Keynote Speakers: A Feast of Ideas

Gaining Ground has selected keynote speakers whose presentations will give shape, direction and passion to the work of the conference. Collectively they bring to the table a core of knowledge, experience and a comprehensive perspective on current conditions in sustainability practices, as well as its prospects as a broad-scale restorative movement in land use and development practice in North America.

Speakers generally will be ‘hands-on’ throughout the two-and-a-half days of Gaining Ground, working with all participants on practice and policy issues and all other conference concerns.

James Kunstler
is one of the best-known of our social critics who has focused on the insanity and destructiveness of North American land use, the “suburban fiasco,” and the collapse of community resulting from our building practices and car dependency.

Author of Home From Nowhere, The Geography of Nowhere, The City In Mind, and the current and controversial The Long Emergency, Kunstler has thoroughly examined the pathologies of recent and current land use and development practice and policy. He has been a cautious champion of New Urbanism and a thoughtful pessimist about our society’s capacity and practical ability to change its patterns of energy use and consumption.

His presentation at Gaining Ground will touch on the vast historical landscape of mistakes and mis-steps, and open up the urgent need for the sustainability and restoration ‘movement’ to influence current land use and community-making practice.


Maurice Strong
is Chairman Emeritus of the Earth Council Alliance and served as Senior Advisor to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He was Secretary-General of the 1992 U.N. Conference of Environment and Development (Rio Earth Summit).

In the past thirty years, few have contributed as much and as widely to the environmental movement—and provided a platform for change—than Strong. He has endlessly pressed the case for nations, corporations and other interests to adopt eco-friendly policies of sustainable development.

Author of the ominous Where On Earth Are We Going?, Strong will emphasize in his presentation the important opportunity of the sustainable and restorative development movement to shift public values and policy. He will discuss the strategic means by which the sustainability agenda can be advanced to center-stage.

Storm Cunningham
author of The Restoration Economy, is Executive Director of the Revitalization Institute, the alliance for community renewal and natural resource restoration. The institute’s mission is “to advance restorative development of communities and natural resources worldwide.”

Cunningham was, from 1996 to 2002, the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Construction Specifications Institute, an association of 18,000 architects, engineers, contractors and manufacturers that influences the standard for commercial construction in the U.S., Canada and other countries.

His presentation at Gaining Ground will profile the trillions of dollars of “restorable assets” in North America; the keys to revitalizing communities and regions; numerous innovative policy and planning-related issues; and restorative development’s relationship to sustainable development and smart growth. He will emphasize the power and potentials of integrated restoration projects and integrated revitalization programs.


Ed McMahon
a nationally renowned authority on sustainable development, land conservation and urban design is currently ULI/Charles Fraser Senior Resident Fellow for Sustainable Development at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, DC. McMahon is formerly the vice president and director of land use programs at The Conservation Fund.

Quoted recently at a ULI-sponsored forum, McMahon described the need to preserve green infrastructure: “Smart conservation is just as important as smart growth. Smart conservation is proactive, large-scale and coordinated. We need to think of open space as a form of infrastructure just as we think of roads as infrastructure. It must be viewed as a necessity, not an amenity; and it must be preserved as a connected, contiguous system.”

Author of Land Conservation Finance and Better Models for Commercial Development, and currently helping to head up the ULI redevelopment response in New Orleans, McMahon will emphasize opportunities and strategies for new and better relationships between development and environment.


John Knott
Developer of the 3,000-acre “Noisette” Project in Charleston, South Carolina – one the largest and most ambitious sustainable developments in the U.S – refers to himself as a ‘change agent’, Knott limits his annual speaking to eight presentations, and hopes to influence participants to more seriously consider the social equity potentials of sustainable development. He has built “Noisette” around the principles of sustainability not limited to environmental goals, but social ones as well.

As the project website notes, “Noisette” is not just about the physical process of urban renewal, it is about community renewal through non-profit initiatives in education, the arts and social justice.”

Knott expects to deliver a powerful message about the potential of sustainable development to replace “mindless urban sprawl” and to renew both commonsense approaches to human settlement and the values of community. He looks forward to spending time engaged with legislators, policymakers, NGO’s and other interests.

Timothy Beatley
Timothy Beatley is Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities, in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he has taught for the last eighteen years. His primary teaching and research interests are in environmental planning and policy, with special emphasis on coastal and natural hazards planning, environmental values and ethics, and biodiversity conservation. He has published extensively in these areas, including the following recent books: Ethical Land Use (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Habitat Conservation Planning: Endangered Species and Urban Growth (University of Texas Press, 1994), Natural Hazard Mitigation (Island Press, 1999, with David Godschalk and others); and An Introduction to Coastal Zone Management (Island Press, 2002, Second Edition, with David Brower and Anna Schwab).

In recent years much of his research and writing has been focused on the subject of sustainable communities, and creative strategies by which cities and towns can fundamentally reduce their ecological footprints, while at the same time becoming more livable and equitable places. To this end, he is the recent author of The Ecology of Place (Island Press, 1997), with Kristy Manning, which reviews innovative local sustainability practice from around the country and provides practical guidance on creating more sustainable urban form, restorative local economies, and stronger communities. Beatley has recently returned from a year’s research in Europe, specifically examining the experiences of some 30 cities, in twelve European countries. The findings of this study have been published in a recent book entitled Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities (Island Press, 2000). He is also the author of a new book Native to Nowhere: Sustaining Home and Community in a Global Age (also published by Island Press, December, 2004).

Beatley holds a PhD in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.