Recently, CNU president John Norquist told the media that Salt Lake City is a “great example” of the New Urbanism, pointing to the fastest-growing rail system in the country, as well as the city’s planning around mass transit and its walkability.

CNU Atlanta will send a strong contingent westward, with featured speakers at the event such as local chapter founder Ellen Dunham-Jones and current local chapter president Chris Carrigan.

Also, the CNU ‘Health District’ Initiative will meet Saturday, June 1 from 12-2:00 pm.  This initiative was launched out of the CNU Atlanta chapter and CNU 18, which took place in Atlanta. Entitled, “Is Healthcare the New Retail?” the initiative is organized with assistance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Assistance’s Healthy Community Design and is focused on place-based health and healthcare imbedded in live/work/walk neighborhoods, for youth to seniors.  According to CNU Atlanta founder and Health Districts Initiative Chair, Laura Heery Prozes, the ’Health District’ Initiative leverages bodies of research from Dr. Larry Frank, previously at Georgia Tech, and other thought leaders previously with the CDC: Dr. Richard Jackson, Dr. Howard Frumkin and others.

Other speakers from Atlanta will include Paul Knight from Historical Concepts and Bill de St. Aubin of Sizemore Group.

Click here to see a current listing of all registered attendees.

Are you going to CNU 21: Living Community? Use the comment section below to let us know.

Midtown Atlanta, Arts Center Plaza

JOIN US FOR THE MAY T3*

UrbanTalk with Ginny Kennedy

Ginny Kennedy, the Director of Urban Design at Midtown Alliance will speak about:

• Midtown Alliance streetscape and open space projects
• The Peachtree Bridge enhancements
• MARTA transit station enhancements

Thursday, May 16th, 5:30-7:30pm

Location:
Steel Restaurant
950 West Peachtree Street, NW

MAP

– please walk or ride, but if you drive, park in the deck behind Publix –

*T3 (Thirsty Third Thursdays) is a monthly gathering organized by the Atlanta Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU Atlanta) for architects, planners, real estate professionals and all others who are interested in our built environment.

Ginny Kennedy is the Director of Urban Design at Midtown Alliance. With a background in architecture, art history and urban planning, she brings a multidisciplinary approach to the organization’s efforts to advance livability in Midtown through good design. Recently she has been responsible for projects ranging in scale from the sweeping initiative to improve the visual experience on the I-75/85 Atlanta Connector to installing temporary pocket parks as a means of activating underutilized sites throughout the district. Upcoming work will focus on enhancements to Midtown’s MARTA Transit Stations. She provides ongoing assistance to the development community through design review of proposed projects to ensure consistency with the Blueprint Midtown vision and conformity with the SPI-16/17 zoning codes. Prior to her role at Midtown Alliance, Ginny was a Senior Associate at Urban Collage with significant project management experience in urban redevelopment plans, community master plans, and facility planning for Atlanta Public Schools. Ginny is a native of Atlanta with an undergraduate degree from Smith College and Masters of Architecture and Masters of City Planning from Georgia Tech.

Photo: Gary Hustwit, Urbanized

CNU Atlanta founder, Ellen Dunham-Jones, makes a featured appearance in the 2011 documentary, Urbanized, a documentary about the design of cities, and the issues and strategies behind urban design.

The feature-length movie, by filmmaker Gary Hustwit, will screen on Monday, May 13, at Georgia Tech’s Reinsch-Pierce Family Auditorium at 6:30 pm. Dunham-Jones, among many of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers providing insight in the movie, was a driving force behind the creation of the Atlanta chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism that was founded in 2006. She is a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Georgia Tech.

Ellen recently commented about Urbanized, “It really is a great film for anyone who loves cities, who loves films that take them places they’ve never been, and who’s interested in hearing some well-known folks talk about cities. I’m honored to be in such great company.”

She recently appeared in a interview in Creative Loafing about her appearance in the movie in which she said:

Atlanta has some great examples of retrofitting. The Beltline and the redevelopment of Woodstock’s downtown are two wonderful cases of reinhabiting, redeveloping, and re-greening the legacy of our rail infrastructure.

