PROGRAM
Download the print version of the program with presenter bios.

New: Download the delegate orientation package.

Showcase Projects

Loreto Bay
Loreto is located approximately 700 miles south of San Diego along the Sea of Cortés in Baja California Sur. This $3 billion project, which will be built over 15 years, will create a town of approximately 6,000 homes in pedestrian-oriented, car-free neighborhoods with the use of bicycles and electric carts as primary transportation.

The goal of the project is to become an international model for how a development can enrich an existing landscape and community while remaining profitable and economically viable.

Dockside Green
Situated on the inner harbour of Victoria, Canada, Dockside Green will be a socially vibrant, ecologically restorative, economically sound and just community. It will be a distinct collection of beautifully designed live, work, play and rest spaces designed to enhance the health and well being of both people and ecosystems, both now and in the future.

Noisette
Noisette is a 3,000 acre city-within-a-city. It is an area of North Charleston, South Carolina targeted for integrated restoration as a sustainable community – modeled on the belief that cities must be equally responsive to social needs, environmental responsibility and economic vitality (the philosophy embodied by people, planet, prosperity).

The plan seeks to preserve historic architectural styles, neighborhood diversity and the area’s unique social fabric. It also works to restore environmental stability and beauty, attract jobs, improve services like education and healthcare, reduce dependence on car travel, promote recreation, eliminate the foundations of crime and poverty, and strengthen the sense of pride many North Charleston resident feel toward their community.

Workshops and Themed Salons

Introduction

Large time blocks have been reserved on each of two afternoons for smaller-group, more intensive discussion of various sustainable development topics. This will ensure that the conference is a joint-learning experience and that you leave with new ideas and practical approaches that add value to your own work and advance sustainable development thinking in your professional network and your community.

Each of these workshops and salons has been designed around a line of inquiry. Our belief is that sustainable development application, theory and policy are advancing together, informing and enriching each other, and we think there is much to be learned at this conference by taking an interrogative (and integrative) approach: defining the thresholds of understanding, studying best practices, feeling our way past obstacles.

This is a ‘practitioner-driven’ conference, and we include in the definition of practice all of us in numerous and related roles—developers, policy makers, legislators, consultants, planners, cost-analysts, social critics, NGO leaders, economists, biologists, product designers, agronomists, educators, and more—who are responding to the challenge of delivering sustainable development.

Salons and workshops may be added between now and the conference dates. Pre-selection/pre-registration are not required and you are free to choose and move between sessions on the basis of your interests, passions, areas of expertise and your definition of value.

Gaining Ground puts emphasis on two features: an integrative, interdisciplinary model; and what Storm Cunningham of the Revitalization Institute calls the “Re” words: revitalization, regeneration, reuse, redevelopment, reintegration, restoration, remediation. As distinct from other events that many of us have attended, Gaining Ground is focused on regeneration strategies—“renewing the capacity of the built environment we’ve already developed” (Storm)—and on the application of whole systems thinking to development—in projects, policy, process and public thought.

All salons and workshops will be organized as charrettes: cross-disciplinary studies of particular topics. The aim is to bring thought and expertise in development practice, policy design and application, investment and finance, ecology and habitat management, governance, revitalization strategy, planning and design to each subject. Pamela Mang of Regenesis puts the idea this way:

How can a development [or a policy] be conceived, designed, built and operated to serve the place it seeks to inhabit by becoming a powerful and effective instrument for integrating and harmonizing the evolution of the whole of that place toward greater vitality and viability—economically, socially, ecologically and spiritually?

Workshops and salons will be supported by specialist resources, facilitators and recorders.

Workshop and Salon Topics

> Development Practice

Central City Sites and Areas. Sustainability is implicit in the central area renaissance taking place in many North American cities. But the potential of individual projects and area plans to achieve that renewal varies widely, and none of us thinks it’s enough just to rest on the implicit renewal argument. What are the principles and best practices for maximizing the sustainability potentials in central area locations and sites—taking into account environmental, mobility, energy use, social integration and other concerns?

Making the Economic Case: ‘Green’ Value. A quantitative demonstration that the ‘payback’ on investment in sustainability features, particularly when occupant or user benefits are factored in, more than returns on the capital inputs. This workshop, featuring Chris Corps of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, will involve analysis of this economics on both the cost and marketing side.

Revitalizing Spent Places. The sheer amount of end-of-life-cycle built form and land use in North America is staggering, in endless supply and, in Storm Cunningham’s view, capable of offering the quickest payback and best basis for political and public support. This session will consider the disciplined strategies for identifying such opportunities and converting them into renewed places that score high on all parts of the sustainable development checklist.

