AIA Seattle awards. His 1976 passive solar house was one of several pioneering passive solar buildings. As an author, his books on planning and design include the national bestseller The Pedestrian Pocket Book (coauthored with Calthorpe), which helped lay the groundwork for the New Urbanism.  His book, COMMON PLACE: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design, is part of the new urbanist canon and is now in its second printing. “I agreed to join the board,” says Kelbaugh, “because I’d like to help push New Urbanism to do as well at the architectural and regional scale as it has done at the scale of the neighborhood and community.”
Katharine Kelley has been a leading mixed-use urban developer for more than sixteen years.  While at Post Properties, she developed the mixed-use Post Riverside and Post Parkside projects in Atlanta. And in her current role as president of Green Street Properties, where she works alongside chairman Charles Brewer, founder of the Internet service provider Mindspring, Kelley managed the development process for Atlanta’s Glenwood Park. The 2003 CNU Charter Award winner received praise for serving as a strong counter-example to the region’s rampant sprawl.
Kelley received her masters of science in real estate development from Columbia University and an MBA from Harvard. “I am excited to help extend the principles of New Urbanism to others in the development community through our work on the CNU Board,” she says. “The CNU has a tremendous opportunity to influence the pattern of development, and I look forward to being a part of that strategy.”
Steve J. Maun is the President of Leyland Alliance LLC, a development firm based in Tuxedo, NY, with an accomplished record creating traditional neighborhoods across the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and Southeast. Influenced by his childhood experiences with civic life, Maun’s chief goal is to create developments that embody traditional town forms.
Leyland Alliance has six communities in various stages of development, including four public-private initiatives: Newburgh Waterfront in Newburgh, NY; East Beach in Norfolk, VA; Hammond’s Ferry in North Augusta, SC; and Storrs Center, a new “Main Street” neighborhood planned to complement the University of Connecticut in Mansfield, CT. In two other communities, Leyland Alliance serves as the builder and developer of developments meant to complement existing historic main streets: Warwick Grove in Warwick, NY and Madison Landing in Madison, CT.  In addition to leading Leyland Alliance LLC, the Princeton University graduate serves as an Executive Board Member of the National Town Builders’ Association. “As a CNU Board member and a developer of new urbanist communities, I hope to bring more builder/developers into contact with the Congress. ... Ultimately, the new urbanist movement will be judged by the extent and quality of our implementation,” he says.