“It’s revolutionary:" How CNU Participants See Planning Changing With New Urbanist Principles

This is part of a nine-part series where three Duke students ask three questions to architects, planners, and figures at the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU 32).

This past May, student fellows at Southern Urbanism attended the thirty-second national gathering of the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU) in downtown Cincinnati. While there, the fellows caught up with urbanists from all over the United States and beyond to chat about their work. Each interviewee was asked three questions about what they do and the goals that their work advances. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Jeff Speck is a city planner and author from Massachusetts. He does projects all over North America, for municipalities and private developers, with a focus on downtown master plans and making cities and towns more walkable, and creating mixed-use communities. He has written four books, the most famous of which is “Walkable Cities.” At the conference, Speck spent time promoting the Planner’s Pledge.

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ZT: This Planner’s Pledge—tell me a little about this.

JS: It’s a collective effort, but it grew out of a rhetorical exercise from the latest edition of Walkable Cities, in which I was promoting the fact that planners are not really asked to attest to their intention to plan well and not badly. So there's a lot that we've learned in the last decades in particular about how, for want of a better description, car-centric suburban sprawl is unhealthy for us, it's unhealthy for the planet, it's destructive to the economy, to our society, and that planners know that when you plan around walkability, bikeability, and transit, we save the planet, we save our bodies and we save our culture. Why are we not asked to acknowledge that? So the purpose of the Planner’s Pledge is to create a grassroots effort among professional planners and other folks who are active in the creation of the environment to reform the professions from below rather than from above because it's not happening.

ZT: I've heard this before, that planning is kind of ironic, in the sense that we're kind of undoing the work that planners before us have inside of predecessors have done. Like, how do you navigate that tension in the profession?

JS: I don't feel that tension. But I think it's important to understand that professions evolve, right? And doctors eventually learned that germs cause disease and not air. And we learn this stuff. We stop using leeches, although some say that actually serves the purpose. It's also worth acknowledging that planners are connected to power by necessity, and therefore have tended to advance the interests of the powerful forces within the culture. And that particularly in the US, those cultures were very pro-automotive. So, in the same way that any profession evolves over time, I don't see it as ironic or insulting to say that planners were wrong for quite a long time.

There are still very powerful car-building, road-building, and status-quo interests that don't want to see change because they benefit from it. And so, to a certain degree, plans to advance these goals will find themselves pitted against [the] status quo, as CNU has been from the very beginning, right?

It’s revolutionary. I don't know if it's [a] revolution. I think a political revolution is characterized by the people who are in power losing power. And while the change represented by both the Planners’ Pledge and the CNU represents perhaps working against the interest of those in power, it doesn't mean they have to lose their position of power, right? So if those in power change their outlook and their actions, we don't need to topple any regimes.

ZT: Do you think CNU, and New Urbanism generally, is always consistent in ideology? Or do you think there are tensions?

JS: Well on the one hand, as Ellen Dunham-Jones likes to say, the CNU is a forum, not a formula. On the other hand, the Charter for New Urbanism [is] a very clear and straightforward statement of a set of principles that have been absolutely consistent over the year and have existed unchanged until this year, as we hope to add some more to them, right. But I do think there’s a lot of people in CNU who hold varying opinions on issues that surround the Charter but aren't necessarily in the Charter. So I think that most CNU participants embrace almost everything in the Charter. It's very interesting to find, for example, that there are people at the CNU who hate modern architecture and only like traditional architecture. There are also people at CNU who feel the opposite. So there's a great variety of opinions around issues surrounding the Charter, but not in the Charter.

ZT: What do you get out of CNU?

JS: It's the place where I get most of my professional education currently. I mean it's one of the only conferences I go to where I am attending sessions as opposed to just giving sessions. So I learn a lot. But the principal thing I get out of CNU, which I can tell you at my 30th CNU, is that this is where all my friends are, and I just love seeing my friends. I love sharing practices and stories with my friends. I love attending the awards and seeing the great projects, the CNU awards are to me the most important event because they show great design advancements that I can learn from and apply to my own work, and I hear about new germinating ideas that I can also apply to my own work.

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Zoe Tishaev is a recent graduate from Duke University and the Duke Initiative for Urban Studies Fellow on Transportation Alternatives and University Development.