The Atlanta Regional Commission’s Livable Centers Initiative and Lifelong Communities programs have and are continuing to help over 100 metro communities re-envision how to retrofit some of our auto-dependent areas into more walkable, more compact places.

She is the co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs.

For more information on Monday’s screening of Urbanized at Georgia Tech click here.

Poster Credit: Scott Doyon, Placemakers

The Atlanta chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism welcomed Jeff Speck, author of the book Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time, the last week of March. On Thursday, March 28 Speck spoke to a group of the Midtown Alliance and on Friday, March 29 CNU Atlanta conducted an all-day workshop exploring transit-oriented development (TOD) opportunities at the King Memorial and H.E. Holmes MARTA stations, with Speck the featured speaker.

View photos of Speck speaking at the Midtown Alliance gathering here. Picture credit: Terry Kearns.

Esteemed local journalist Maria Saporta recapped Speck’s visit with an article on her well-read blog Saportareport.com.

Saporta reported on one of Speck’s major points during his talks in Atlanta, “Cities that are more walkable are more productive,” Speck said. “There is a strong economic argument.”

Saporta continued: “In his Atlanta workshop, Speck actually offered tools that the city can adopt to make it more walkable. He is a big advocate of road diets – reducing the amount of space devoted to cars and reallocating it to people. Pick streets that are the most likely winners — those that are strong candidates to become pedestrian-friendly. Reduce the number and/or width of the lanes, widen sidewalks, put in bike lanes, add parallel parking, plant street trees between the road and pedestrians and make sure there’s a building with active storefronts or restaurants opening up to sidewalk.

Nothing kills street life more than a surface parking lot or a lifeless concrete garage butting up to a sidewalk.”

November 15, Thursday, 5:30-7:30pm
Steel Restaurant & Lounge
950 West Peachtree Street Northwest #255, Atlanta, GA 30309 (map)

Free and open to all!

*T3 is a monthly gathering organized by the Atlanta Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU Atlanta) for architects, planners, real estate professionals and all others who are interested in our built environment.

 About Living Walls: Living Walls, The City Speaks, is an annual conference on street art and urbanism that began in August 2010 in the city of Atlanta. Along with changing the urban landscape, the Living Walls conference set out to highlight a number of problems facing the city. Living Walls did not just showcase art, but also built a platform for much-needed dialogue in the city. The 2012 conference featured 26 artists who visually activated our urban landscape in the world’s first all-female street art conference.  The five-day conference included film screenings, lectures, block parties, gallery exhibits and bike tours. Learn more about their work at their website.

Today’s comprehensive plans are operating with only 50% of their legal machinery; they are implemented primarily through zoning ordinances alone. However, zoning originally had a critical and necessary partner: the master street plan. In this brief presentation, the history, concept, and legal aspect of the master street plan will be explored relative to its role in city planning. Specifically, two questions will be addressed: What is a master street plan? and Why is a master street plan so critical in city planning? 

FOR MORE INFORMATION AND TO REGISTER, PLEASE VISIT:  http://www.cnuatlanta.org/cnu-atlanta-winter-luncheon/

Development in Downtown Woodstock has been guided by a form-based code for nearly a decade.
Copyright 2012 Tunnell-Spangler-Walsh & Associates

Most of the development and building codes today were originally created to improve public health. During the 19th and early 20th century, they were used to address infectious diseases and other health risks associated with pollution and poor working or living conditions. While they were effective at addressing the health concerns of the time, many of today’s codes are contributing to the public health challenge of the 21st century: obesity and its impact on chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. At its heart, the New Urbanism movement is about making communities more walkable, more bikeable, and ultimately healthier. If we are to create communities that are no longer auto-oriented, but rather, encourage physical activity, then we must tackle the complex challenge of code reform.

Click here to view the entire article.

Let the Health Impact Assessment begin! As athletes prepared for the 2012 London Olympic Games, so did England’s planners and health professionals with the following assessments:

• Rapid Health Impact Assessment of the Proposed London Olympic Games and Their Legacy
• The Health Impact of the 2012 Games: a Screening Health Impact Assessment of the North East’s Draft Vision for the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games 2012
• Health Impact of the 2012 Olympic Transport Plans

Click here to view the entire article.