Matthew Moore: The 34th Annual Congress for the New Urbanism will take place in northwest Arkansas May 12–16, 2026. One of the ways that CNU invests in the community that is hosting their annual conference is by providing pro bono design and planning workshops they call Legacy Projects.
Last week, I spoke with Mary Madden, the founder of Fayetteville-based Madden Planning, as well as Mallory Baches, the president of the Congress for the New Urbanism. They are both involved in the Legacy Projects program.
Mallory Baches: The purpose of this program is to connect the talent, the knowledge, the expertise, whether it's in urban design, in economic development, in urban planning, in regulatory reform, and bring that knowledge to communities and community groups, municipalities, neighborhood associations where they otherwise wouldn't have access to that sort of professional expertise in one way or another. And it gives us an opportunity as well to really learn firsthand about the communities in the region and what their needs are. They're very real-world needs.
Northwest Arkansas is sort of the smallest region that we've come to historically. But one of the things that we have found with the Legacy Program is that many times it is the smaller communities in a region, no matter how large that region is, that are struggling to find the resources that it takes to get that professional expertise that they so desperately need to make good decisions about their future. And that's where the Legacy Program comes in to attempt to bridge that gap.
And we have members with experience in all different scales of urbanism. And so CNU's job is to connect the right expertise with the right community challenges in northwest Arkansas. And that's where Mary comes in to help us with that.
Moore: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, Mary, as you look around our community here, thinking about northwest Arkansas and urbanism can kind of feel at odds with one another sometimes, that there aren't a lot of urban spaces within our community. How do you see these Legacy Projects being utilized in spaces that may not consider themselves urban?
Mary Madden: Well, one, I'm going to get a little down in the geeky weeds and say that with the Congress for the New Urbanism, we talk about urbanism from the Latin root urbs, and I won't try to go on to that. But basically an urban area being not rural. And so it could be from the smallest village crossroads up to a big city.
And I think for a lot of people, when they hear the name Congress for the New Urbanism or think urban, they think big city. And I think that's one of the things CNU has tried to do since its beginning, is that urban is a very positive thing. It's about places for people.
And so I think that may be part of the Legacy Project, is making sure people understand we, in fact, have a lot of urban places. That doesn't mean they're big cities. But we have a lot of small villages, small towns, growing cities. And I think that's one of the big things that we're probably going to be looking at.
And we've already talked about, as you know, Matthew, we are this rapidly growing region. And we hear repeatedly from the bigger cities that are up and down the corridor to the small towns, almost everybody's worried about us losing our character — both the character of the towns and our beautiful natural areas. And so I think that's one of the tasks we're going to have: whatever the scale of the Legacy Projects, the urban goes hand in hand with the natural. They're sort of two sides, and the more that you can promote positive, good urban development, you have the ability to save and protect the natural areas, the agricultural rural areas.
So that may be a little theoretical for what you are looking for, but I think that's going to be one of the important aspects of the Legacy Projects in northwest Arkansas.
Moore: Why do this for free?
Baches: Well, that's an important question for sure. And I think the fundamental answer is CNU is a nonprofit organization. Our work is to expand our mission, which is to create more walkable, more sustainable, more equitable communities across the country and even internationally. And doing so means doing so regardless of whether there is a for-profit entity that can financially support the work.
That's the benefit of what we bring — a certain level of commitment to making sure that all communities have access to these values. And so we solicit support from all kinds of different funders to be able to do this work. And then we turn that around and we put that effort back into communities that need it.
Moore: When people are sending in their requests for proposals, you're looking to accept about four of them, it sounds like. What are the kinds of projects you're looking to work with, and what sort of expertise can you offer with these Legacy Projects?
Baches: Why don't you talk, Mary, about the what, and I'll talk about the who we bring and the knowledge.
Madden: Okay. So I think, as we've already mentioned, we have diverse communities here in northwest Arkansas. So we are hoping that the Legacy Projects will have a variety of issues and a variety of context.
As much as we love our big four — Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville — we hope that we would not have our four projects be limited to those four places. Maybe we'll have one or two in those, and maybe we'll have one or two in any of the rapidly growing surrounding communities.
So that's big picture what we're looking for. I don't want to presuppose because we want to really see what ideas people have. But I think we can kind of point back to previous Legacy Projects where people talk about improving walkability or multimodal transportation, which we know is a big issue here in northwest Arkansas with all of our investment in our bike trails.
