We’re joined in the studio by Mallory Baches, President of the Congress for the New Urbanism, who was in town to plan their 2027 conference in Minneapolis. Come listen in on our conversation!
Links
- Further listening: our conversation with CNU board member Spencer Miller-Johnson about zoning mixed-use corridors
- The Year Without Sunshine by Naomi Kritzer (text and audio versions available)
- CNU’s RFP for 2027 Legacy Projects
Attributions
Our theme song is Tanz den Dobberstein, and our interstitial song is Puck’s Blues. Both tracks used by permission of their creator, Erik Brandt. Find out more about his band, The Urban Hillbilly Quartet, on their website.
This episode was produced, edited, and transcribed by Ian R Buck. Many thanks to Mallory Baches for coming on the show! We’re always looking to feature new voices on the show, so if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [email protected].
Transcript
[00:00:02] Ian: Welcome to the Streets.mn podcast, the show where we highlight how transportation and land use can make our communities better places. Coming to you from beautiful uptown Minneapolis, Minnesota, I am your host, Ian R. Buck. Did you know that the Congress for the New Urbanism will be hosting their annual conference in Minneapolis next year? It’s true, and as part of their preparations for the event, their president, Mallory Baches, was in town to help with the planning. She stopped by our studio for a chat before heading out of town. Please enjoy our conversation. So the Congress for the New Urbanism, it sounds like a very particular title, a particular name, right? Let’s break down the different parts of that. What does it all mean?
[00:00:50] Mallory: Absolutely. Yep. So first, Congress. We are named a Congress because we are an activated, organizing group of people. We are a membership-based organization. The organization came together sort of by virtue of like-minded people finding each other, realizing that they shared a passion for walkability and sustainability and equity in the cities and towns that they were working in, regardless of their discipline. Folks from pretty much any professional discipline that impacts the built environment, but also just advocates, you know, community members who want to see more inclusive, more participatory, more accessible urbanism in their own communities. You know, “Congress,” the implication there is that we debate a little bit, and we do. A very big part of our “why” of coming together is to share knowledge with each other, but also to push for improvements in our work and in the development patterns that exist across the country. So that’s where “Congress” comes from. “New urbanism.” Often, I will tell you, we’re in our 35th year, so often somewhat debated. Is it still new? And was it ever new?
[00:02:22] Ian: What was the old?
[00:02:24] Mallory: What was the old urbanism? Really, I think it’s important to give context to the fact that when CNU was coming together, there had been a movement of folks regularly gathering before the organization was founded in 1993. Cities had gone through nearly a generation of people leaving cities, of abandoning the cores of cities, and the sort of tantalizing appeal of the newness of suburbia. And the founders of our organization, that founding generation, were promoting the fact that we could go back to building cities and towns the way human beings have done nearly our entire existence, of proximity to each other, mutual benefit to the ways that buildings are placed and how people are able to interact with each other as a result. It was new to think about that in that way in 1993.
[00:03:31] Ian: New in the sense that we wouldn’t be able to achieve this kind of urbanism within the current context, without intentionality, whereas hundreds of years ago it came about organically because each of those individual pieces just made sense on their own.
[00:03:49] Mallory: It was very pragmatic to live close to your neighbor who you might need to borrow things from, or whom you might have some relationship with in one way or another. It was new to think about mixing uses. It was new to think about mobility that wasn’t simply the personal vehicle. It was new to really focus on the interactive needs of community and how our buildings and our streets and our businesses and our organizations need to interact with each other, as opposed to being sort of siloed out into an office park and a cul-de-sac of residential housing and a district for medical offices. All of that separation and segregation had become reinforced by pretty much every system that informs what our cities and towns look like by the financial systems, the way capital was flowing, by the zoning and regulatory systems, and the way that buildings were allowed to be placed on land by the transportation systems and where priorities were being set for funding and for allocation of space by decision-making around who could be where. And we’re about progress. We’re not satisfied with a single accomplishment of improving cities. Cities are evolutionary in nature. Human beings are evolutionary in nature.
[00:05:37] Ian: And the improvement is a process.
[00:05:38] Mallory: That’s right. That’s right. So newness is not something to be, you know, it’s not newness for newness sake. It’s pushing to understand how we can better serve humanity by the way that we build the structures and systems that humanity coexists within.
[00:05:59] Ian: Nice. And is there any particular reason that there’s a “the” in the middle?
[00:06:06] Mallory: [laughter] Well, in fact, yes, that was very intentional. You know, when we talk about “the” new urbanism, there’s sort of two angles to that. The risk of getting a bit nerdy here, as if I haven’t already.
[00:06:20] Ian: That is the purpose of this show.
