March 31, 2023 6:00pm - April 2, 2023 6:00pm

Urbanism, the most subtle, complex – and important of human endeavors – has been appropriated by all agendas wishing to combat climate change.

Centuries of hard-earned knowledge on human settlements have been condemned as the source of heat islands and tailpipe emissions. The mitigation strategy is the increased investment in public transit. But transit to be effective requires urban density as a concomitant aspect. At its worst, urban density has been reduced to the simplistic definition of high-rise living, now blindly adopted by global cities as the way forward. Ingenious lessons in balancing urban density with public life seen in traditional human habitats worldwide remain marginalized and ignored. The human habitat, with its many variables, has been reduced to a hyper-simplistic formula of increasing density.

The architectural profession and the development community, aided by governmental authorities, are aggressively endorsing this ingenious formula – imposing high-rises and distorting the most humane of the world’s cities. Not even Paris is to be spared. Against the outcry of citizens, profit is the driver, and the unintended consequence of such linear urban density promotion has offered investors a vehicle to safely park funds in cities without any benefit to the urban context.

This has trumped and often contradicted the scores of issues concerning human habitation. It is enough to look at many global cities to see the lack of human life satisfaction. The result is a myopic contradiction of the fundamental issues concerning human habitation. The triad of diversity, equity, and inclusion can, in the urban context, be seen as follows: diversity as socio-economic complexity; equity as those elements of complexity in equilibrium; and inclusion as the human balance within neighborhoods.

The danger is that myopic focus on mitigation obscures that high-rise buildings, necessarily high-tech and energy-guzzling, are the most fragile and vulnerable in climate change adaptation. The Density without Urbanism / Urbanism without Density CNU DC Council is to be the first event to highlight this insidious imposition on human thriving, which settlements must provide if life, surviving catastrophe, is to be worth living.

The Council is organized by
          Matthew Bell       [email protected]
          Andrés Duany     [email protected]
          Dhiru Thadani     [email protected]
Questions: regarding content, schedule, and location please contact one of the hosts.

SCHEDULE (click here to download as a PDF)

Registration for the 3-day event is sold out.

Registration for April 2 Sunday, focusing on Washington DC, debate on height limit and tour is still available for $50.