New Era for New Urbanism

By Anthony Flint, June 4, 2025

After more than three decades promoting compact, mixed-use, transit-oriented development, the Congress for the New Urbanism is banking on a future in which demand for walkable urbanism is stronger than ever.

So says Mallory Baches, the current president of the organization. CNU splashed onto the scene in the early 1990s with a goal of stopping—or slowing—suburban and exurban sprawl. Since then, some of its most successful activity has happened behind the scenes, as the group highlighted how outdated zoning, codes, and land use regulations make it impossible to build the town centers and village greens that many people want.

“CNU has made important progress. Many more people want the alternative of great urbanism,” Baches said in an interview on the Land Matters podcast. “But we also know a lot more of what stands in the way of achieving that vision. We know that regulations at every level of governance make it illegal to build some of the great urbanism that the general public wants. We also know that the cost of great urbanism makes it increasingly inaccessible.

“When the original founding generation of this movement was first trying to describe what they were working to achieve, every system that impacted the built environment was an obstacle,” Baches said. “The enemy was everywhere. Every single thing that you had to consider when trying to create walkable urbanism was something you had to overcome.”

The interview comes as hundreds of architects, transportation planners, developers, elected officials, and others gather for the 33rd Congress for the New Urbanism in Providence, Rhode Island—a city that has embraced many of the group’s principles, such as adaptive reuse, freeway rerouting, and human-centered placemaking.

Contemplating the future of an organization that has been active for so long, Baches said her colleagues remain true to the original vision, while navigating an increasingly turbulent political environment in which many initiatives are out of favor with the federal government. The Trump administration has rolled back funding for housing, the dismantling of urban freeways, and clean energy manufacturing projects that were seeding economic regeneration in legacy cities.

“These are drastic shifts, especially at the federal policy and funding level, but also … in some state conditions as well,” she said. “I just remind myself that over three decades CNU … has seen changes in rhetoric and in leadership, in priorities, in the market, in the economic conditions of where we are doing this work. I remember [during] the Great Recession, I was attempting to continue my [planning] practice, and it required a lot of adaptation.

“What I don’t want to lose sight of [is that while] rethinking our strategy is responsible … what we believe in is not on the table. We know what we’re aiming toward. We may have to adapt how we get toward that, but the fact of the matter is any sort of binary view of conservative or liberal, or red state or blue state, is a vast simplification of what it looks like to try and achieve this vision in any given community.”

The preamble to the Charter of the New Urbanism says the group “views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness—and the erosion of society’s built heritage—as one interrelated community-building challenge.”

Mallory Baches is in her second year leading the Congress for the New Urbanism. She started out in the field of city planning and urban design with the firm Duany Plater–Zyberk & Company, and continued on with her own urban design practice, creating greenfield and infill masterplans, architectural and adaptive reuse concept designs, urban and architectural codes, and associated design guidelines.

She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Science in Sustainable Urban Development from the University of Oxford, and was also a fellow at the University of Miami School of Architecture. She is accredited with the American Planning Association and the US Green Building Council.

Listen to the show here or subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Further Reading

New leadership at CNU | Traditional Building

Freeways without Futures | CNU Public Square

Building Housing in Walkable Neighborhoods: Are US Cities and States Making Progress? | Terner Center for Housing Innovation

Study Shows Widespread New Urbanist Zoning Reform | CNU Public Square

CNU Returns to Providence | Architecture Here and There

Anthony Flint  is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.