[00:06:23] Mallory: [laughter] Yeah. So the new urbanism is both the set of ideas. I put a pin in that because I want to talk about that. And it’s also the people. It’s the movement. It’s the fact that we are a group of people who see in ourselves and in each other a shared vision for how cities and towns and neighborhoods can be more fulfilling and supportive. And so, you know, there are times when I’m referring to the new urbanists or the new urbanism, actually a big to be particularly nerdy. A big topic of conversation is when to use those words as a proper noun and capitalize versus, if your grammar nerd, you know, when not to. In some context, that is referencing the people. The new urbanism, we are not simply an association that sort of, you know, alludes to ideas. The wisdom of the original generation of participants in this organization, the wisdom that they had to document their ideas with a charter, which is the charter of the new urbanism. Originally a preamble and then 27 principles that documented what that vision looks like in built form and in systemic sort of operation as well.
[00:07:54] Ian: Which is tying back to the Congress thing as well. This is feeling very Congressy.
[00:07:58] Mallory: Yes. The U.S. Constitutional Congress was definitely a model that our founders, you know, sort of thought towards when they were determining how to come together. The charter originally, I think, was conceived of as a, you know, a complete document. And over the what took about 30 years, the consideration that it might need to be a living document that, in fact, in a generation of applying these ideas and ideals that we might have learned more or new challenges had become evident. And, you know, in how cities come together or what obstacles exist to cities, you know, improving in it and evolving.
[00:08:46] Ian: Yeah, because 30 years ago was almost exactly when we got our first painted bike lane in Minnesota on Summit Avenue in St. Paul. Yeah. And at the time that was like peak design, right? Yeah. And now we’re considering the reconstruction of Summit and what should the bike lane look like, you know, now that we… have we learned anything new in the last 30 years? Who’s to say?
[00:09:10] Mallory: Well, and I like to point out that new urbanists don’t think about cities solely in three dimensions. We think about them, you know, in time and space. And so, you know, we’re we’re thinking about the fact that people populate these cities and the people change. And also that over time, you know, if you look, if we just look out along the street, we’re going to see evidence of different eras of this neighborhood’s existence. And, you know, whether that’s through the types of architecture and the buildings that sort of daylight to you. “Oh, that was built in a, you know, 20 years later than that building next door,” or whether it’s, you know, the landscape and the, you know, the age of that landscape. And and in some ways, you know, the systems and what sort of say mobility devices are prioritized or not. And with that perspective in mind, you know, you can recognize that people’s needs change people’s understandings of their surroundings change. The one I think about a lot is that if you had said to my younger self in architecture school that there would come a time where I could call any number of needs or uses directly to me through something that I was holding in my hand. I would have thought that was crazy because personal cellular phones as a calling device was still not something that many people had. And that’s had a radical, that technology has had a radical implication on cities and how we interact with each other and communicate with each other. Yes, but also what we have access to what we have knowledge about how we how we can interpret our surroundings. Because this little device, you know, you can either look at a map at all times to see where you’re going or you can have it talk to you in your ear or you can find information immediately about the place that you’re at. You can call transportation to you. You can call goods and services to you. You know, all of that is a very significant shift from where we might have been in 1993. Then, interestingly, at the same time, there’s, you know, those fundamental qualities of being able to walk down a street and be part of that activation of the street and also enjoy the experience of being part of that activation of the street. That are, you know, sort of go beyond what a, you know, personal computer and in the palm of your hand might, you know, might tell you about the city.
[00:12:04] Ian: Yeah. You just made me think of, you know, the phrase like “you’re not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.” You just made me think of the the the opposite end of that spectrum is like, well, “I’m not just enjoying the activation of this street. I am part of the activation of this street whenever I’m walking there.” That’s kind of beautiful. I’m going to have to remember that for later.
[00:12:27] Mallory: I have another one for you because I lived in a very early example of new urbanism, a greenfield project outside Beaufort, South Carolina. It’s called Habersham. Some of my friends and I used to purposefully walk through the middle of the streets. Now, granted, it was well designed streets and it was, you know, relatively slow moving traffic. And so, you know, we used to joke about, you know, we all of us were the traffic calming in that neighborhood.
[00:12:52] Ian: Yeah. Yeah. OK, so we’re chatting right now because you are currently planning your next big annual conference going to take place here in Minneapolis next June, June of 2027. Yeah. What’s going into that planning? Like, why are you here in person right now?
[00:13:10] Mallory: Why am I here? Well, we joke at CNU that it is always Congress season. We just finished our 34th Congress in May and over the summer we have been at the sort of kickoff stage of this 35th Congress. So I’m here right now in person to help kick off that momentum in earnest. And so we’ve been having meetings with the two local co-chairs for the Congress: Ryan Kelley, he’s at Hennepin County and then Spencer Miller-Johnson, who’s at the city of St. Paul and is also one of my CNU board members.
[00:13:54] Ian: And has appeared on the podcast before. I’ll have to pull up a link to that.
