A review of CNU-A. An accreditation for people who want the place they live to be a place everyone loves.
Exploring the accreditation program offered by the Congress for the New Urbanism, and administered by the University of Miami School of Architecture
I’ve found the CNU itself to be a home for people of very diverse backgrounds. I imagine that folks taking the accreditation exam are similarly diverse, so let me give you some context about where I started. It might give you a better idea of how I arrived at the conclusions I’ve drawn, and whether or not the opinions I have might also apply to you.
I came to urbanism in the most embarrassing way possible, and certainly from the outside. I didn’t want a developer to build a small commercial building near the front of my suburban neighborhood and so I showed up at City Hall and made my case in the three minutes I was given. My professional background is in graphic and visual design so I came with maps and charts to illustrate my position and felt quite resolute and just in my thinking. The rezoning was denied and I considered myself a hero.
But I didn’t go home and gloat, I stuck around.
I watched how the council worked and attended planning commission meetings and eventually one of the council members suggested I apply for an opening on that commission.
This is where it all started to change for me. Being on the other side of that dais makes you look at things differently. It makes you consider the larger good. It allows you listen to and really understand those one or two passionate parties who manage to find time every Thursday night to share their thoughts on each project. But it also makes you consider who couldn’t to make it to the meeting. The folks who might have a choir concert at their kid’s school to attend, or a job where they work nights, they should have a role in the future of our town too. I was certain that the right thing to do was listen to as many voices as I could, narrow the commentary down to the facts that I could apply to my decision making process, factor in our codes, ordianances and Comprehensive Plan and vote according to all of that. I felt a very real sense of duty to getting it right for the members of my community.
That responsibility drove me to learn as much as I could about our local zoning and subdivision ordinances, and to better understand the history of land use in Texas (where I am) and in the United States writ large. I’ll pause here to give a shout-out to our previous assistant city manager and Director of Development Services, Tom Yantis, who along with the rest of his staff spent more hours than I can count entertaining very basic questions; “So what exactly is an easement?” or “But set back from what, and why? How did we even come up with these numbers?”
So, all this to say that after learning about the Congress for the New Urbanism and that they offered a course through the University of Miami School of Architecture and I felt it would be another great learning opportunity and I decided to give it a go.
The CNU website provides a 10 page PDF that covers the basics of the accreditation process. If you are considering taking the U of M class or the exam I would encourage you to read this in its entirety. It lays out the format of the test, what you are required to do to maintain your accreditation status and when the exams are available.
The basic items of note are:
- Must be a CNU Member to receive accreditation (though there is no verification process during enrollment so you are responsible for ensuring your status)
- The Course through the University of Miami is not required. You can take the exam independently.
- The Course is “self-paced” (more on that later)
- You’ll need to do 8 hours each year of CE to maintain your accreditation.
- All told the course, exam and CNU membership is somewhere in the ballpark of $750–800. So pretty reasonable.
The Course
The course offered by U of M is called The Principals and Practice of New Urbanism. The CNU lists over 30 people as contributors for the course, many of them luminaries in the world of New Urbanism. My expectation was a very well conceived and executed curriculum and online course.
It’s a little more complicated than that.
With the course you get a couple of useful PDFs. The first is the Charter of the New Urbanism book (the first edition). This is a series of essays that explain and expand on the principles of the charter. You can buy this book yourself (the second edition) it costs about $50 new. The second document is New Urbanism: Best Practices Guide (fourth edition). This one is a pretty wonderful book giving loads of real-world examples applying the tenets of New Urbanism in communities worldwide. It’s well written and has loads of useful visuals to better convey some of the more complex concepts. You can pick this up used on Amazon (as of June 2019) for strangely varying prices from about $60 to $500.
To call the course self-paced feels generous. There is no interaction whatsoever with any faculty or other students. Generally speaking I think you are mostly paying for an online study guide.
The course is split into 11 sections each with a short list of learning objectives and some required reading. Often there are a list of items for suggested reading as well. The majority of the required readings consist of a few essays from the Charter of the New Urbanism book and a few chapters from New Urbanism: Best Practices Guide. Unfortunately, there are often discrepancies between the required readings listed in the syllabus, and the list provided in a Google Doc linked inside the modules.
