I am Stefanos Polyzoides, Chair of the Board of the Congress for the New Urbanism. I am an architect, an urbanist and like you a volunteer and proud member of this remarkable national organization.

On behalf of our Board of Directors, I would like to welcome you to the 10th Congress.

There is no greater miracle than a room full of friends, colleagues, new urbanists engaged in the greatest challenge of our lives- to build beautiful, just and livable cities in balance with nature - both here in America and in the world.

There are 1000 of us here in Miami this week. Many are Floridians; others are coming from the far reaches of the globe. I would like to thank every one of you for taking time to be here and be part of this Congress, to celebrate our tenth anniversary and to chart the future of this movement over the next decade and beyond.

I also want to thank the Miami Organizing Committee headed by Lize Plater-Zyberk and Jim Murley for leading the charge of bringing the CNU back to its birthplace.

Would the members of the Organizing Committee please rise.

Thank you all for welcoming us here and for your hard work in putting the program of the next few days together.

Thanks are also due to Shelley Poticha and the Staff of our CNU Office in San Francisco as well as the members of our Task Forces for tireless dedication to the New Urbanism. They are in place 365 days a year to promote our common cause and to serve our needs as members. They have contributed a great deal to the success we have enjoyed in the year since we last met in New York.

Finally, I would like to thank God that Peter Calthorpe is here for the first time after three years of trying. No Congress is the same without you, Peter. It is great to have you here.

Ten years ago, a small group of founders launched the CNU as a group with a national outlook and a universal message: Tonight, and as we gather to begin our 10th Congress, I believe it is important to pause and acknowledge what has been accomplished through the collective hard work of thousands of us since the founding of the CNU a decade ago:

• We have generated through a Charter an intellectually compelling and also useful general theory of Urbanism for the first time in three generations;
• We have become the most prominent and active national organization dedicated to the cause of stopping sprawl and recasting the process of planning and development in our country. We are now a resource for countless other organizations, groups and individuals.
• We have engaged so widely in the public process, that our ideas and practical remedies are now directly championed by people who are not even our members. The word Urbanism and the ideal of beautiful, prosperous, useful and just cities is being championed by advocates in Neighborhoods, municipal councils, statehouses nationwide, and in the US Congress and Senate.
• The word Urbanism is ever present in the national and local press. Take pleasure in witnessing common citizens, people you don’t know, articulate their views and express their city- building wishes based on new urbanist arguments that were freshly minted in your minds only a few years, maybe even months ago.
• We are slowly changing the face of the country in two important ways: By inspiring and leading through the market the design and building of streets, blocks, buildings, Neighborhoods, Districts, Corridors and parts of metropolises, cities and towns, that reflect the highest livability, quality and value that we as Americans can imagine.
• Also by inspiring our colleagues in government to seek alternatives to destructive, archaic and failed regulation by conventional zoning codes. Our country is changing project-by-project and rule-by-rule. Stop once in a while and take pleasure in seeing it happen.
• We have changed national policy in a variety of ways, but most prominently and dramatically in helping bring to an end 60-plus years of catastrophic public housing practices by our federal government. From now on, there will only be mixed income Neighborhoods, instead of projects where poor families were isolated often under brutal physical and social conditions.
• We have transformed the way in which professionals interact around the subject of Urbanism.
• The option of a humanist approach has been made available to professions such as Architecture transportation and civil engineering, and many members have responded. Take pride in remembering how much these Congresses have helped us understand and respect each other and have instructed us to better work together.
• Many municipalities and states are actively pursuing Smart Growth policies and their design consequences. Although no national politician has been courageous or sophisticated enough to run a national campaign based on the power of people in place, issues of Urbanism as quality of private and community life and access to nature are increasingly becoming part of the local and state political scene.

You must consider the fact, tonight, that these ten-year accomplishments, historic in scope as they are, are our accomplishments. They are the result of our ideas emerging out of Congresses and Councils, our professional practices, our constant advocacy of the new urbanist cause, the constant labors of the members of the CNU. You must feel very proud of the progress we have made in meeting our foundation goals.

Flying over California and Florida to get here was a mixed experience, as always. Those wide-open expanses of western and southern territories scarred at the edge of metropolitan cities by bad conventional development. This morning, Jim Murley handed me a marvelous new book, a guide of new urbanist projects in Florida that includes no less than sixty plus projects now under way or completed in this state.

This is, then, true about the current state of the New Urbanism: Despite enjoying the kind of success we would have thought unbelievable ten years ago, there is still a great deal to be done. These are the six unfinished subjects after 10 years of laboring that I would wish the Chair of the CNU in 2012 would comment on in their keynote speech to CNU 20:

1. Code Reform
It is time to admit that fighting new urbanist battles one frustrating project at a time is tactically wrong and runs the risk of exhausting our members and disheartening our admirers and supporters. It is time to focus on reforming the operational system of sprawl on all fronts, general plans, zoning codes, excessive engineering standards, environmental impact reports, and the like.

2. Urbanism and the Environment
The urbanist and environmentalist camps must be brought together around the issues of striking a balance between building and nature at all scales of the Charter. This argues for better standards of judging the environmental performance of buildings, better practical remedies for site engineering, an acceptance of the transect as an instrument for resolving the footprint of development and of nature in cities, and finally, the adoption of practical means of coordinating regional growth, if not some outright means of regional planning.

3. Education Reform
We are in dire need of integrated models of education that engage diverse disciplines, schools and departments around the subject of Urbanism. Such models should encourage students to both think big and to be capable of dispensing practical remedies. We need to imagine a professional ethic where people become advocates, where they profess a worthy future living in cities and in nature.

4. Building Better Cities
Design matters a great deal. For every fifty competent new urbanist two-dimensional plans there is only one project that presents an architectural image to match the worthy standard of its Urbanism. This is a problem of crisis proportions because our movement is beginning to be judged not only by hybrid, half hearted examples of Urbanism springing all around, but also by built examples of questionable competence.

5. Engaging the rest of the world
We need to respond to the needs of the rest of the world. Whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, people are looking at the United States as the country whose success they wish to emulate. We must share new urbanist ideas with them and promote the ethic that conventional models of growth are not valid there as they are not valid here. The alternative to this outreach is the urbanized world turning to sprawl development to the same extent that it dominates here.

For the longest time, I have been advocating that reversing sprawl and rebuilding the metropolitan regions of our country is a monumental challenge that will physically outlast most of us in this room today. I can only hope that we direct our future efforts to refining our ideas and practices, while attracting a whole new generation of activists that will be able to carry on the cause of the new Urbanism to its inevitable success. We definitely won’t be there to see it, but we would be remembered as the people that helped set into motion this extraordinary movement.