[00:13:58] Mallory: Fantastic. And I’d be remiss to leave out Lucy Thompson, longtime planning director of the city of St. Paul. She’s retired now, but we’ve been calling her our local co-chair emeritus because she’s just our little piece of wisdom on the history of the Twin Cities. And Margaret, my colleague and I have been here meeting with those folks, but also how to get together for folks who are going to help volunteer to bring this event together. And, you know, sort of activating the individual committees. We have committees for, you know, certainly fundraising and some of the engagement and outreach that the Congress will need to bring folks to the event itself. But also tours. You know, we do tours as part of the content. We have folks that, you know, are going to work on helping bring volunteers so that, you know, we can make sure everybody’s going in the right direction, knows where to be, and has the help they need when they come to the Congress. And we’ve also been exploring some of the sites that we want folks to see and learn from and understand and, you know, where we’re going to host different events at the Congress as well. So it’s been, you know, sort of that big kickoff that we need to do to get things rolling.
[00:15:20] Ian: Yeah. Over the weekend, one of my friends organized a bunch of us to go on a riverboat tour in downtown Minneapolis. And we were like, yeah, this is the kind of like touristy thing that we like hardly ever do in our own town. And so any time that there’s somebody who’s visiting from out of town and they ask like, “what should I do?” I’m almost always at a loss like, oh, yeah, wait, I need to think about.
[00:15:44] Mallory: What are the things that out of towners would do here? Well, and, you know, in any given Congress location, we move the event to a different city every year. And in any location, we sort of average about maybe a third of the attendees and we get about fifteen hundred attendees. So maybe a third of those five hundred or so are coming from the local host region. And oftentimes it’s folks who they may not be longtime active members of CNU, but they know about the organization’s work and or the organization’s work intercepts what they do day to day. And like I said, we have, our audience is everybody from planners and architects to developers to transportation engineers and officials to elected officials to, you know, folks who work in public health, folks who work in different social sciences that study the impacts of urbanism on folks’ well-being. All of these different folks might not from one year to the next go to every single Congress. But when it’s in your backyard and I can say that because one year the Congress was in my backyard. I live in Savannah, Georgia now. And and and so that’s it’s both an opportunity to see these ideas in your own sort of personal environment and the work that you do every day. But it’s also an opportunity to show off the accomplishments that your community has been able to do. And so that’s that’s part of the excitement, too. We the Congress is certainly a conference, but we take a very intentional approach to this gathering as one that we want to have a purposeful impact on the local region to to help those folks that are working to improve their neighborhoods and their systems and structures and built environment in general to help put momentum behind that work, to help demonstrate that that work has meaning. It has positive impacts on real people’s lives and, you know, sort of give a bit of oomph to the day-to-day work that we know folks in the region are doing to, you know, improve the Twin Cities for everybody who lives here.
[00:18:04] Ian: Yeah. So what drew you to choose Minneapolis for this next year? Because, like, I’ve we had NACTO this year. Last year, I forget what the name of the conference that was here in April. But like The War on Cars had a live show in conjunction with that, so they could like draw a lot of people. It feels like we’ve had a lot of there’s a lot of attention, a lot of attention on Minneapolis right now.
[00:18:27] Mallory: That’s fair. CNU originally intended to come to the Twin Cities in 2020.
[00:18:34] Ian: Huh. Okay, yeah, there was some attention on the Twin Cities at that time as well.
[00:18:39] Mallory: Yeah, there was. In fact, I can recall clearly I was working at CNU in a different role. We were at our spring board meeting in D.C. where we’re headquartered in that second week of March 2020, when pretty much everything was shutting down around us. And the covid pandemic was becoming something we were not just wondering about, but knew was a crisis. And we had to accept the fact that the government was telling us we couldn’t gather large crowds. And so this we just simply couldn’t bring folks to the Twin Cities even if we wanted to. And so that year we converted to a virtual congress, did everything, you know, through our computer screens. And since that time and, you know, I don’t want to fail to point out an extraordinary amount of work by the local team went into planning, you know, like I said, all the tours and the fundraising and the special events and the specialty content, all of those things that educational programming that we were going to do. And so, you know, that takes a lot of work. It’s a lot of commitment. And, you know, then to not have that come to fruition is pretty disappointing for the locals and for CNU. And so Margaret and I have been sort of waiting until folks were sort of ready to tackle that again. We didn’t want to fail to come to this region. And because there’s so much to learn from and and I think so much encouragement to give as well. And so, you know, Ryan and Spencer and Margaret and I were sitting yesterday thinking about how much has changed since 2020. But by the same token that there’s so much more to learn. There’s so much more to gain from the changes and the improvements and the challenges that the Twin Cities have faced.
[00:20:38] Ian: Yeah, I hope that you’re planning on showcasing, you know, giving people tours of like both downtown and also like other, you know, uptown, northeast. Right. Like, the street activation feels very, very different. In those different parts of Minneapolis.
