The CNU: Lingering Second Thoughts
by Mike Pyatok

The Planners’ Network
2002

The New Urbanism has been aggressively marketed within the last decade by ‘boomers’ who came of age professionally in the 90’s, disenchanted with the negative physical and social consequences of sprawl and urban renewal they had witnessed as young professionals as they were being educated in the 60’s. Much credit should be bestowed upon them for their ability to rally many architects, reared in a sub-culture of radical individualism, to join a social and environmental cause than transcends the profession?s usual pursuit of frivolous fashions. Unfortunately, this effort emerged from political and social origins that made its members unable to assess the class biases of their own assumptions and prescriptions. While some of their works demonstrate alternative models which hint at possible larger solutions, it’s members more often choose to serve private developers who co-opt their mission by simply repackaging the same suburban sprawl in more seductive ‘urbane’ clothing, or public developers who too often trample on the lives of disadvantaged communities in the inner city, as happened in the 90s with HUD?s HOPE VI program.

It is interesting to note that when surveying the CNU?s founders, (who remain its leadership today since there has been no change since its founding in the early 90?s), their ages narrowly ranged between 45-55, all are white, and nearly all are men except for two women architects related by marriage to two of the men. Nearly all were limited to the architectural profession. For a movement that was to proclaim itself as the savior of all things wrong about American suburban and urban living, this was certainly a narrow base from which to launch such a crusade. This narrow cultural base of thinking limited the organization almost from its start in its efforts to frame the issues and propose solutions for American development patterns.

This narrow world view produced its first major error in judgement by preparing a ?charter? without making the painstaking, and often time-consuming, efforts of building a broad-based and diverse coalition to engage in that messy process of defining first principles. They reached out mostly to other architects, of similar ages and race, and from among friends, of like minds. Had that broad coalition been formed, perhaps such a pretentious charter may not have been concocted in the first place. Perhaps they would have realized that seeking allies in elected positions should not have been their first priority, but finding allies in other progressive organizations and from among those engaged in grass roots efforts would have given them not just numbers, but a more sensitive understanding of the issues of equity. Instead, they first sought media coverage and access to power, in politics and real estate, using aggressive publicists like Peter Katz (author of The New Urbanists) or planners like Mark Weiss of Cisneros? HUD staff, rather than build a base of support among the many citizen?s groups already addressing these problems.

Even as late as 1999, the Association of Community Design Centers (an organization with 3 times as many years of experience as the CNU in dealing with inner city problems), while holding its conference simultaneously with the CNU in Portland, reached out to collaborate on some workshops. The CNU ignored them. The Low Income Housing Coalition, the Coalition for the Homeless, the Planners Network, to name a few, are organizations which possess sophisticated political perspectives based on both in-the-trenches experience as well as on education in the history of critical thinking about the shortcomings of Capitalism. They understand some of the unseemly implications these shortcomings have on the management and development of our natural and built environments. Yet to this day, efforts to reach out to the CNU are stymied either by the founders? lack of connections to such groups or suspicions on the part of such groups about the starting points of the CNU, when asked to affiliate with it.

Perhaps given their class origins and the limits of their professional training, they did not congeal around a well-formed critical view of how America?s political, economic and social system creates and fosters these physical problems. They understandably quickly sought to analyze from the lenses of architects and physical planners, focussed on symptoms of these deeper problems as they manifest themselves in the physical environment and the immediate policies which shape it, like zoning, fire and building regulations and the predispositions of traffic engineers. As a consequence, their charter?s principles of environmental justice eventually would ring hollow when compared to their actions in practice. This is not to say that moving quickly to demonstrate built alternatives is not an intelligent strategy to titillate the imaginations of those who may effect policy among the general populace, politicians and entrepreneurs. But had a more thorough understanding of just how deeply our cultural values, assumptions and government regulations are nourished by a corporate-dominated market and private profit driven economy, then perhaps the projects for demonstrating principles would have been selected more carefully.

While giving some vague lip service to other more complicated sources of our malaise, as architects they truly believe that many of the nation?s intractable problems are predominantly physical in nature and that physical fixes could substantially improve our futures. Examination of the contents of their newsletter, New Urban News, clearly shows this bias, where attention is given solely to physical design, and in particular, to larger projects. Small, community-driven in-fill projects that may be contributing significantly to a community?s political and economic self development are ignored because they are not at a physical scale that requires new street layouts and streetscapes which employ the CNU?s tenets for the good life. To them, the larger the physical interventions, the greater must be the positive impacts and the greater the political clout. Even if the execution of the results do not contribute to building the local job base, and even if the resulting mix of incomes requires the displacement of hundreds of lower income households, such developments are praised by the CNU because they have employed some neighborhood layout designs which their founders, through acts of religious faith, truly believe will improve the lives of the residents.

As an architect I can sympathize with the professional tendency of the CNU to try to solve our society?s problems within the framework of our architectural and urban design disciplines. But until its leadership significantly broadens it membership to enable it to recognize that oftentime the creation of physical interventions are not the end, but the means for building jobs, community self-sufficiency, political empowerment, we will continue to see ?sticks and bricks? interventions that merely raise property values and cause displacement of the very people we are trying to help.