Be There to Help Evolve a New, New Urbanism

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This year, for the first time, Duany Plater-Zyberk is opening the doors to a special edition of its much-anticipated annual "Meet" — the stimulating all-day event where leaders from the firm present and invite discussion about their latest work on in-house initiatives addressing cutting edge concerns.

The regular "Meet" will still occur a few days before the Congress but then on Wednesday, June 10th in Denver, the same presenters will share the stage in Denver to present on the same topics and start a discussion with a wider group of urbanists, including you. Because the techniques this year are of general importance and urgency — addressing our "overlapping" economic, environmental and social crises — the firm thought that they should be made available simultaneously to anyone interested

Sharing the latest strategies from one of the most influential firms in urbanism, the event is $50 but CNU and DPZ will waive this session fee for the next 75 people to sign up to attend at least four days of the Congress. Register now for CNU 17 (and then use your CNU 17 confirmation number for free registration at the DPZ event) to be sure you have a seat at this partner event, "Settlements for the 21st Century." It's a fitting start to a Congress designed to help urbanists adapt their strategies to a changed planning and development landscape. Here's how DPZ describes the session:

Preparing for the 21st Century

The 21st century has presented us with three overlapping crises: environmental, economic and social. While the New Urbanism offers a partial solution to all three, it also becomes partly obsolete as the outline of the future emerges. We must evolve a "new" New Urbanism.

• Agricultural Urbanism: The ever increasing concerns regarding the quality, availability, cost and carbon footprint of our food supply pose a series of challenges that New Urbanists are well equipped to address. If adapted to the rural-to-urban Transect, food production at every T-Zone could provide environmental benefits, food security and social capital. "Ag is the new golf," says Andrés Duany. Topic leader: Andrés Duany. Textbook: Handbook for Agricultural Urbanism

• Green Marketing: "Real estate consumers will not necessarily tolerate being hectored to, nor can they be expected to behave ethically. There is more than one way to market green. We have identified at least four distinct messages." Topic Leader: Andrés Duany

• Light Imprint Infrastructure: There are no loans and there is no money to throw away in gold-plated infrastructure. Restore the common sense way of building roads and handling water that were common at a time when developers while poorer had to be smarter. The Light Imprint Handbook presents a toolbox of over sixty intelligent infrastructure strategies, from the regional to the building scale for integrating sustainability with community design. Topic Leader: Tom Low. Textbook: Light Imprint Handbook: Integrating Sustainability and Community Design.

• Secure Settlements: Studies show that the environmental and economic crises will likely generate new levels of social insecurity—indeed anarchy—that the open New Urbanist communities will be unable to resist. It is possible that we should be precautionary and not have our communities, fifty years from now, be on the losing end of history. We must handle the requisite open network while preparing for a reversion to what has been the way of the world throughout most of history. Suburbia’s one response has been to invent the gated community, but the New Urbanism has a more sophisticated palette of options to provide varying degrees of security. Topic Leader: Andrés Duany.

• Sprawl Repair:The sixty-year investment in suburban sprawl has proven to be dysfunctional in every possible way. New Urbanists have long identified this as a problem, and yet we cannot abandon that misguided investment that today represents more than fifty percent of the urban fabric of America. Ironically, part of the answer lies in the fortuitous presence of large, single-use, single-owner tracts. What are the techniques for repairing each of the suburban types that occupy these parcels? Topic Leader: Galina Tahchieva. Textbook: Sprawl Repair Manual.

• Lifelong Communities: The great demographic bubble of the baby boomers is now aging. Suburbia is very ill-equipped to serve their needs. Together with the AARP, DPZ has developed an understanding of how the New Urbanism, while remaining the best possible habitat for seniors, can be ever more tuned to make retirement communities obsolete. Topic Leader: Scott Ball. Textbook: Age Inclusive Community Planning Evaluation Toolbox and Typology Guidebook.

• Smart Buildings: Housing, live-work units, shops and schools can be designed to be small, affordable and incremental. What well-intentioned American builders, planning agencies, and social housing providers have been doing has not been good enough. Most of the creative solutions have been confined to policy and economics when, in fact, design contributes very substantially to the necessary models. Smart buildings take us back to the last time our society provided good buildings for regular folk without subsidies. Topic leaders: Matt Lambert & Tom Low. Textbook - Learning Cottages and Neighborly Schools: Concept and Design Guidelines.

• Complete Campuses: The colleges, airports and hospital complexes built from the 1950s onward were conceived in a manner that was not only dysfunctional, but unattractive to their users, employees, visitors and neighbors. Retrofitting these with urbanism creates an absent context, while generating income for their institution. Topic Leaders: Galina Tahchieva & Xavier Iglesias

• Regional Scenarios: A one-size-fits-all approach to regional planning will not go far in this new economy. While many methodologies such as urban boundaries, conservation buffers and efficient infrastructure expansion and reuse remain relevant, a finer-grained approach and more diverse toolkit is now imperative in effectively analyzing a financially-challenged region’s growth options. Utilizing typologically-based models in the form of scenarios—ranging from the creation of new settlements to the surgical insertion of new buildings -- gives the regional planner a broader menu of techniques. DPZ discusses this approach in the contexts of political framework, the public process and means for implementation. Topic Leader: Senen Antonio

• Smart Regulations: The fragmentation of society at the hands of conventional Euclidean zoning has been well-documented by the New Urbanism. Sprawl did not occur by accident; it was enabled by widespread adoption of segregated-use zoning ordinances. Form-based codes, such as the SmartCode, entail a more holistic approach by ensuring a public realm that is physically more predictable and defined, as well as socially more integrated. The SmartCode addresses all scales of planning, from the region to the community to the block and building, with the goal of keeping settlements compact and balanced. The flexibility of this regulatory tool and the requirement it be locally calibrated, gives the SmartCode a resilient and adaptable nature. Moreover, additional Modules (such as for bicycle-compatible streets, lighting design and performance-based sustainable urbanism), have been developed to supplement the SmartCode, making it applicable to a multitude of physical, political, economic and social contexts. Topic Leader: Marina Khoury. Case Study: Miami 21. Textbook: The SmartCode Version 9.2.