[00:20:55] Mallory: Yeah, for sure. One of the things that I was somewhat familiar with the Twin Cities before I started coming here to, you know, work on these congresses. One of the things I really personally love and I think is particularly compelling to new urbanism. The Twin Cities are, you know, cities of neighborhoods and people really know and understand their neighborhoods as as, you know, units of social connection and as places where there are assets and amenities, you know, and all that sort of real estate speak. But like there are choices to be made from one neighborhood to another that, you know, you might want to live in very close proximity to a lake or you might want to live in very close proximity to a high concentration of employment. Or you might want to live close to the U. There’s, you know, and that these neighborhoods or you might just want to visit from one neighborhood to the next. Right. But, you know, we were before this talking about particular neighborhoods that are the kind of places that on a beautiful Sunday evening, you’re going to want to take a stroll down the street and, you know, grab an ice cream. They’re destinations in and of themselves because they each have their own character and culture and histories and, you know, challenges for sure. And also communities surrounding them that really authenticate what that place is all about. But our understandings of the importance of interconnection since the pandemic, just as people, it’s just changed so radically. And so it’s wonderful to be coming to a city with these, you know, strong neighborhood infrastructure in place and think about what that means more clearly, more intentionally.
[00:22:44] Ian: Yeah. Yeah. And we definitely put that on display this last winter, the strong cohesion of the community here in the Twin Cities.
[00:22:53] Mallory: That is very true. We knew we were going to be coming here. And I think that the two sides of the violence that came to the Twin Cities that, from my perspective, is something we want to be very thoughtful about, but also very clear and straightforward about. Is that our neighborhoods and our public realm can be the the lifeblood of our communities. And it is also clearly in the Twin Cities and across the country still a geography in contest that that it is space that can be weaponized against human beings and against their livelihood, against their lives. And so that’s something that we can talk about walking to the corner to get an ice cream with our friends. And in the same token, we have to recognize that that public realm is or should be precious. And when it is a landscape for violence, when it is a landscape for oppression, that is something that we as, you know, as citizens have to be able to take seriously and recognize that there are ways where design reinforces the propensity for that kind of violence. And there’s ways where design can be a tool to help communities come together, to help communities fight back against violence. Spencer and I have been talking a lot about the opportunity for gathering and how important that is to democracy, that the public realm is the place where people, you know, new urbanists often talk about how important it is to meet your neighbors. You know, Jane Jacobs and Death and Life of Great American Cities and how fundamental knowing your neighbors and knowing people other than, you know, just your immediate circle of friends and family, especially when they’re different from you, is so important to, you know, our own humanity and that the public realm is where that takes place. And so, you know, on the one hand, like I say, it can be a space where people are not safe, but the public realm is also where that gathering and that community building can come together. It’s where, you know, communities need to take back their own agency, that they’re able to do that. It’s hard to do that quietly in your own home, in your own residence. Where you do that is when you come together with people that you collectively have a shared goal of how you want to protect your community, how you want to stand up for your community, and the public realm is where that happens.
[00:25:45] Ian: Yeah, yeah. And, like, we saw this playing out in some pretty concrete ways with, like, you know, the folks here in the core of the Twin Cities and a lot of folks in the suburbs of the Twin Cities, like, in large part shared values, right? Shared desired reactions to the ICE occupation of our communities, but the built environment provided different opportunities for that. And I saw a lot of people who live in the suburbs, like, saying how much more difficult it was to respond effectively. Because they didn’t have, like, the kind of density of people just, you know, around to see, like, what’s going on. You know, there were, you know, people who would, like, “okay, I got to tail this one ICE vehicle in my vehicle. I’m the only person who’s doing this right now. Like, I’m the only person who’s seeing what’s happening.”
[00:26:47] Mallory: “And if something happens to me, is anyone seeing that?”
[00:26:51] Ian: Exactly. Yes. Yes. Which, yeah, like… it is incredible how many different camera angles we had of, like, Alex Pretti’s murder. Because it like all of us knew, and I remember reading a newspaper article that really hit me hard of, like, how incredible it was that everybody was like, you know, “I’m out here. I’m filming because I don’t know who might be the next. Yeah, it could be the person standing next to me. It could be me. Yeah. And if somebody else is recording me, then that helps protect me as well as I’m helping to protect other people.”
