American Planning Association

Authors Jon B. DeVries and D. Bradford Hunt discuss the state of planning in the Chicago region and their book Planning Chicago.

January 7, 2014 For the past three years, APA has been working in Latin America to promote urban planning. The most recent grant from the U.S. Department of State's Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas has focused on four innovative housing and community development demonstration projects in Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru. This presentation explains the background of the region's planning issues and showcases the progress of the four projects.

Immigration is woven into American history. But what about its future? Each year APA's professional institute, the American Institute of Certified Planners, hosts a fall symposium on a timely topic in planning. As federal legislators debate immigration reform, this fall's symposium looks at how immigrants affect the economies and cultures of the cities where they live and work. Hear regional perspectives on a dynamic group of people and their role in places across the United States. Recorded on October 29, 2013 at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. Panelists Stacy Anne Harwood Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana Fatima Shama Commissioner New York City Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs Leslie Wollack Program Director of Infrastructure National League of Cities Paul Farmer, FAICP, moderator CEO American Planning Association

November 12, 2013 Across the country, hundreds of communities have embraced Complete Streets policies as a way to foster safer streets that serve everyone, not just drivers. But individual projects and general policies aren't enough: transportation agencies often struggle to reform decades of rules, practice, and politics that prioritize cars. Barbara McCann, founding director of the National Complete Streets Coalition, has dug into what it takes to upend the way every transportation project is conceived, planned, and evaluated so each provides for people walking, bicycling, or taking the bus. McCann will discuss what she learned about why Complete Streets too often fail and what can be done to close that gap between policy and practice. She will share the stories of practitioners in cities and towns from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Colorado Springs, Colorado, who have made four fundamental changes in the way transportation projects are chosen, planned, and built.

November 19, 2013 A growing number of cities across the country have begun to acknowledge their waterfronts as valuable community assets through plans, capital investments, and development regulations. The Cal-Sag Channel and Little Calumet River wind through the ecologically rich, but economically challenged Calumet region in Chicago's south suburbs. The region has received attention lately through the state's Millennium Reserve initiative, a new land bank and transit-oriented development fund, and possible national park designation for the Pullman neighborhood, and it's poised to take advantage of its rich water assets. At the center of much of this activity is the City of Blue Island, Illinois, an inner-ring suburb straddling both banks of the Cal-Sag Channel. Jason Berry, from the City of Blue Island, and Abby Crisostomo, from the Metropolitan Planning Council, discussed a number of water-oriented planning activities happening in Blue Island — from neighborhood-based approaches to green infrastructure a

October 22, 2013 The American mobilization for World War II is famed for its industrial production; less well known is that it was also one of the greatest urban planning challenges that the United States has ever faced. Although Americans tend to think of World War II as a time of national unity, mobilization had a fractious side. Interest groups competed for federal attention, frequent — sometimes violent — protests interrupted mobilization plans, and seemingly local urban planning controversies could blow up into investigations by the U.S. Senate. Drawing on her recently released book, Planning the Home Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run, Sarah Jo Peterson shows how the federal government used a participatory planning approach to mobilize the home front. For the massive Willow Run Bomber Plant, built in a rural area 25 miles west of Detroit, bringing the plant to success required dealing with housing, transportation, and communities for its tens of thousands of workers. It involved Ame

October 22, 2013 Despite the planning profession's origins in visionary thinking about the future of our cities, many contemporary planning practitioners are mired in the political battles of today and, therefore, can feel disconnected from the idea of imagining how the cities of tomorrow may have different needs and functions than the cities of today. According to architect and urban designer Marshall Brown, from the Illinois Institute of Technology, future cities will be rooted in but not beholden to current realities. The cities of the future will likely be "mash-ups," recombining and repurposing infrastructure and design features. Brown discussed his recent projects, including proposals for reimaging Chicago's Circle Center, and shared ideas about American cities and their futures.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013 While the greater Chicago region has historically had access to ample fresh water, it can no longer assume that water supplies are infinite. Without coordinated planning and policy, the Chicago region may be in jeopardy of forfeiting future growth and prosperity. Fortunately, a lot has happened since the 2010 release of Water 2050: Northeastern Illinois Water Supply/Demand Plan that bodes well for water supply planning and management in northeastern Illinois, including the creation of the Northwest Water Planning Alliance, momentum toward a modernized state plumbing code, and the creation of the Clean Water Initiative. At the same time, there remains a lot of work to, including developing a sustainable revenue stream to support ongoing regional water supply planning. Josh Ellis, from the Metropolitan Planning Council, will summarize the current state of water supply planning in the Chicago region, and highlight opportunities for moving Northeastern Illinois toward a more sustain

Tuesday, August 27, 2013 Since 2010, the American Planning Association (APA) has worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to examine the inclusion of public health goals within comprehensive plans and their implementation. This presentation will identify best practices for the effective integration of public health goals into plans and successful approaches to cross-sector collaboration and community partnerships to implement those goals. Anna Ricklin and Nick Kushner of APA's Planning and Community Health Research Center offer case study examples of how local government agencies can build upon partnerships for assistance and resources to translate a comprehensive plan from policy document into a set of actions to improve community health. As built environment factors increasingly determine public health outcomes, this presentation offers a clear and targeted avenue for intervention at the highest level of built environment planning.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013 The more planners engage in collaborative participation the more they should expect to find people making judgments about the future tied to current emotional attachments. How do planners anticipate this and prepare activities and plans that encourage and foster emotional shifts? Most planners and plans provide argument and evidence to inform clients about future changes giving reasons in support of different alternative responses. But these do not work in the face of emotional attachments to familiar and popular practices. The use of narrative and storytelling offers a way for professionals to anticipate and counter client attachments. Professor Charles Hoch, from the University of Illinois at Chicago, shared some highlights from his research about the effects of emotions on planning processes and discussed the power of narrative in planning.

