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The Congress for the New Urbanism's (CNU) annual Charter Awards offers a rich set of documents with which to understand the discursive construction of the New Urbanism movement in the world. Every year, since 2001, developers and designers submit work representing their plans and projects to CNU for consideration of an award. In each case, a collection of urban design practitioners with expertise in New Urbanism comes together as jurors to evaluate the submissions. A handful of projects are recognized with an award and profiled in the Charter Awards booklet. This booklet offers a snapshot of what the movement's awards program jurors in a given year see as its exemplary work and most innovative accomplishments. Using a framework for understanding the discursive labor that design award programs perform, I examine two decades worth of Charter Awards and analyze narratives and messages presented therein concerning how New Urbanism exists in the world. I advance three claims through this analysis. First, the Charter Awards as a text discursively constructs disparate projects and plans as part of a singular movement. Second, the Charter Awards narrate New Urbanism as a worldwide movement that transcends particularities of place, culture, and history. Finally, CNU uses the Charter Awards to effectively claim universal relevance to urban development despite the particularities of places and the divergence of development contexts.

This article examines the governance dynamics surrounding the development of sustainable neighborhoods in United States metropolitan contexts characterized as suburban sprawl. Drawing on original case study research of three distinct applications of New Urbanism design principles, the article argues for understanding the relative power of municipal authorities to incorporate social justice imperatives into the practice of sustainable development in suburban contexts. Moreover, key to prioritizing social imperatives is the way in which development processes respond to the "suburban ideal", which is a view of suburbs as an exclusive bourgeois utopia that constrains the ability to connect so-called sustainable development with social justice. Case study research shows how deference to the suburban ideal limits sustainable development to embracing growth and greening interests only and peripheralizing or denying social justice. The article discusses how sustainable development endeavors can address such constraints in the effort to create alternatives to suburban sprawl that integrate the pursuit of social justice with environmental protection and economic growth.

This thematic issue explores the evolution of the New Urbanism, a normative planning and urban design movement that has contributed to development throughout the world. Against a dominant narrative that frames the movement as a straightforward application of principles that has yielded many versions of the same idea, this issue instead proposes an examination of New Urbanism as heterogeneous in practice, shaped through multiple contingent factors that spell variegated translations of core principles. The contributing authors investigate how variegated forms of New Urbanism emerge, interrogate why place-based contingencies lead to differentiation in practice, and explain why the movement continues to be represented as a universal phenomenon despite such on-the-ground complexities. Together, the articles in this thematic issue offer a powerful rebuttal to the idea that our understanding of the New Urbanism is somehow complete and provide original ideas and frameworks with which to reassess the movement's complexity and understand its ongoing impact.