[00:27:31] Mallory: Yeah, I think that the, you know, new urbanists early on, you know, on the one hand, we were coming together with a vision for how cities and neighborhoods could be. And on the other hand, there was something really clear that we were fighting against, which was this sort of mindless, baseless, placeless, sprawling machine of suburban sprawl. And I think that, you know, there’s a lot of, like, media, movies, television around the dystopia of, you know, not knowing your neighbors or being, you know, that sort of isolation that comes from separation. And, you know, the overt and subversive sort of de-identification that, you know, sometimes you can see in sprawl. The sort of joke example is, you know, the houses, we’ll call them like snout houses or whatever, but where the only opening to the house is the garage door facing the street. So, like, if you went to go meet your neighbor, would you, how would you, you would have to catch them while they were driving out of their, in their personal vehicle out of their garage. You know, that all has a certain, you know, movie quality of dystopia to it. But when it becomes…
[00:28:56] Ian: Can I give you a recommendation of a piece of fiction?
[00:29:00] Mallory: Yes, please.
[00:29:00] Ian: So local author Naomi Kritzer wrote a short story called The Year Without Sunshine. That’s something like that. That portrays a, in this case, it was a climate catastrophe of, you know, a little bit unnamed of what exactly it was. But it was like, OK, like, there’s a bunch of smoke in the air, whatever, you know, we’re not going to be getting a lot of crops, you know, from the farms this year, something, something. It was a little bit nebulous, but it was a situation where it was like the communities have to come together to support each other. And it was very explicit in the short story that, like, this neighborhood in South Minneapolis is doing pretty well because the neighbors have just, like, walked to each other’s houses and been like, “what do you need? What can I provide? What can you provide? I’m going to put up a bulletin board, you know, on the corner so that we can all coordinate.” And then, you know, there’s some contrast with what the communities in the suburbs were able to achieve and, you know, some literal conflict between those two communities based on that in the short story. And when Operation Metro Surge was taking place, I was like, “wow, I didn’t I didn’t want us to have a like Naomi Kritzer and Cory Doctorow kind of crossover event happening.”
[00:30:28] Mallory: Yeah. And look, here we are. Yeah, I well, I mean, I think, you know, I mentioned that the pandemic, I think that there’s certainly more and more reminder in our world right now that community is vitally important to our own survival. And yet, and this is where, you know, new urbanists have been talking about the importance of the built environment towards all of these, you know, very fundamental, you know, aspects of well-being. We might collectively call it safety, security, but also, you know, mental health, physical health. And, you know, it’s interesting that data, these were ideas that you could see pieces of evidence of even, you know, back in the 90s. But the way data is so broadly reinforcing those sort of principles now that, you know, the former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has talked a lot about loneliness, the loneliness epidemic and how detrimental that is to people’s mental health and physical health as well. And, you know, you can look at two different neighborhoods, you know, to your example and identify that people’s access to even just knowing their neighbors, let alone being able to have that sense of security from being able to rely on those people and interact with them in supportive ways. You can look at two neighborhoods and recognize that it’s going to be a hell of a lot easier in one than it is in the other. So, you know, I was talking to Professor Raj Chetty, who is at Harvard, and he studies social mobility, and his team studied a program that New Urbanist helped inform very directly the HOPE VI program, which was a HUD federal housing program that began in the 90s. And members of CNU, very active leadership in CNU and then the organization itself helped to draft the design principles for this particular program of taking deteriorated federal public housing projects and redeveloping them into mixed use, mixed income neighborhoods. And, like I said, CNU members helped draft those design guidelines and CNU helped support the implementation, the sort of rollout of this program helped HUD do so. And Raj Chetty’s research on social mobility, some of that work, he chose to focus on those, the performance of those neighborhoods themselves. And he found that there were substantial benefits to the children, the children whose families, you know, were below the poverty line that were living in these mixed use, mixed income neighborhoods, that those children growing up in those neighborhoods had substantially higher economic opportunities as adults. And, you know, he’s posited, he spoke about this at the Congress, he’s posited that it is the social interaction that came from the fact that it wasn’t just like great housing product. It was that children from different means, from different economic means, were able to interact with each other and that their families were able to interact with each other. And that, you know, the isolation of poverty only reinforces poverty. That when you are able to come together in community and holistically, you know, support each other, that the ability for children who might be starting out with less to, you know, access more opportunity and, you know, more economic advantages as a result is substantial. And that, you know, is a really important piece of data to reinforce the fact that your neighborhood and how well you know your neighbors and who all is included in that neighborhood is really fundamentally important to your own well-being, let alone the community’s well-being and, you know, just public health and public well-being in general.
[00:35:10] Ian: Yeah. Okay, so bringing up a talk that happened at last year’s, you know, let’s focus back on the Congress.
[00:35:22] Mallory: Go to the future.
[00:35:22] Ian: What can people expect if they choose to come to the 2027 Congress for New Urbanism- for _the_ New Urbanism?
