What a glorious view from this lectern!!! I wish everyone here had the chance to face you from my vantage point. An auditorium full of New Urbanists is the most wonderful sight in the world.

I am Stefanos Polyzoides, the chair of the Board of the CNU. On behalf of our Board, I welcome you all to New York and to the 9th Congress of this remarkable organization. I would like to thank the New York CNU 9 Organizing Committee, their Chair and Co-chair, Jonathan Rose and John Massangale and the principal donors to this event, for their energy, their dedication and commitment in staging this great festival. I would also like to single out for special thanks Shelley Poticha, our Executive Director, and her tireless San Francisco Staff, for a yearlong extraordinary service to the CNU. We have made great demands of them during the last twelve months, and they have always, always come through with competence and with a smile!! Finally, I would like to recognize the many contributions made last year by the CNU Task Forces under the overall coordination and leadership of Todd Zimmerman; the Educators Task Force is headed by Steven Hurtt and Phyllis Bleiweiss; the Planners Task Force is headed by Rick Bernhardt and Gianni Longo; the Designers Task Force is headed by Stephanie Bothwell and Dhiru Thadani; the Development/Project implementation Task Force is headed by Tom diGiovanni and Dan Hernandez; the Environment Task Force is headed by Dan Williams and Kaid Benfield; and the Transportation Task Force is headed by G B Arrington and Don Chen. Their volunteer work has increased the intellectual depth of our movement and spread meaningful involvement within the CNU to an unprecedented degree. To all of you, all of us are profoundly thankful.

The Congress for the New Urbanism is almost a decade old. For the many among us tonight responsible for founding and nurturing this organization, for the ones that authored and are practicing guided by the principles of its remarkable charter, for those that have contributed their time, their resources and their lives to advancing the cause of stopping sprawl and bringing the City and Nature into balance, this is justifiably an annual infusion of deep satisfaction and pride.

The CNU was founded as a quixotic quest to reverse continental, if not universal conventional development practices that could be best described, then, as exhausted, and, now, a decade later, as corrosive and even corrupt!! We all vividly remember the landscape of sprawl that we grew up with and confronted professionally from the start. It is currently in a state of remission, thanks to our work, but still essentially in place. Freeways and roads bulging with lanes, large, un-decipherable, tightly sealed, mono use, temporary buildings endless tracts of single use pods of housing, office parks and industrial parks, is sprawl’s environment of choice. A receding and degraded nature and the physical abandonment and disinvestment at the center of our great cities, its poisonous after effect. The slash and burn economics, the architectural trash, the preservation adverse, car favoring codes of every profession, its paralyzing legacy. For ten years now, the CNU has been laboring to imagine an alternative to sprawl and to practice it at every level. We should be justifiably proud that to date, our efforts have produced remarkable results. Some of these are born of initiatives carried out by the CNU as an organization. These include:

• Launching a nationwide Congress that includes professionals of many stripes and is guided by an ethic of cooperation with allied organizations. As of today, we are 2500 member strong;
• Drafting a Charter, that is the first unified theory and guide to practice for design, planning, engineering, administration and development in sixty years;
• After a hiatus of half a century, restoring the legitimacy of the discipline of Urbanism, the 5000-year-old art of designing cities;
• Becoming an important resource in our country, and the world, for framing public policy and new financial models around issues of development, and coordinating thought and action in the battle to arrest sprawl.
• Defining Urbanism and environmentalism as opposite sides of the same coin and beginning a dialogue on the design of the city in nature.

Isn’t it really thrilling to see our agenda and our rhetoric regularly covered in the front pages of the national press and cited by citizens in support of their actions in public meetings? Equally important are many accomplishments that are the result of dedicated and transforming practices, and inspiring professional collaborations among CNU members, such as,

• Demonstrating economic value added through new urbanist development;
• Framing and imposing a stingy streets ethic on transportation engineering;
• Taking on general plans and zoning codes, and promoting deregulation through new urbanist codes;
• Providing remarkable built models for both greenfield and infill development.

Our successes are multiplying. We know this by the continuing praise of those who support our thoughts and actions, and the vehemence of recent opposition to the CNU. Yet, as our influence spreads, we need more than ever to stay the course. In a world captivated by fashion, and disoriented by the pace of change, constancy in support of the principles of our Charter, is the great secret tool of the New Urbanism. American families should live better lives than they now live, in places hospitable, and beautiful that support their long-term needs. There is a great deal of work that remains to be done in the coming years to accomplish this simple goal.

• A new web site has being launched and will be continuously refined over time that will increasingly become the most important resource of its kind in the country;
• A publication is in the works that presents CNU ideas and projects and allows us to remain in control of our message and our agenda;
• A series of Councils, following the success of the recent gathering in Charleston are planned to hone skills and share professional experiences;
• New models are being framed that transform the way in which Urbanism is delivered through different professions, in transportation, in education, in development, in public administration;

Very much as we foresaw a decade ago, this small movement of generalists with the vast ambition of changing the vast development appetite of a vast country, is becoming the most important voice in the country in providing leadership in the fight against sprawl. The future of this movement cannot be imagined by one person or one narrow, partial approach. This will be a long struggle measured in decades. Together in every way, we will prevail in the end.

Welcome again to CNU 9. Let’s Play Ball!!!