Press Releases

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Draft of Initial Press Release

For immediate release, September 20, 2005
For more information, contact Stephen Filmanowicz, Congress for the New Urbanism, 312-551-7300 (office) or 312-927-0979 (mobile).

DRAFT

For immediate release, September XX, 2005
For more information, contact Stephen Filmanowicz, Congress for the New Urbanism, 312-551-7300 (office) or 312-927-0979 (mobile).

New Urbanists Assemble Expert Team to Help Rebuild Mississippi Communities Destroyed by Katrina

Congress for the New Urbanism assembles group of 70 architects, planners, engineers, and other specialists to work with Governor Barbour, local colleagues and community members in one of the most intensive planning efforts ever

At the request of Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, the Chicago-based Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) is assembling a team of experienced planning professionals and other experts to stage a seven-day charrette planning workshop in the Katrina-devastated region along the state’s Gulf coast.

This ambitious effort, the Missisippi Building Charrette, will take place from October 11-18, 2005 in Biloxi, Miss., with crews of national experts, local colleagues, and stakeholders venturing out for site visits to storm-ravaged communities along the coast. Governor Barbour announced the charrette with James Barksdale, President and CEO of Barksdale Management Corporation and chair of the Governor’s Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal.

“The unprecedented destruction in the Gulf has yielded an unprecedented response from a highly skilled and experienced team of professionals,” says John Norquist, President and CEO of CNU. “Governor Barbour has made it clear that he wants the people of Mississippi to come out of this stronger than ever. And with more areas of the Gulf feeling the brunt of vicious hurricanes, this effort will serve as a model for other rebuilding efforts.”

The intensive weeklong effort will address a range of settings and scales that extends far beyond the experience of most planners – 120 miles of coastline requiring the reconstruction of whole towns, street networks, and transit systems, as well as residential neighborhoods. But the approach is familiar to New Urbanists, who use collaborative meetings, called charrettes, to achieve community consensus for complex planning efforts.

In keeping with this tradition, the Mississippi charrette will bring together national and local professionals from diverse fields -- planning, development economics, code writing, architecture, sociology, engineering and landscaping. The charrette team, led by Andres Duany, the internationally known architect and planner whose firm, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, has completed designs and plans for more than 300 new urban communities and community-revitalization projects worldwide, will work closely with local elected officials, civic leaders, municipal officials and other stakeholders to develop planning and architectural tools to be used in rebuilding Mississippi efforts. These tools and designs will be made available to local and state officials, who would then decide how and if they should be used.

“The tools will be valuable but optional. Nothing will be imposed," said Duany, who did much of the initial organizing of the charrette after meeting with Governor Barbour, Barksdale and other officials in Mississippi and Louisiana shortly after Katrina struck. He says the devastated communities can be improved during the rebuilding period, yielding a quality of life that’s better than what existed before Katrina. “We have a tremendous opportunity to improve communities while rebuilding them. We want to give Mississippians the tools to create place that are more visually pleasing, more environmentally friendly, more diverse, and more secure from hurricanes."

INSERT QUOTE FROM GOVERNOR BARBOUR OR JAMES BARKSDALE, IF POSSIBLE.

CNU is the leading organization advancing traditional city and town design and walkable neighborhoods as alternatives to sprawl. In the 13 years since the creation of CNU, New Urbanism has grown to the point where a listing maintained by the Town Paper now counts more than 350 traditional neighborhood developments featuring sidewalks; nearby walk-to amenities such as stores, schools, and parks; and urban forms of housing ranging from single-family homes to townhouses to apartments above shops. There are countless more smaller block- or lot-level infill developments along small-town main streets or in larger downtowns where they support and often take advantage of high-quality transit service.

In forming the expert team, CNU will draw from the top-notch experience of its 2600 members across the United States and internationally. One of the participants, Rob Robinson, a principal at Urban Design Associates in Pittsburgh, was an advisors to the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the creation of the Hope VI program, which converted the nation’s most deteriorated public housing projects into successful, mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods. Another charrette leader will be Steve Mouzon, co-founder of the New Urban Guild and principal of PlaceMakers, a design, planning, and marketing firm based in Miami. Mouzon curates a vast catalog of images of nearly every structure built before 1925 in historic cities, towns, and districts such as New Orleans’ French Quarter and Mooresville, Alabama. From these images, Mouzon and PlaceMakers have created pattern books and architectural guidelines for use in building vernacular buildings today. Among the hopes of the charrette is to adapt these accurate, vernacular styles to designs for manufactured homes of extraordinary character, variety, and value.

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Last edited by Steve Filmanowicz. Based on work by Johanna Nyden and steve Filmanowicz.  Page last modified on September 23, 2005