The Congress for the New Urbanism is bringing its annual conference to Buffalo next spring. In preparation for that event they are busy planning the 100s of events that will fill the week-long gathering. As part of that process they are asking for your input at this website. You can flip through the site without becoming a member. But if you want to comment and make suggestions for the conference you will need to go through a brief registration process. There is no cost and you do not need to be a CNU member. The easy to use comment and suggestion pages are broken into basic categories as seen here:
The Congress, or CNU, was formed over 2 decades ago to promote a return to time-tested human scaled walkable urban design principles. Over that time it has had limited success as sprawl style development grew exponentially. New Urbanist dense mixed use development was typically relegated to high cost developments, resorts,or poorly done, in name only subdivisions. Interestingly,one of the reasons new urbanist developments tend to be costly to buy into is that they in high demand but are relatively rare. Developers are taking note however and new urbanist development is becoming more common. Unfortunately, today’s developers and their customers often have a poor understanding of what quality urbanism is so their developments come off ham handed. I do not think there is any new urbanist development at the subdivision scale. However, Buffalo has been doing a lot to polish up its old urbanism and is even starting to fill in the gap toothed streets that 60 years of urban removal and divestment wrought. Ultimately new urbanism mixed with old urbanism is the best course for cities. This is likely to be a major focus of the Buffalo conference. So chime in. Who do you want to see in Buffalo? What does Buffalo have to teach these planners and architects from around the country? Let the CNU know your thoughts within the next 8 days. The site will be closed after that time period.