“We’ve become obsessed by it.” - CNU Co-Founder reflects on climate change, and how “new urbanism” has changed in 32 years.
This is part of nine-part series where three Duke students ask three questions to architects, planners, and figures at the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU 32) in Cincinnati.
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.
Andrés Duany is an architect, planner, co-founder of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company design firm (DPZ), and co-founder of the Congress for New Urbanism. Duany has been a central figure in new urbanism, and reflects on the shifts in focus of CNU since its founding. The following interview has been shortened for brevity.
ZT: You've been involved with CNU for a while, obviously. How have you seen CNU change in the last 32 sessions?
AD: Well, I was there before CNU. And there was a lot of pre-history for the first conference and I think that it was serendipitously the right people… there were a lot of coincidences that had to happen. I'm not sure that the movement was inevitable. I know the time had come for a reform, but this could easily not have happened… But because of serendipity, and a bunch of people that tended to say “yes” -- they tend to say “yes, let's do it” – a lot of positive energy, it happened.
At the beginning it was by invitation. So it was elite. The idea was that it would only be people that we could learn from. That it wasn't about teaching. Many of us were already teachers and knew how to-- we had the chance to teach because we were in universities and so forth. And what we wanted to do was to learn. And so the first two congresses: we're all experts. Which is different now, because now there's so many people coming in that are younger and starting that we have a much stronger teaching agenda. So that's a huge difference. The second phase was driven by fighting NIMBYism. And so, since NIMBYism arose out of the problems that arose out of suburbia. And we could actually document that we were not part of the problem, but part of the solution. We were sort of NIMBY Busters. It was the third phase that was there was a very, very academic, rigorous health agenda run by Joanna Lombard among others that got the statistics that proved that living in these communities were good for health and, because of walkability and because of sociability, broke social isolation. And so I thought that, “wow, this is great. We're now associated with good health. Therefore, this is going to work.” The fourth was actually climate change driven, because of tailpipe emissions. And we were part of that solution. We were part of the climate change agenda, and that is what's currently driving us. Mitigation happens at a very high level, you know, policy, United Nations, tax brakes for solar farms, right? And it's kind of at a higher level than us. But adaptation happens at our scope because you have to localize it. As things go along, you have to localize your food supply, your energy supply, your security, your governance, etcetera, and that's our scale.
ZT: You talked yesterday about the shift away from like the little things, the street lights that make people look good, small things. How has that coincided with the change in values and the purpose of CNU?
AD: I think that we indeed are effective in affecting tailpipe emissions, in lowering carbon emissions. The problem is that we’ve become obsessed by it. Like if we somehow cut the vehicle miles traveled, or raise the density, or put in the streetcar, we give you a medal: “Ohh, you get an award!” Now, the thing can probably look like a bowl of porridge, and you still get it to work. You see what I'm saying? “Ohh, it's a transit oriented whatever,” and that’s it.
What happens is that the obsession with tailpipe emissions distracts us from a much earlier, much more subtle new urbanism. Have you taken the streetcar here? Well, the streetcar has really bad lighting. It makes everyone look like shit. And the thing is that it's the wrong light bulb, which actually dissuades you from using the streetcar, even though you think it doesn’t. It doesn't give you that feeling, you know that – “this feels good, I look good,” you know? Now, every restaurant knows about lighting or it shuts in two seconds.
If your family is a young family, I [as a planner] can affect your life between leaving home, dropping the kid in school and getting to work. Which is essentially a pretty chunk of time, because the kid has to be in school by 7:30, and you work at 9:00. So what do the parents do in that extra hour? You can do a lot in that extra hour if you design the town right. Like for example, you have the gym there, or you can have the coffee shop right next to the school so that you socialize, or you can have laundry there and leave it in the morning. Which means the school needs to be next to the shopping center.
We used to talk about that all the time. All this subtle stuff, right. And now, tailpipe emissions, you get a medal, let's have a beer. And I don't like the dumbing down of things.
ZT: What should we do to bring it back to its roots?
AD: There's a book just written about children, by a guy called Haidt, professor at NYU, and everybody's reviewing it. And it's got every solution to the problem of children except urbanism. It's unbelievable, but the kids can't walk anywhere. And yet we all walked. I mean, you know, it's like you actually know people that walked everywhere. It’s now all dead. I mean, it's in memory. It's in living memory that everyone walked to school. I’ve actually interviewed people when I was learning this. There’s this older Black guy in Stuart, Florida, I said, tell me what your life was like. I’d say, “what’d you do in the morning?” he’d say, I dropped by the drugstore, say hello to this, and I want this. Honestly, I cried. I was so emotional, it was beautiful, what his life was like. All the people he knew, and where he went, and he went to the drugstore and everything. It just broke me up, I couldn’t believe it, it was so gone. But the guy was totally 50 [years old]. So it’s really recent that all this stuff has gone away. It's not like the Middle Ages where, you know, people say, “Well, that's not going to come back.” No, it actually was there, you know.
I think we're really good at doing affordable housing that doesn't implode socially. People love HOPE VI [a US Housing and Urban Development program], it doesn’t crash. It's the first public housing that doesn’t crash. It’s pretty amazing, when you think about it. We totally invented it. So that is something that's so niche. But once we withdraw from HOPE VI, that stuff is going to crash. I can say, oh, you're back to corridors? Where people get mugged? Well, you better have a doorman or somebody that checks you in.They’re making all the mistakes again. But it’s new. The plumbing is new, so you're happy for a while, but you know, it's just going to, it's making all the mistakes that we knew about and we're not transmitting. The way people don't know these rules now, like you all. You should just walk in every morning and in two hours get the rules that prevent crimes. It’s not rocket science. Somebody figured it out in 1960. And we used to know it.
Have you heard of Oscar Newman? He did the studies. And it's not the looks, I think what they're doing now looks good, but it’s not going to work right. It's not about the looks. “Oh, that looks so good. Oh, they’ll just love this,” And that’s the problem.
Zoe Tishaev is a recent graduate of Duke University. You can find her coverage of last year’s CNU, hosted in our backyard in Charlotte, NC, here.
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