Found the Mother Ship!
Providence , June 4, 2006 – I found the mother ship. It landed in Providence, RI this June. More specifically, it landed at the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) XIV conference June 1 – 4.
When I heard Andres Duany, one of the principal architects of New Urbanism, pronounce to the packed crowd of 1,000+ how ridiculous it was to address the problem of juvenile diabetes by removing vending machines from schools and recommending nutritional labeling be in larger print, I sat straight up. What?! Someone else on the planet saw this as ludicrous and simplistic?
We were having this discussion in a session called Urbanism At The Tipping Point. And, somehow, it all made sense to be having a discussion about soda pop, candy bars and New Urbanism at the tipping point. Hmm, something was up here.
With just one charrette under my belt, I had the rare privilege of being a part of the communications team to coordinate the online efforts to blog CNU XIV. (Thanks Scott Doyon of PlaceMakers for your confidence or maybe a weak moment of total insanity?) I worked with enormously talented and seasoned NUers like Ben Brown, Steve Filmanowicz, Payton Chung and a host of other nationally known writers and photographers. We even had a film documentarian that arrived with absolutely no place to stay (lucky search on CraigsList found him a spare room with a college student). And newbies like Marco Negro showed up and contributed volumes to the process.
In-between the flood of online article and photo postings, I ducked into as many sessions as my brain would allow. Malespace: ‘Tant None. The Post-Carbon Society: Hate to tell you this, but we are on a real short timeline here. And, as James Kunstler so aptly put it, “Technology does not – repeat - does not, fill up the fuel tank.”
The breadth and depth of the sessions confirmed my pre-conference suspicions. New Urbanists “got it going on.” They are serious about preserving the planet, increasing quality of life, making communities affordable and fabulously interesting. They are solutions focused with real-life solutions in hand. They are holistic, unbelievably multidisciplinary and really kinda crazy. I think passion does that to you. Andres summed it up best after he finished talking about soda pop and candy bars, “Human beings are complex. When it comes to creating community, you just can’t dumb it down.”
At the end of the exhaustive four days, I knew I had been challenged. Not by the demands of the conference, but by what this new knowledge now demanded of me. Of course I knew of the issues addressed such as global warming and suburban sprawl and the tentacles of weighty issues surrounding them both. But I did not un-der-stand. Now, I had both a deeper, panicked understanding and a no excuse not to get involved epiphany that these New Urbanists have a playbook. As I walked to the back of the room, leaving Julian Darley’s looming slide presentation of The Post-Carbon Society, I said a silent, “OK. I get it. How could I ever say to my children that I knew and did nothing?”
Which is why I’ve gone towards the light and have gleefully boarded the mother ship for the ride of my life.