We know people have done small Main Street revitalizations. There have been some that looked at dying strip centers and what you could do to redevelop or revitalize. So we don't want to limit people in what ideas they may have, but this is an opportunity for them to maybe take that first step on a project they envision and they don't even know how to get started. So the folks that come in may help them set up a framework and envision that, then they can move forward on into the future.
Baches: And one of the other steps in this process is that as we receive proposals for potential projects and the committees work through which projects are going to be selected, we work directly with the applicants — again, whether that's a municipality or a community group or otherwise, a nonprofit, something of that nature.
We work directly with them to refine the scope of the project so that it's something that's achievable, that it's able to match the amount of time and effort that the teams coming from outside the community are able to bring. It's a short time span, these little workshops that we do to work directly in the communities, embed there, and understand the problems firsthand. And so we want to make sure that these are projects that are going to be helpful to the community, and as Mary suggested, are going to launch into further work. It'll be maybe the first step of a longer strategy for whether it's design or regulation or visioning in one way or another.
And CNU’s member practitioners run the gamut of expertise. What we look to do is to understand that project clearly, what the community needs through that scoping process. Then we find the best talent to bring to that project. It could be urban design firms, economic analysis, market analysis. It could be transportation design or engineering expertise. It could be development support — understanding how to position a project to be ready to actually be implemented.
And we've worked on projects that maybe seemed a little unique. There's one that I talk about a lot. That was a creek bed that was running through Louisville. This was in 2019. But it was running through a whole series of communities and was this eyesore. It was a detractor from the value of the community surrounding — both economic value and just quality-of-life value, because it was a dumping ground. Everyone had turned their back on it.
The project was one where the team worked to recreate that, as Mary said, as a human-based asset and reopen the creek and design community spaces that could activate that natural amenity. These are the types of projects that we don't know the region well enough to see. And CNU doesn’t yet know northwest Arkansas as well as we hope to one day. And so we're trying to learn from the communities and what they're seeing as real challenges to the quality of life for their residents and their businesses. We want to help find the right folks to improve on that quality of life.
Moore: How do you avoid the stigma of just parachuting in, coming in to fix people's problems and leaving? How do you make sure that the projects and the work that's done is grounded in the community and is sustainable for the community?
Baches: Yeah, that's a great question. And part of it really goes into the selection process. Understanding the project idea thoroughly and with our, you know, with Mary and her committee members in Arkansas really knowing what the market is capable of, what the growth might be suggesting needs to happen, really knowing the region and its planning needs well, is a big part of being able to identify the projects that are going to be feasible in the long run.
The other thing is that part of these Legacy Project teams’ efforts is they leave a set of deliverables. In those deliverables, whether it's a booklet or a series of presentations, they're demonstrating for the community what the next steps are going to be — creating a playbook of what the community needs to do next.
We've had projects where the recommendations had a lot to do with how to finance the project that they'd proposed. In other cases, it has a lot to do with how to reform the local zoning code so that the project would be viable. It really comes down to what the project needs and then what the next steps might be.
Many times there's a funding aspect. It costs money to carry out design projects. And part of CNU's goal is to try and help communities find access to that funding. We can't always do it — sometimes it requires local support, sometimes there are national opportunities. But part of our commitment to the communities is we're going to do as much as we can to help make sure that these projects get off the ground. And we have a pretty solid success rate. I think we're at a little somewhere over 80% right now of the projects we've done over the years that are actually in some phase of implementation.
Madden: One thing I wanted to add to that is I think an important part of that is the application process. We're not coming from — I'm sitting here, but the larger CNU team isn't coming in and saying, you need to do this. The application is the local communities up front saying this is an issue or an opportunity that is important for us.
So that's big picture. That first idea is coming from the local area. A part of the application is also saying, how will this help the local community? Who in the local community is supporting this? So if one John Smith submits it and can't tell us this is something they want to do in their neighborhood and there's no buy-in, then that's probably not going to be one of the projects that gets selected.
So we really want on the front end to make sure that the local community says, yes, this is an issue for us and we have local support. It's a priority. And then if they're selected, then CNU is looking, as Mallory already said, to figure out, okay, who's the best part of our national membership? Who could provide technical assistance? Who's done a similar project or has an understanding of these issues?
So the issue is framed and brought forward by the local community. And then the technical assistance is really trying to help move forward from that.
Moore: Mary Madden is the founder of Madden Planning. Mallory Baches is the president of the Congress for the New Urbanism. They joined me over Zoom last week. Applications for these projects are due on Friday, Aug. 29. You can find more details about how to submit your proposal at CNU’s website.
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