The Elephant in the CNU (Art 2)
And so, I was recently privileged to receive a registration waiver for the CNU27 conference in Louisville. I was delighted to be able to go, delighted to explore Louisville, and variably delighted to participate in some of the sessions.
But there were just a lot of elephants we need to talk about – in the microcosm of New Urbanism, in the mezzocosm of planning, and in the macrocosm of urbanism. Here is my second conversation starter.
Diversity. In the rah-rah session that was cloaked as a plenary on the first night, we were subjected to a Howard Dean-level rallying call about how super CNUbees are. I’m sure. But as I looked over an auditorium of attendees – nearly 1,600 attendees overall – there wasn’t much ethnic diversity. In fact, over the 4 days of sessions I attended, I saw literally a handful of people of color. Anecdotal, not scientific. But coming from Detroit – and Oakland and Tucson before it – it was a bit of a shock to the system.
The absence of diversity was also painfully evident in the announcement by the outgoing chair, Michaele Pride, who spoke of her work with developing a diversity and inclusion organizational statement. From the perspective of my own lived experience, she spoke of the effort with the subtext of disappointment, urgency and frustration which those of us who dwell in these spaces recognize as the code switching used to call out a problem when position and relationship require enormous caution. But the message could not have been any more clear for those with ears to hear as the new board walked on stage… distinctly not diverse.
In a small sample of sessions, sitting in rooms of a professional-class, ostensibly White audience, discussing inclusion in the most superficial way was….uncomfortable. And although class is a harder type of diversity to quickly identify, I certainly know the kinds of conversations common to diverse ethnic and class audiences weren’t easily discoverable, in or out of the sessions. This was amplified by the overheard conversations of architects and developers, talking about reshaping landscapes in ways that sounded distinctly like Manifest Destiny more than any enlightened, progressive planning front. I half expected Robert Moses to walk into the room. I was so dismissed that a group of men had an entire conversation around me at a standing table about the ripeness of Detroit for the picking, of returns for extractive wealth, of how easy it was to come in and be boss in a place that was desperate for competent intervention. They speculated about the impact of Gilbert’s stroke, and what opportunities that may free up.
This was all especially notable in contrast to my participation in the EcoDistricts Summit in MSP last year. There, practitioners came from all kinds of fields – social justice, environmental, supply chain, housing, community organizing, planning, academia. Again, not scientific, but anecdotally, the diversity seemed consistent with the US as a whole, and the topics were the topics which strike at the essence of developing cities and social systems of equity. The only conference I have ever attended which was more breathtakingly lacking in self-reflection and diversity was the Michigan Association of Planning’s Transportation mini-conference last year.
And so in the excessive self-congratulations which cut in to the substance of every plenary, what were the metrics of organizational success? Numbers of attendees, of members. Of acceptance of the notions of New Urbanism, which as we know, is really old urbanism. In fairness, there was strong representation of women as presenters, attendees and organizational leadership, and although younger women may not know it, it was not so long ago that this would have been astoundingly progressive. But it is not enough, any longer.
Ultimately, how can you have relevant conversations about form, content, placemaking, inclusion, criteria of urban priorities, codes, housing, and all the rest of it when nearly 50% of the American experience is missing from your count – and possibly more, if we factor in class? Granted, I check off a lot of boxes, but I’m just one person and can hardly call out all elephants in every room. So, you know, CNU – get it together. It’s obviously time for a substantive re-evaluation of what you actually stand for.