[00:35:30] Mallory: The New Urbanism, that’s right. Well, yeah, let me tell you a little bit about what all takes place at a Congress because I certainly have been to a lot of professional conferences. The Congress is a bit different. We certainly have some of your standard, you know, educational sessions that, you know, folks are presenting work that they’ve done or ideas that they have and, you know, interacting with session attendees. And that’s that’s there. We’ll actually put a call for sessions out here in probably a couple months. I think we probably do that in October. But we’ll be, you know, promoting that here in the local region to make sure folks who are, you know, want to talk about their work in and, you know, what they’re, you know, excited about, what they’ve been promoting, what has worked, what hasn’t worked here in the Twin Cities. And we’ll have, you know, that call be national. So we’ll have folks from all over the country, you know, submitting their good ideas of what they’d like to talk about. But that’s the beginning of what we offer. We also we have tours where we make sure to get out into as many different conditions out in the Twin Cities as possible from a from a learning standpoint. You know, our attendees want to know about, you know, greenways and they want to know about neighborhoods that are are, you know, have really done a lot of work. And there’s a lot of, you know, sort of the evidence of that success. And we want to see the neighborhoods that are at the beginning stage of their own evolution and and understand what steps are being taken and what the future, you know, what the hopeful future might look like. We certainly have folks from all over the country. So we’re going to get into some of the I don’t know that I would call it touristy places, but the places that make the Twin Cities feel authentic, the places that tell us the story of the culture of this place. The tours are it’s it’s maybe a misnomer because it’s really, you know, sort of like on site educational opportunities. We also do special educational programming for different audiences within our movement. And so we’ll certainly do a full day deep dive for local government. That’ll be for, you know, staff and elected officials. And we we curate that curriculum with, you know, the expertise from folks all over the country that are working on particularly progressive, you know, reforms in their in their own, you know, location and, you know, knowledge sharing that way. In previous years, we’ve done similar educational programs for like the building and development community. We have a certification program that you can become CNU accredited and we do an all day boot camp for folks who want to go through that accreditation process as basically as opposed to the self guided learning that that program usually has. You can be with, you know, real in person instructors, experts that know this stuff inside and out.
[00:38:43] Ian: Is that targeted mostly at people who are like working in urban planning as a profession or like was this is this something that activists should look into as well?
[00:38:54] Mallory: It’s it is open to everyone and I would say that it’s accessible to everyone. It is a breadth of knowledge about all of the different characteristics that inform a good healthy urbanism. And so, you know, there’s topics about transportation in there, also urban planning, also the history of development patterns, the history of suburban sprawls, sort of, you know, manifestation and quite a bit about how to, you know, implement these ideas in the real world. And so that’s a bit why the boot camp is helpful is, you know, you’ve got folks who are practitioners in any, you know, any given discipline within the urban realm actually talking through the details of why, you know, particular ideas are important. Why physical separation on a bike lane is a lot different than a painted bike lane, for example. And so, you know, for folks who work in transportation, they might already know and understand that. But for folks who are in the real estate profession, they might, you know, gain a lot from the technical expertise that, you know, the folks, the faculty leading the boot camp can offer. We also certainly have, you know, a lot of social events and we’re a fun group. This has been a very nerdy conversation, but we have a lot of fun.
[00:40:17] Ian: Nerds can be fun!
[00:40:18] Mallory: That’s right. That’s right. And then one of the things that folks will see a bit of attention about, they may already have, is our legacy projects, which we do in conjunction with the Congress. And that is pro bono technical assistance that we bring to projects that wouldn’t otherwise, you know, have that boost of energy and, you know, professional expertise. We’ve put out an RFP already that folks listening to this may have seen for project proposals. Usually those submissions can come from municipalities. They can come from nonprofit organizations or philanthropies. They can come from community groups and community organizations that know about particular challenges in their neighborhood that deserve technical expertise to try to solve. And the legacy projects aren’t, you know, this isn’t like a, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of long term investment. This is really seen as the sort of kickstart sort of investment that can help those groups then move on to, you know, the next stages of work. But we’ve really fine tuned the way that we scope those projects so that we can make sure that these aren’t, you know, just some, you know, fancy vision boards that then sit on a shelf. But this is really, you know, practical next steps for a for a neighborhood or for a community to be able to start to address some aspect, whether it’s, you know, a street that needs redesigned, whether it’s a set of parcels that have sat vacant, whether it’s, you know, some some regulatory obstacles that a community might be facing that they need help in figuring out how to, you know, get through a reform process for those. All of those sorts of ideas that, you know, really benefit from some professionals, either from the region or from outside the region. And we match make, you know, the right expertise to the right problem space and making sure that the community gets that, you know, initial set of pro bono investment in the kind of help they need.
[00:42:36] Ian: There you go. So let’s talk about that membership. I was looking on the website and I saw like local chapters and affiliate organizations and whatnot. And I didn’t see any local chapters here in Minnesota specifically, at least nothing jumped out at me from the web page. But you mentioned that we have a few like individual members, one of whom is on the board, apparently. So like, yeah, what is what’s the makeup here? Is it? Yeah.
