Buffalo Lands 2014 Congress for the New Urbanism Conference

Oh god. "Back to Basics" like cupolas, watercolor renderings and clocks with roman numerals.

awesome.

Wonderful news! Our heartfelt congratulations and thanks to George!

Fantastic news! Between this and the National Trust conference this fall, Buffalo is really starting to be recognized and appreciated for its historic traditional neighborhoods. This will be a great opportunity to get more exposure for Buffalo to people who love cities and historic neighborhoods.

I hope the city uses the next three years as an opportunity to ramp up efforts to improve Buffalo's urban design. Three years is enough time for a lot of improvements - better street infrastructure and furniture, more and better bicycle infrastructure, several significant downtown projects should be complete by then (Hotel Lafayette, the Curtiss building, hopefully the Statler and AM&A's, etc.).

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Central Planners are coming to town. Yippee, not. I'm getting a feeling of deja vu. "Those who designed the Soviet economic system began with a belief that "the problem with capitalism is that it produces for profit instead of for people's needs," and they set out to build a system that produced directly for people's needs and not at all for profit."

Thank you to the Buffalo Niagara Convention & Visitors Bureau, Mayor Byron Brown, and Mayor Paul Dyster for taking the leading role in bringing CNU to town!

It will be drum circles by the grain elevators.

Great news! Nice job to everyone that worked on this.

Be still my tumescence.

yahoooooooo! first the national trust and now cnu. the national rediscovery of buffalo is underway!

Good stuff, though I must confess that I have never heard of CNU. Sure do hope that the Buff doesn't get too darn progressive, though. :)

By the looks of the pictures,the stores better start stocking up on Granola and crocs.

I attended CNU 17 in Denver a couple of years ago. During the conference, I thought "You know, Buffalo would be an ideal host for a CNU congress." There's enough hotel space to accommodate the number of expected attendees, it has the kind of high-density urban mixed-use neighborhoods that the NU crowd is drawn to, and maybe by the time a conference rolls around, Buffalo will have adopted some kind of form-based zoning, as Denver was in the process of doing in 2009.

The one shortcoming of Buffalo as a location for CNU 22? Unlike the Denver area, where it's nearly impossible to throw Andres Duany's MacBook without hitting an example of new urbanism and transit-oriented development, there's no new urbanist development in the Buffalo area. Mobile workshops would have to place an emphasis on learning from "old urbanism", and from the mistakes of attempting to suburbanize Buffalo's built environment in previous decades.

Good news! John Norquist - CNU President - addressed a packed auditorium at the Burchfield Penny late last year. Jacques Gourguechon, Carl Montante and Rocco Termini joined the panel discussion. Post and podcast of his remarks, here: http://fixbuffalo.blogspot.com/2010/11/norquist-on-buffalos-future.html

Design-based solutions don't work to solve social, economic and government ills, all which are more pressing that in WNY than development. We're a region with population decline and belief it or not, a decline in new home construction, so where exactly is NU relevant in WNY? It's not.

The sad thing is, WNY holds up the Partners as this organization of experience and skill when it's nothing more than a few blowhards with a hobby.

Want proof? Dig a little deeper into Grasser's background. The guy has made money on development as an investor. He tried a pathetic AUTO-DEPENDENT NU project in Lewisto called the Gardens at Oxbow that has never been completed and is a failure, in fact, he has struggled to move any properties there in the 5+ year history of the project.

The rest of the Partners are just jokers.

Partners=New Millenium=Fill-in-the-name-of-another-single-issue group

This conference would be even more helpful if their ideas could be implemented- except we live in Buffalo, and politics is messy

By the way, isn't this news HUGE? I and so many other people I know can't stop being excited about it. :D

Here's how the Boston Globe article linked in davvid's comment summarizes the alternative to NU:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/01/30/green_building
"...And instead of pushing people closer together in service of achieving density, as New Urbanism advocates, landscape urbanism allows for the possibility of an environmentally friendly future that includes spacious suburbs, and doesn’t demand that Americans stop driving their convenient cars.

Americans have decided how they want to live, they argue, and the job of urban designers is to intelligently accommodate them while finding ways to protect the environment.

The movement has rapidly been gaining traction: Its proponents are ascending to prominent positions at architecture schools, its practitioners have won significant commissions around the world, and respected publications like ArchitectureBoston and the European journal Topos have recently devoted nearly entire issues to their ideas. ..."

At least one of you really seems to dislike when the r-word is used on here, but the alternative sounds more in touch with the current reality (sorry, Armchair) that there's many people who choose lower density suburbanism instead of higher density settings.

The ultimate failure of new urbanism is not its tendency to become nostalgia oriented. There is nothing in new urbanism that prevents good urban oriented contemporary design. That said the philosophy is dominated by people who do want buildings to be historicy.

The real failure of new urbanism is that because of the way we do things now and how our economy always values big over small it leaves out piece by piece organic development in favor of mega mastermind development - all at one time with a mega planner and a mega developer projects. You can't just plunk a big town down all at one time based on the minds of a half dozen people and expect to get the real richness of the urban spaces found in a city built over many generations.

In many cases new urban developments are just sprawl that is a bit more palatable.

I think you're right, Steel, though that's changing. Andres Duany for instance has been talking a great deal about "slow development," where density and the mix of uses can be built up over time. That's especially applicable to places like Buffalo, where infill is the answer and many neighborhoods simply cannot, because of economic realities, suddenly become a functioning urban village. Most of the prominent new urbanist projects that people criticize are indeed the very large new mixed-use subdivisions or resort towns, because they are "exceptions" to the typical character of development. However, a few infill houses or a hamlet built up over time into something bigger is as much an example of Nwe Urbanism as Seaside, Florida.

As for nostalgic design, I'd take the position that any very well-executed traditional design is indeed better than most post-Modernist schlock out there, and also that a well-executed modern building with modern materials is rare and is welcome to contribute positively to any urban space. With the failure of so many truly monstrous and inhuman 20th century buildings, the new urbanism argues very credibly that the primary purpose of building architecture is to frame public space, not to communicate the individual genius of the designer. This runs counter to the egos of many Modernist architects.

However, the issue isn't style, but the rejection of a coherent and humanistic urbanism. The New Urbanism argues that architecture should rightly derive from local climate, topography, history, and building practice. Modern architecture can do all of those things, but Modernism is frequently motivated by a hostile and ideological opposition to indigineous cultures and traditions.

In "Learning From Las Vegas" Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown used the tawdry built environment of Las Vegas as a laboratory to study the realities of contemporary architecture there at that time. There is a tradition in architecture of observing and interpreting naturally occurring phenomena with suspended judgment before designing in response to those conditions with an eye on the past as well as developments in art, philosophy, economics, science etc. This is why architecture culture, with its alienating language, seems to always be reassessing and redefining what it is and what it should be doing. Its trying to get a grip on an ever-changing reality.

A regular theme in the comments on this site is "differing views on reality." I'm beginning think that I should just conclude this by deciding that New Urbanism simply isn't for everyone. It isn't designed to be an approach that is broad and nimble enough to respond to all circumstances or all "realities." Its a resistance movement that appeals to sympathetic constituencies for different reasons. "Neotraditional" isn't an alternative to "Contemporary." Neotraditional is a subcategory of Contemporary. Contemporary is that broader reality of wild (maybe unsustainable) complexity that we all participate in.

A fun contemporary sidenote: When you search "neotraditional" in google images you get a surprising mix of homes like this and tattoos like this.