DAVID LEWIS remark upon receiving the Athena Award of the Congress for the New Urbanism

Thank you for those kind words and for honoring me with the Athena Award.

However, I have to say, John, that you’ve put me in an embarrassing position. Nothing that I have done in my lifetime as an architect and urban designer has been achieved alone. The essence of urban design is teamwork. And by teamwork I don’t mean only the professionals, I mean the citizens, to whom all cities rightfully belong.

My work, and that of my colleagues at UDA, has always been done with the open participation of citizens. When we began, in 1963, the Civil Rights movement was in full spate. Here we had a situation in which the voices of almost twenty percent of our population were not only not listened to -but were unheard. Yet the United States prided itself on being the world’s oldest democracy.

We learned a basic lesson from the groundswell of courage that lay at the heart of the Civil Rights movement and its dedication to the principles of democracy. Our accountability as urban designers is always to the voices of citizens, and to their vision for the future of their communities.

It is important- and I hope that Hank, in his talk this evening, will agree with me- to make a distinction between history and tradition. History is the study of the past. Tradition is the bridge between the past and the future. Unlike history, tradition is open-ended, forward-looking, and perpetually unfinished. It is the vital language that citizens use when they relate local heritage to what they want their community to become in facing the challenges of change.

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