[00:43:06] Mallory: So the great news is that sort of in conjunction with this Congress, and it doesn’t happen every time, the Minnesota chapter is coming together. There will be a Minnesota chapter. It’s actually technically they’ve already filed with the IRS and have their 501c3 status. So technically it already exists. But they’re organizing, you know, is sort of happening. And this is wonderful. It’s happening in parallel with the Congress. And so, you know, that’s a great piece of infrastructure that not only is the chapter going to be a mechanism to help people come together and participate in the making of this Congress. But then it’s going to be an organizing tool for folks after the Congress to continue the, you know, the dialogue, to continue the energy around those legacy projects and other sort of important topics that the Congress is going to cast attention on here in the region. You know, Spencer and Ryan, they’re helping lead that charge. But there’s a small but growing group of folks that really want to be a part of carrying on the impact of Congress long term here in the Twin Cities.
[00:44:18] Ian: How do these local chapters typically fit into like the the urbanism advocacy space? Because like I and I’ve been meaning to do an episode about this, but like in the Twin Cities, especially and to some extent, greater Minnesota as well. Like we have a large family tree of different organizations that all kind of have their own little niche. But there’s a lot of overlap in like what they work on and everything. And, you know, our last podcast episode was the legislative session wrap up. And, you know, there was so I was interviewing people from like four different organizations and, you know, they were all aware of what each other were doing already because they had been working together through all of this.
[00:45:01] Mallory: Yep. Yeah, our chapter network is it’s sort of beautiful in its complexity. The chapters have evolved as a way to localize the conversation that CNU, you know, represents nationally. And I should say we have international members. We actually have an international chapter that just is coming together as well in France. But but we those chapters have sort of evolved as a byproduct of what the conversation in that region would benefit from. And so we have some chapters that are regional in nature. There’s a Midwest chapter. There’s a mid-Atlantic chapter. But then there’s the Atlanta chapter is, you know, just really represents the city, the metro region of Atlanta. And we have state chapters. Minnesota chapter is, you know, going to be one of those that are just representative of the state. And we even have sub chapters, which is sort of like, you know, just a small group of folks in a particular city that, you know, that come together regularly. And in each case, what chapter work looks like is some combined version of sharing knowledge with each other. And then, you know, advocating for the ideas at the local, whatever their local level is, advocating for the ideas that that local level needs, you know, more energy behind, more advocates for, more organizing around. And in each case, it is taking what can be pretty complex ideas when you think about them at the national scale. You know, if we’re going to talk about the affordability crisis and think nationally, there’s a lot of nuance to that challenge. When you go into a particular market or into a particular region that has to do with, you know, the the issues about employment, issues about, you know, housing availability, issues about, you know, demographics and demographic change. There’s there’s all kinds of things that influence at a local level what the affordability challenge looks like. State legislation, state regulations, you know, that at a national level, we’re going to talk about how the problem, you know, what the the mechanics of the problem overall look like. But at a local level, that conversation is about how, you know, maybe there really needs to be a particular tweak to the state legislation that’s going to help developers provide more inclusive, more inclusivity into the housing that they’re delivering, the development that they’re delivering. So CNU does a lot of programming outside of just the Congress, although it is a major part of our, our gathering is a major part of our of our mission. We host different topical gatherings throughout the year. We have different advocacy programs that that help us on a national level push ideas that, you know, are of the moment and we feel are really important.
[00:48:26] Ian: I noticed that your headquarters are in, like, D.C. So I assume that there’s some amount of lobbying that happens.
[00:48:32] Mallory: You know, actually, we do a lot less lobbying, although we do partner with some of our, you know, friendly organizations. Smart Growth America is one where, you know, we support their work in legislative advocacy in particular. And, you know, they’re just a peer organization to us in that regard. Up for Growth is another. These are folks that are leveraging the political system to try and get the change that needs to happen, you know, whether that’s at the federal or sometimes state, you know, level. One of the things that we do attempt to do with some of these topical gatherings, one example would be a council that we just held on affordability back in February of this year. And those councils are our attempt to bring, you know, specific knowledge about a challenge or a problem all to the same room to discuss why, you know, that problem continues to exist and what needs to be done about it to solve it. And so, you know, affordability, this is, you know, whether you’re in Savannah, Georgia or the Twin Cities, folks are talking about whether whether the city is affordable or not. And to whom the city is affordable and where.
[00:49:52] Ian: An evergreen topic.
