What's old is new.  Lauren Mayer, communications manager for the Congress for the New Urbanism, joins the pod to talk sprawl, burning streetcars, urban "renewal" and highway removal, Albany, OKC, and Tulsa, and why New Urbanism is for everyone. 

www.cnu.org
Twitter: @NewUrbanism

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Show notes:

• CNU background and history, reaction to 20th century sprawl
• Problems with suburban sprawl, bad for community building
  • No sidewalks, unsafe for kids
  • No parks nearby
  • Unsafe for walking, not getting around in a car
• Last street car burning in St. Paul minnesota
• What’s a streetcar suburb
• Suburbs themselves are not bad ideas, it’s how they’re constructed and how car-centric they are
• CNU in OKC
• Current zoning doesn’t allow you to build the communities you love
• Urban renewal - urban highway construction - red-lining and discrimination
• Albany interstate 787: cuts the city apart, highway removal movement  
• Using federal infra dollars to start healing process
• There’s still  highway expansion projects across the country
• Can’t just be about highway removal, need the whole urbanist package to solve our problems
• Tulsa parking lot activation - CNU project
• “New urbanism has an impact at every scale”
• Listening to and getting buy-in from the community
• Getting community support for highway removal
• Biden admiistration - momentum for freeway removals, studies and funding
• The engineering profession - focus on “grey” infrastructure, “this road needs to move people faster”
• Department of Transportation looking to the future
• Reconnecting communities grant - still highway expansions being proposed to get this grant funding
• Why urbanism?
• New urbanism is for everyone