Congress for the New Urbanism

Name

Congress for the New Urbanism

Location

Washington, DC

Organizational History

Founded in 1993, New Urbanism is a movement united around the belief that our physical environment has a direct impact on our chances for happy, prosperous lives. New Urbanists believe that well-designed cities, towns, neighborhoods, and public places help create community: healthy places for people and businesses to thrive and prosper. 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a large number of urban designers, architects, planners, developers, and engineers were frustrated with prevailing development patterns, which focused more on building dispersed housing far from traditional downtowns and Main Streets. Meanwhile, inside cities, urban renewal was destroying the fabric of historic neighborhoods and isolating once-stable communities. As cities continued to decline, a coalition of urban designers, architects, planners, developers, and engineers coalesced to create New Urbanism—a movement for reinvestment in design, community, and place. Their values, and the core principles of their work, are articulated in the Charter of the New Urbanism: “We stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy.”

CNU's mission is to champion walkable urbanism. We provide resources, education, and technical assistance to create socially just, economically robust, environmentally resilient, and people centered places. We leverage New Urbanism's unique integration of design and social principles to advance three key goals: to diversify neighborhoods, to design for climate change, and to legalize walkable places.

With nineteen state and regional chapters and headquarters in Washington, DC, CNU works to unite the New Urbanist movement. Our projects and campaigns serve to empower our members’ efforts, identify policy opportunities, spread great ideas and innovative work to a national audience, and catalyze new strategies for implementing policy through design approaches.

Source: Congress for the New Urbanism https://www.cnu.org/, accessed in August 2023.

Related Records

Archival Holdings

Architecture Research Center, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida
      Archive of the New Urbanism, online finding aid at https://atom.library.miami.edu/arc1000; and Congress for the New Urbanism Records, online finding aid at https://atom.library.miami.edu/arc8000. For more information https://www.library.miami.edu/architecture/

Publications