[00:49:54] Mallory: Yeah, exactly. And so we that council was the opportunity for us to bring folks from across the country. We had a group of about 30 that have very different levels of agency or responsibility within that challenge. So we had the housing secretary from the state of Maryland, Jake Day. We had Alli Quinlan as a architect and developer in Fayetteville, Arkansas, works all over the country and is the president of the Incremental Development Alliance, which is a small. It’s one of CNU’s affiliate organizations that works to educate small scale developers all over the country. Gosh, folks from the former assistant city manager. She just left this gig, but from the city of Kalamazoo, Michigan, which, you know, folks probably think, oh, like the big cities, you know, that’s where affordability is a challenge. But Kalamazoo, Michigan has been, you know, very actively working on improving the affordability for workforce housing in their city. That was a real challenge that they were facing. And so we brought these folks together because from their unique perspectives, they’re all trying to tackle this issue. But also the collective strategy for how to make their work easier was something that, you know, CNU wanted to put effort towards. That’s that’s the kind of that’s part of the why to our mission is that we educate and we convene groups and we collaborate with partners to be able to help the principles, help help promote the principles of the charter and make sure that we’re we’re doing all we can to make it easier to create that great urbanism. That’s so good for humans’ well-being. And so, you know, if you can’t afford to live somewhere, if you can’t afford to put a roof over your head, that’s and or if the good quality urbanism is only available to people with the means to afford it, that’s that’s not seeing our our mission out. And so, you know, that council was actually the kickoff of now some working groups that individually are working on different, you know, different topics that came up out of those that conversation, you know, some of that is problem solving. Some of that is finding partnerships with, you know, institutions that are maybe part of the problem and seeing if we can’t try to help, you know, reform their thinking. And some of that is just determining good strategy for influencing decision making, particularly when it comes to things like, you know, state level legislation or state level policies that may not intend to inhibit affordability, but do.
[00:52:51] Ian: Yeah.
[00:52:51] Mallory: And how to get those policies changed or that legislation passed. That’s some of the work that, you know, a lot of that brainstorming starts to happen at a Congress, but then CNU’s task is to carry out that brainstorming into real purposeful action. Like I said, we held that council. We have a long standing program that’s called Freeways Without Futures that is work to remove, to add, to help the advocacy of existing urban highways and freeways that, you know, is, you know, folks listening to your podcast will probably know as a form of urban renewal and an intentional, you know, dissection of our urban fabric, separation of neighborhoods from each other and from opportunity. And so our Freeways Without Futures program, you know, is one of those. It’s a real point of pride because we’ve been able to elevate the campaigns of, you know, of community groups all over the country and, you know, their advocacy for removing these damaging urban freeways.
[00:54:07] Ian: And we can learn from each other.
[00:54:08] Mallory: Absolutely. Yeah, the connections between those, that’s some of the, when I say that the Congress is a lot of fun and that our movement is a lot of fun. I love to see how some of those friendships form from, you know, shared firefights, shared battles that people have had to wage.
[00:54:27] Ian: Commiserating.
[00:54:28] Mallory: Yep, that’s right.
[00:54:32] Ian: Speaking of affordability, like what does an individual membership cost for being in CNU? Our individual urbanist membership, I believe we’re at $195 right now. But some of that benefit comes in the sort of communication and awareness, you know, that you get to have through participating in our communication channels and networking tools that we have. Invitations to some of these, you know, events and gatherings. There’s certainly discounts to coming to Congress. But one of the things that we’ve been working on is soliciting from members what sort of tools or access to tools to help them improve their work might be really valuable. So when I first came into this role in 2023, I’d been a member of CNU for my whole career. I sort of dyed in the wool. This was, I came out of architecture school straight into the firm of a couple of the founders of this organization. So I was apparently meant to do this. But one of the things I was really conscious of is that we put a lot of stock as a membership group, as a movement on sharing, you know, between each other. But there are new and better ways to share knowledge and to improve each other’s work than there were when we, you know, didn’t have the same level of digital tools and the same level of incredible good work that needs to be shared. And as the movement has grown, so have the examples of what new urbanism looks like in built form and in written policy and in reform strategy and all of that. And so being a better network for our members is something that we’re continuing to work towards and creating the tools that will, or sharing the tools amongst each other that will help folks do their work better as a specific place where we’re looking to grow.
[00:56:41] Ian: Nice. I think that that is a beautiful place to wrap it up.
[00:56:48] Mallory: Wonderful. Sounds good.
[00:56:50] Ian: Mallory, thank you for coming on the show.
[00:56:51] Mallory: Thank you for having me.
[00:56:54] Ian: And thank you for joining us for this episode of the Streets.mn Podcast. The show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution, non-commercial, non-derivative license, so feel free to republish the episode as long as you are not altering it and you are not profiting from it. The music in this episode is by Erik Brandt and the Urban Hillbilly Quartet. We’re always looking to feature new voices on the Streets.mn podcast, so if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [[email protected]]. Streets.mn is a community publication and relies on contributions from audience members like you. If you can make a one-time or recurring donation, you can find more information about doing so at [https://streets.mn/donate]. Find other listeners and discuss this episode on your favorite social media platform using the hashtag #StreetsMNPodcast. Until next time, take care.