Abstract
The Congress for the New Urbanism’s (CNU) annual <em>Charter Awards</em> offers a rich set of documents with which to understand the discursive construction of the New Urbanism movement in the world. Every year, since 2001, developers and designers submit work representing their plans and projects to CNU for consideration of an award. In each case, a collection of urban design practitioners with expertise in New Urbanism comes together as jurors to evaluate the submissions. A handful of projects are recognized with an award and profiled in the <em>Charter Awards</em> booklet. This booklet offers a snapshot of what the movement’s awards program jurors in a given year see as its exemplary work and most innovative accomplishments. Using a framework for understanding the discursive labor that design award programs perform, I examine two decades worth of <em>Charter Awards</em> and analyze narratives and messages presented therein concerning how New Urbanism exists in the world. I advance three claims through this analysis. First, the <em>Charter Awards</em> as a text discursively constructs disparate projects and plans as part of a singular movement. Second, the <em>Charter Awards</em> narrate New Urbanism as a worldwide movement that transcends particularities of place, culture, and history. Finally, CNU uses the <em>Charter Awards</em> to effectively claim universal relevance to urban development despite the particularities of places and the divergence of development contexts.
Highlights
The principles articulated in the Charter of the New Urbanism (Talen, 2013) offer a set of norms for urban design and planning
Elizabeth Moule, jury chair for the 2011 Charter Awards (CNU, 2011) explains how the work to frame award winners as models for the rest of the world is a part of the calculus in the awards selection process: This year, as jurors of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) Charter Awards, we decided unanimously to search for those paradigmatic projects which could serve as examples of good standards of practice for the future of the New Urbanism in America, and the rest of the world. (p. 2)
While the contexts vary and the processes shift from place to place, we see that the Charter Awards brings these otherwise divergent tendencies together into a unified movement that share a commitment to the creative application of the principles of New Urbanism
Summary
The principles articulated in the Charter of the New Urbanism (Talen, 2013) offer a set of norms for urban design and planning. Other researchers have noted the propensity of developers to engage some, but not all, of the principles (Mayo & Ellis, 2009; Moore, 2010; Sohmer & Lang, 2000) Such selective or partial uptake of the movement’s principles, by differently situated development interests and ideologies, has yielded a highly differentiated movement in practice. This article responds to the call for examining the efforts to promote a singular New Urbanism over multiple new urbanisms and understand the attempt to promote the movement’s widespread appeal and global reach To this point, this article can be read as an exploration of how proponents position New Urbanism as globally relevant and conferring a premiere distinction to the places that puts its principles into practice
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