CNU XVI starts today. On Friday, City Green of Austin is hosting two free events that are open to the public. The first is a Sustainable Buildings Tour, which will include several of Austin's LEED and AEGB certified buildings. The second is the Sustainabash at Speakeasy. Click here for information on more free events....

As a prelude to CNU XVI, Envision Central Texas and the Congress for the New Urbanism are hosting "From Boom to BEST? The Future of Central Texas", a lunch featuring a discussion by Andrés Duany of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, Hank Dittmar of The Prince Charles Foundation for the Built Environment and our own beloved mayor. Topics include fostering walkable development, transit, sustainability in times of booming growth and the impact of mixed-use development......

With all the hype surrounding high-rise condos and New Urbanism, it is easy to forget that the dominant form of growth in Austin is still 20th century style, car-centric, suburban sprawl. Small developments (like The Shops at Silverado, shown right) or large (like the 425-acre Southpark Meadows, shown above), most new construction in Austin comes in the form of sparse, single-use, single-story sprawl. Southpark Meadows co-opts the language of New Urbanism as a marketing......

Katherine Gregor does a nice job in this week's Developing Stories chronicling the negotiations surrounding the redevelopment of the former location of Concordia University. The setup is a familiar one - developers propose crappy project, neighbors get upset and protest. Here's the twist: the New Urbanist gurus at ROMA step in to mediate and they work out a project that everyone is happy with (at least the developers and the heads of the neighborhood......

In case you haven't gotten enough New Urbanism lately, Congress for the New Urbanism will be holding next year's CNU XVI right here in Austin. If you can't wait that long to hear about New Urbanism's applicability to Central Texas, Envision Central Texas is hosting the SmartCode Workshop from March 29- 31, 2007. Is $565 a little too much scratch to hear about urban planning? Don't want to go all out on the whole......

On Saturday, the City presented a preliminary draft of the North Burnet Gateway Re-Development plan, which includes the Domain. We skipped the presentation and went shopping. The shopping is awesome (got some hot Pumas), but we're not sure what to make of the development. It is VMU (at least the part that has been built), appears reasonably dense, and may someday have rail. It is also a freaky, disneyfied version of "downtown." One goal......

Growing up within the confines of our suburban cul-de-sac - perched imperially at the top of a hill, no less - we can say with little hesitation that in the master-planned communities dotting the outskirts of every major city, it's terribly difficult to have any meaningful collective social development. Now, planning committes in Austin are determined to do away with what in the last few decades has become the de-facto community-buildling scheme, and "create......