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About Build Maine
Build Maine is a community of folks dedicated to expanding housing and opportunity, creating sustainable communities, and preserving our state’s built legacy, while conserving its natural beauty. This is what makes Maine great. We are leaders from the public and private sector, planners and architects, advocates and builders, place-makers and conservationists, policymakers and preservationists. Each June, we organize a conference to share these ideas. More about our conference is at build-maine.com. In between, we host events and tell stories about how we can build these values into our development.
For more, check out our charter. To get involved, reach out to us at connect [at] build-maine [dot] com.
The Charter of Build Maine
Build Maine views disinvestment in villages, towns, and cities, the spread of placeless high-cost sprawl, increasing isolation and loneliness, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.
We stand for the restoration of existing village, town, and city centers, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real, diverse neighborhoods, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy.
We recognize that physical solutions by themselves will not solve social and economic problems, but neither can economic vitality, community stability, and environmental health be sustained without a coherent and supportive place-based community.
We advocate the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the following principles in building neighborhoods, villages, towns and cities:
Diverse in use and population;
Designed for walking and transit, as well as cars;
Shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions;
Framed by architecture and landscape that celebrates local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.
Build Maine views disinvestment in villages, towns, and cities, the spread of placeless high-cost sprawl, increasing isolation and loneliness, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.
We stand for the restoration of existing village, town, and city centers, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real, diverse neighborhoods, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy.
We dedicate ourselves to reclaiming our homes, blocks, streets, parks, neighborhoods, districts, towns, cities, regions, and environment. Together, these elements make up unique places that are worth caring about, and are the foundation of community, democracy, and belonging.
We assert the following principles to guide public policy, development practice, planning, and design:
The region: village, town, and city
1. Regions are finite places with geographic boundaries derived from topography, watersheds, coastlines, farmlands, regional parks, and river basins. The region is made of multiple centers that are cities, towns, and villages, each with its own identifiable center and edges.
2. Regions are foundational economic, planning, and coordination units of the contemporary world, particularly in Maine. Governmental cooperation, public policy, physical planning, and economic strategy must reflect this new reality.
3. The region has a necessary and fragile relationship to its agrarian hinterland, natural landscapes and resources. The relationship is environmental, economic, and cultural. Farmland and nature are as important to the village, town, or city as the garden is to the house.
4. Development patterns should not blur or eradicate the edges of the region. Infill development within existing villages, towns, and cities conserve environmental resources, economic investment, and social fabric, while reclaiming marginal and abandoned areas. Regions should develop strategies to encourage such infill development over peripheral expansion.
5. Where appropriate, new development contiguous to existing centers of activity should be organized as neighborhoods and districts, and be integrated with the existing village, town, and city patterns. New, noncontiguous development should also be organized as towns and villages with defined edges, and planned for a jobs/housing balance, not as bedroom suburbs.
6. The development and re-development of villages, towns, and cities should respect historical patterns, precedents, and boundaries. Infill development and redevelopment of historic industrial and commercial properties promotes local entrepreneurs to form businesses that reinvest in the community.
7. Villages, towns, and cities should bring into proximity a broad spectrum of public and private uses to support a regional economy that benefits people of all incomes. Affordable housing should be distributed throughout the region to match job opportunities and to avoid concentrations of poverty.
8. The physical organization of the region should be supported by a framework of transportation alternatives. Transit, pedestrian, and bicycle systems should maximize access and mobility throughout the region while reducing dependence on the automobile.
9. Revenues and resources can be shared more cooperatively among the municipalities and centers within regions to avoid destructive competition for tax base and to promote rational coordination of transportation, recreation, public service, housing, and community institutions.
The neighborhood, the district, the corridor and the main street
10. The neighborhood, the district, corridors and main streets are the essential elements of development and redevelopment in the village, town, or city. They form identifiable areas that encourage citizens to take responsibility for their maintenance and evolution.
11. Neighborhoods should be compact, pedestrian-friendly, and mixed-use. Districts generally emphasize a special single use, and should follow the principles of neighborhood design when possible. Corridors are regional connectors of neighborhoods and districts; they range from boulevards and rail lines to rivers and parkways. Main streets are often historic centers of commerce, focused on ports, riverfronts, and crossroads where people have come together for centuries.
12. Many activities of daily living should occur within walking distance, allowing independence to those who do not drive, especially the elderly and the young. Interconnected networks of streets should be designed to encourage walking, reduce the number and length of automobile trips, and conserve energy.
13. Within neighborhoods, a broad range of housing types and price levels can bring people of diverse ages, races, and incomes into daily interaction, strengthening the personal and civic bonds essential to an authentic community.
14. Transit corridors, when properly planned and coordinated, can help organize regional structure and revitalize village, main streets, and downtowns. In contrast, highway corridors should not displace investment from existing centres. Highways are designed for long-distance connections, and are inefficient and damaging to main street businesses when they enable sprawl development.
15. Appropriate building densities and land uses should be within walking distance of transit stops whenever feasible, permitting public transit to become a viable alternative to the automobile.
16. Concentrations of civic, institutional, and commercial activity should be embedded in neighborhoods and districts, not isolated in remote, single-use complexes. Schools should be sized and located to enable children to walk or bicycle to them. Medical centers service aging populations and employ working-class people, and should be walkable and efficiently serviceable by transit.
17. The economic health and harmonious evolution of neighborhoods, districts, and corridors can be improved through visual design codes that serve as predictable guides for change.
18. A range of parks, from tot-lots and village greens to ballfields and community gardens, should be distributed within neighborhoods. Conservation areas and open lands should be used to define and connect different neighborhoods and districts.
The block, the street, and the building
19. A primary task of all community architecture and landscape design is the physical definition of streets and public spaces as places of shared use.
20. Individual architectural projects should be seamlessly linked to their surroundings. This issue transcends style.
21. The revitalization of historic villages, towns, and cities depends on safety and security. The design of streets and buildings should reinforce safe environments, but not at the expense of accessibility and openness.
22. In the contemporary village, town, or city, development must adequately accommodate automobiles. It should do so in ways that respect the pedestrian and the form of public space.
23. Streets and squares should be safe, comfortable, and interesting to the pedestrian. Properly configured, they encourage walking and enable neighbors to know each other and protect their communities.
24. Architecture and landscape design should grow from local climate, topography, history, and building practice.
25. Civic buildings and public gathering places require important sites to reinforce community identity and the culture of democracy. They deserve distinctive form, because their role is different from that of other buildings and places that constitute the fabric of the city.
26. All buildings should provide their inhabitants with a clear sense of location, weather and time. Natural methods of heating and cooling can be more resource-efficient than mechanical systems.
27. Preservation and renewal of historic buildings, districts, and landscapes affirm the continuity and evolution of society.
This document was developed based on the Charter of the New Urbanism and calibrated to Maine climate, culture, and on the ground conditions. Build Maine, June 2026.