Mismatched requirements and broken links are fairly common. Early in the course there was a link that seemed like it was supposed to help you answer one section of the learning objectives but the link wasn’t resolvable and I could not find the resource that was referenced anywhere online. I emailed the address provided for faculty and never heard anything back regarding this issue. In another section, where direction was given to evaluate planning policies on a number of organizations only information for one of three was available.
The truth is, if you are comfortable doing a lot of reading you’d probably be best-suited to pass the exam if you just settled in and took good notes on the previously mentioned required readings.
One very big benefit I could ascertain from the course is that the material in the modules is clearly written and vetted by the same people who wrote the exam questions. This means that the phrasing and tone makes it easier than it would be otherwise to determine the intended answers on the exam once you have gotten attuned to the module language.
The Exam
The exam consists of about 100 multiple choice questions and perhaps three to five questions that require short written answers. If you are familiar with the assigned readings and you are a good test taker you are likely to do just fine.
Personally, I found many of the questions to be written strangely. Often you are looking for the incorrect answer out of the multiple options. But the question, if not thoroughly read, appears to be asking you to find the best choice of the correct answers. Perhaps this is by design, but I’m confident that at least a few of the errors I made were affected by the way the questions were written.
Another thing that stood out to me was that it sometimes felt like you were being asked to find a small, somewhat inconsequential fact buried in a given reading. Meaning, that instead of testing whether or not you understand the principals and practice of New Urbanism as the course suggests, you were actually looking for the title of the program that was created by someone who was influenced by New Urbanism or some similar trivia. I suppose there is a benefit to being able to recall items like this, but it just felt to me that I was being asked to prove that I had spent time studying, or knew how to search for something as opposed to testing my knowledge of how to implement and understand New Urbanism.
I took nearly the allotted three hours to complete the test. The directions before you start indicate that you are likely to finish early. Given the nature of the questions I thought it best to double/triple check their meanings and if I had indeed answered according to the request. Maybe I was less knowledgable than I thought, but I would encourage anyone who is taking the exam to do the same.
The Results
The University of Miami provides you with a form that shows the percentage of questions you got right, broken down by subject/unit. They won’t elaborate on what exactly constitutes passing, and they specifically point out that the sections are all weighted differently, so its essentially impossible to know how you did in relation to other exam-takers. So I was really only able to extrapolate that my worst areas of knowledge were “Architecture, Local Culture and Identity” and “Boundaries & Centers, Economics & Mobility”.
At minimum, I would love to see the questions I got wrong. It would help me determine whether I misunderstood some of the material conceptually, or just made a mistake on that question. I would guess based on the state of the rest of the class and exam that they probably don’t release that information because they have not updated the exam questions recently and there’s a bit of security through obscurity at work here.
Should you pass you’ll get a digital certificate of completion of the class immediately after the results are released. The CNU also sends along a paper Accreditation certificate in the mail a few weeks later.
Conclusion
Overall, I found the material that the U of M course covers to be quite informative. I feel like I have a much better understanding of the genesis of our modern development problems and the ways New Urbanism seeks to solve some of them. But I think that much of that knowledge was gained through what amounts to guided reading of a couple of textbooks, and less to do with self-paced instruction.
I would argue that the course as it is now should be pitched more as a $700 study guide than a class. And if they want to evolve in that direction the modules should be adapted to better guide the student to think critically about how we make places better. Little things like broken links aren’t the end of the world but they do contribute to a general feeling that the course is somewhat forgotten. If the course is to be refined and thought of as an interactive way for students to interact with the material there is some work to be done. I’d suggest at bare minimum the students in the course should have some discussion based activities where they are made to challenge each others preconceived notions and test their assumptions against real world examples. If there is instructor involvement they should be looking for opportunities to force students to think through policy and other land use decisions to their logical extreme in the interest of showing the full spectrum of outcomes to any small new idea.
I recently attended the 27th Annual Congress for the New Urbanism in Louisville. During an orientation breakfast the president of the CNU, Lynn Richards, mentioned that they were working through some major improvements to the course and exam. I imagine that means much of this might soon be resolved. I hope that there is a renewed focus on ensuring that accreditation candidates understand how the principals in the CNU Charter can be applied in a meaningful way, and that their knowledge of that is proven out in a more focused exam.
If there is one thing that is clear to me about CNU it’s that their, or rather our focus is on practical application of complex ideas, not just an intellectual discussion about theory.
If you have also taken the accreditation exam and would like to share your thoughts, or add to this conversation please email me. marshall@urbanmint.org