Non-Urban Settings: Best Practices. Conceived in the spirit of endless frontiers, cheap and available energy, and unrestricted mobility, the suburbs and rural rings remain the most pressing challenge to sustainability values. Still, there is a mood for change and a recognition that it’s time for a shift in land use approaches. The ‘smart growth’ movement has been making this case for a number of years, and clearly it’s time for smart growth and sustainability to harmonize their messages.

What are the current innovations and far-flung if isolated successes that can be broadly applied in suburban and greenfield settings to ensure they make a greater contribution to sustainable development principles?

Integrating Social Equity Values. How can we best and most meaningfully incorporate social benefits and social equity in our projects—through a ‘10 percent’ rule; by using the ‘five promises’ approach of Loreto Bay; by responding to the trend toward the localization of economies (and agriculture); by other means? This session will identify some of the innovations, success and the challenges of delivering social benefits within sustainable development.

> Integrating Environment

Applying a ‘Web of Life’ Approach to Development Plans. This salon most directly engages Pamela Mang’s question in the preamble above. How far can we take our development concepts to ensure an ecological systems basis to urban and non-urban project planning? How can we deliver projects where the sustainability program is deeply embedded as a reflex, and with a minimum of self-announcement or prescription? Can we produce a checklist of principles and a menu of best practice that will enable development teams to fully, or more fully, integrate the design of new developments at the landscape, site and occupant levels?

Successful Team Approaches. Conventional expertise puts architects, engineers, and a few other consultants together for project planning. Sustainable development requires additional resources at the table at the moment of project conception—not only for their expertise, but also to shift the entire thought process and to contribute to outcomes. Required is smart thinking about revitalization, ecosystems, watersheds, mobility options, energy use, maintaining natural capital in urban design, and more. Have we constructed a model and a checklist of resources and expertise to assist in the planning and design of sustainable developments in both central city and regional contexts?

> Policy and Governance

Policy Integration. We are just getting started in producing the integrated policies that will guide and promote fully realized sustainable projects. Policies are yet to be worked out or harmonized at the municipal/regional/ state or province/federal levels, and expectations are all over the place. It’s time to design a much more thoroughgoing policy model and to ensure it is integrated across government levels. This workshop is intended to lay the groundwork—especially for policy designers and legislators—for sustainable development regulation that promotes and encourages innovative and ambitious projects.

Partnership Model for Policy Design. If there was ever an area in which expertise, innovation and overall good will were appropriate ingredients, the sustainable development agenda is it. Clearly, the range of skills, experience and values required to produce successful (and politically acceptable) policy calls for new alliances and partnerships, as opposed to conventional sectoral models. Can we produce a template that can be adopted or adapted by communities everywhere, large and small, that will accelerate the sustainable development agenda both in policy and practice?

Policies for Sustainable Central Areas. The ‘triple bottom line’ has special application in central areas and downtowns, owing to the concentration of expertise and public interest in its application, coupled to extensive revitalization opportunities and the urgent need to make our central urban areas economically, socially and ecologically successful locales. Nowhere can energy use, mobility, social equity and other challenges be more meaningfully addressed. Can the triple bottom line be codified and applied as a set of flexible, adaptive policies that help to make central areas rich, lively and healthy places again?

> Promoting Sustainable Development as a Public Value

Public Thought. While sustainability thinking has caught on in certain
professional circles (architects, planners, policy makers, legislators, etc.) and with a small percentage of the public, it would be folly to imagine that sustainability values have gone mainstream. In the long run, public perception and values must move to a place where sustainability values and choices become reflex. The purpose of this salon is to better understand sustainability and, specifically, sustainable development in the context of a public values shift. What strategies (short of outright crisis) are available to us to avoid sustainable development being perceived as an eccentric frill or an ideological extreme? By what means can sustainable development principles and responses enter public thought so that sustainable development is embraced as a fundamental and popular stewardship value?

The Curricular Frontier. Tremendous effort has gone into the communication of sustainable development principles, values, best practices and innovations within certain professional communities and a narrow public. But little has been done to-date to take sustainable development beyond physical demonstration and a certain amount of laudatory press. There is no question that knowledge needs to affect more developers and the entire network involved in planning and making decisions about development. At the same time, these ideas need to become a more prominent feature of professional curriculums and much more central in the mainstream curriculum for those still of school age. Can these objectives be achieved without creating ideological conflicts or backlash?

Big Shift. If James Kunstler (one of our keynote speakers) and others are right, the coming years will feature a new localism forced on us by a significantly reduced availability of cheap energy. In a context of reduced mobility, an increasing need for local agriculture, vast changes to our economic life, and a more community-based lifestyle, is sustainable development offering itself as a complete response?

Detailed workshops and themed ‘salons’ are still being refined by the program advisory committee. The design principles for the conference program include:

Project showcases and keynote presentations will be delivered throughout the conference in a plenary format. Workshops and themed salons will include, but are not limited to these topics: