New Urbanism and Urbanist Media

The professional urbanism world needs to speak to the average American

Following my weekend in Seattle (my wife had a conference there, so we went early to spend a couple of days together there), I flew to Cincinnati for the joint Strong Towns National Gathering and the 32nd Congress for the New Urbanism conference.

I’ll not surprisingly have a lot to write about, both the city and the material in all the sessions and presentations. I took a lot of notes, like a writer/journalist/general media person would.

And that’s what I’m going to think about a little bit here. Aside from one presentation during the Strong Towns half on reporting and generally writing about traffic/crashes/car stuff from a more urbanist perspective, there was very little material, especially at the CNU conference, that touched at all on communications or media.

On the one hand, I kind of understand that. CNU especially is very professionalized—a predominant number of attendees seem to be planners, engineers, architects, or otherwise “industry” people. Relatively few are laypeople with a side interest in urbanism, or even full-time advocates, journalists, or communicators of some sort. There are more of these folks in Strong Towns—it’s a more populist organization with a more bottom-up orientation, not to mention a smaller staff and reach. Strong Towns also has a surprisingly strong local ground game, which is based on local conversations and meetings, so there’s that.

But as someone who writes this daily newsletter with a predominant focus on urbanism, writes regularly for a new (as in recently founded) urbanist web magazine, and generally has come to understand the importance of communicating these ideas as well as implementing them in government and the building industry, I think something is missing.

During one panel—a lunchtime discussion between a bunch of New Urbanist founding luminaries—one of the founders said, following an arcane discussion over one-way streets or something, that (I’m paraphrasing), If people want to walk out the door over boring, technical discussions like this, good, we don’t want them. We’re an elite organization and we take these kinds of discussions seriously, and we want members who do too.

I couldn’t escape a little twinge of the feeling—and a few other attendees, including a couple much older than me, said much the same—that the official New Urbanism movement, once a revolutionary vehicle for restoring traditional urbanism in a modern context, is now an ossified and curmudgeonly organization, and that conference 32 may not have been substantially different from conference 31 or 25 or 20. That the younger, newer members walking out the door over the arcane and elitist tilt of the organization are exactly the sorts of people who once got this movement off the ground, and who absolutely have a role to play in the movement writ large.

At one panel—actually, the same one, with the old founders—one of them turned for a moment to the half-empty room and asked how many of us actually worked in the industry. He rattled off a bunch of professions, including “landscape architect,” of which there was one or two. One woman in the room raised her hand and yelled out “Journalist!” That one did not occur to the founder.

Urbanism, as an idea and as a set of organizations, has struggled since its resurgence in the 1990s with the weirdness of being an old status quo that is viewed as a radical, newfangled idea. To bridge that gap, it’s necessary to build, yes. But it’s also necessary to talk. To communicate, to explain. Not to the same old people who know it all already, but to the vast majority of the country out there—90 percent, 95 percent—who couldn’t even explain what “urbanism” means, let alone why it might be a good thing.

In a country with a forgotten urban heritage and a current anti-urban bias, urbanism has to be an ecumenical, evangelical movement. The best, most effective urbanists I know are laypeople who feel…transformed by what they’ve discovered. Who feel that urbanism, writ large, is a skeleton key for so many of America’s problems: long commutes, soul-crushing traffic, loneliness and isolation for children and the elderly, the deteriorating social lives of adults, family life eaten up by traveling here and traveling there, too much stuff and too little connection, low birth rates, the diminishment of religious faith, a sense of friction and difficulty from everything being so damn spread out and far apart.

In many ways, the public policy discussion comes after the moment of realization: all of these burdens are a choice, and our current land-use status quo imposes an immeasurable social and emotional tax on everybody, every day, all the time.

The role those of us play in this movement who are communicators—social media posters, advocates, communications staff of small, local urbanist organizations, writers, and journalists—is that of translating the elitism and the wonkery into something intelligible. Of conveying in plain language what we’re talking about. There still isn’t anywhere near enough of this.

And it’s not terribly auspicious to me to see that after three decades, there isn’t a clear acknowledgement of the need for building that bridge between the practitioners and the laypeople, and some recognition of those—many more, and many better, than me—who are trying to build it.

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Related Reading:

Urbanist Ecumenism

Have You Ever Seen A City?

Density Of Stuff

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