Congress for New Urbanism 2016

The 24th annual Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) conference was held in Detroit on June 8th-11th, 2016 right here in Harmonie Park. CNU is an international nonprofit organization working to build vibrant communities where people have diverse choices for how they live, work, and get around. This event brings together over 1,500 individuals from North America and around the world for four days of education, collaboration, discussion, and debate on the policies, designs, and emerging approaches that create great places. This year’s theme was “The Transforming City.”

Since the conference was held at multiple venues and attendees will be walking all around Harmonie Park, ROGUEHAA took on the opportunity to amplify the edge treatments and activate empty storefronts along the paths to creatively engage pedestrians, both conference attendees and non-attendees. Tactical urbanism was implemented by creating temporary pavement markings, site furnishings, and edge treatments as a way to engage wayfinding and as a branding element. ROGUEHAA created stencils of individual diamond shapes and painted the streetscape with a repetitious pattern using temporary removable paint. Temporary cube site furnishings were also created to introduce seating, planting, and programmed activity into the streets of Harmonie Park. Painted fiberboard cutouts were secured to fences as a way to activate edge treatment, without disrupting the continuous urban tactics between conference venues.