El Paso to City Engineers, Architects, and Developers - Get Certified in New Urbansim

[Just the facts]

I read this today and it blew me away, and guess what - it is coming to OKC.

El Paso Teaches New Urbanism to Architects, Engineers

For more than 50 years, developers and city officials in El Paso, Texas, worked from the same page when it came to designing and approving new commercial, institutional and residential developments. New buildings tended to be low-slung, sprawling complexes, designed to meet the needs of the automobile and not the city's residents. Every commercial building was surrounded by parking lots and kept firmly separate from residential areas -- the two linked only by roads and highways.

But that's changing. El Paso officials waht to reinvent the city by following the tenets of new urbanism, which means a greater emphasis on dense, walkable neighborhoods, mixed-use buildings that are street-oriented and more green spaces. But there was one big problem in making that change: The local development community and the architects were still designing the old-fashioned way.

...

El Paso ended up offering a nine-week session on new urbanism to its department heads and engineers, and has since opened the course up to the private sector. The city has also started requiring that any design firm that wants to do capital work with the city has to have someone on the team accredited in new urbanism practices. According to McElroy, approximately 100 city staff and 100 private architects and engineers have taken the course and passed the accreditation exam.

Today, El Paso is fielding multiple requests from other cities to "come in and teach new urbanism," says McElroy, who plans to run a three-day intensive session in Austin soon. And in January, McElroy will run a similar session for 40 to 50 government workers in Oklahoma City.

For the record, I finished my certification last month. If anyone has any interest in the subject I recommend taking the class. The details are in the New Urbansim Library thread.

[LakeEffect]

ULI Oklahoma: CNU Accreditation - ULI Oklahoma

[Just the facts]

Thanks cafeboeuf. I noticed this is a one-day class (although it did mention 3 courses). My on-line class took me 7 months and I still didn't get to everything. The required videos alone are like 30 hours long and there were 4 books (one of them over 400 pages) that had to be read so I don't know how they complete the class so fast. I just hope they don't water down the content too much for those that aren't warm to New Urbanism in the first place. There are some certain engineers that shouldn't get a certificate for taking a course that is geared more towards people who already have a background in the subject. They have to pass a test at the end which took me 3 hours to do so I guess at the end of the day - if they pass the test they learned (already knew) what they need to know.

Anyhow - this is a huge step in the right direction.

Here is a link so you can see who has signed up.

https://netforum.uli.org/eweb/Dynami...e-d58911afa3e2

[LakeEffect]

I think you have to attend all three sessions, so that provides a little more work. Some people will be more suited to passing without extra study, some will need much more time. Only a few of us are already CNU members, so I'm curious what this will do to that. We don't even have enough members to start a chapter organizing committee (need 20 for that, 50 to start a full chapter). ULI is a large organization focused on real estate, CNU is more broad and much more flexible.