The Walter Reed Army Medical Center Reuse Plan provides the urban framework for 66.5 acres of land to be transferred to the District of Columbia following closing of the military installation. The planning effort was led by the District Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development and the Office of Planning. This land has valuable frontage to 16th Street and Georgia Avenue, two major axial corridors, with the former originating in the White House and the latter being a major passageway between D.C. and Silver Spring. Presenters Susana Arissó, AICP, and Martine Combal, AICP, discussed the cutting edge sustainable framework. This future neighborhood is set to become one of the five EcoDistricts in the Washington area, consisting of an exciting mixed-use development balancing new construction with historic buildings, open recreational spaces, destination retail, and residential, institutional and office uses totaling three million gross square feet. Located in an area of Georgia Avenue in di

The U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and the right to bear arms. Nevertheless, land uses that are dependent on these guarantees continue to court controversy in many communities. Whether sparked by chronic concerns over threats to community character or more acute debates related to public safety, many planners find themselves on the front lines of battles over contentious uses that have some claim on being constitutionally protected. Drawing from practice-based experience and lessons from case law, Adam Simon and Dan Bolin from Ancel, Glink discussed local regulatory issues related to strip clubs, churches, guns shops and other land uses entangled with rights flowing from the First and Second Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

Transit oriented development has become the holy grail of land use and transportation planners. The logic of concentrating both residential and commercial growth at transit stations — especially rail transit stations — is compelling and has ample empirical support. There is also evidence that transit accessibility increases property values near stations and that mixed use, high density development near stations increases transit ridership. But investments in transit are designed to move riders through a transit corridor, thus the success of transit investments should be measured at the corridor, not the station, level. In this presentation, Professor Gerrit Knaap, director of the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland, introduced the newly formed Purple Line Corridor Coalition. The goal of the coalition is to assure that investments in the purple line transit corridor achieve more than transit oriented development but serve as a stimulus for sustainable and equitable economic develop

June 25, 2013 As we emerge from the Great Recession, communities with a predictable development review and approval process have a powerful competitive advantage in attracting private investment and economic development. Now, more than ever, limited access to capital, weaker markets, and less ability (or willingness) to share financial incentives is steering good development toward "easier" environments. "Winning" communities are delivering a predictable entitlement process that advances the community's planning and development objectives and rewards good development with less stress and less delay. This concept is not about giving away the store, "padding" anybody's bottom line, or accepting undesirable development. The focus is on a balance between the assurance that communities must have from an approval and the predictability a developer seeks in navigating that process. Michael Blue, FAICP, from Teska Associates will draw on his experience managing municipal development departments and serving clients

Despite a storied planning history, Chicago is no longer a city that plans with confidence and vision. Chicago lacks a city department with the name "planning" in its title. Instead, this essential municipal function is now largely focused on immediate zoning matters with long range and strategic planning in a secondary role and largely replaced with piecemeal, ad hoc, and volunteer planning efforts – often funded and focused on disconnected Tax Increment Financing (TIF) districts. The city had great success in the 1950s and 1960s in crafting strong central area plans and path-breaking comprehensive plans that laid the groundwork for a major commercial and residential revival. In the most recent decade however major planning initiatives have been largely unimplemented and replaced by deal-making, site-specific and one-off projects. Systematic, coordinated, long-range efforts have been difficult to initiate or sustain. Drawing on their new APA Planners Press book Planning Chicago, authors Jon B. DeVries, AI

The film It's a Wonderful Life grows more relevant every day as more American consumers lose the value in their homes and anonymous customer service calling centers become our primary contact with our banks. However, there are still more than 7,000 banks and 7,000 credit unions in the United States. Each of these still has the ability to convert your insured deposit into a loan to a local business and to step up as a community civic leader. Just under 100 of those banks are certified by the U.S. Treasury as "community development banks" and another 500 nonprofit community loan funds finance housing rehab, small businesses, and nonprofit facilities. Ron Grzywinski and Mary Houghton will discuss the role that ShoreBank played as the first and largest community development bank and the increasing importance of community development financial institutions as long term partners in community and economic development. They will touch on the new Global Alliance for Banking on Values as well as opportunities for plan

While sustainability and green urbanism have become buzzwords in urban policy circles, too little analysis has focused on who gets to decide what green looks like. Many visions of the green city seem to have room only for park space, waterfront cafes, and luxury LEED-certified buildings, prompting concern that there is no place in the "sustainable" city for industrial uses and the working class. While it is difficult to find anyone against "sustainability," the process through which urban environments are being remade under the rubric of sustainability are highly contested. A major concern is environmental gentrification, in which environmental improvements result in the displacement of working class residents. While social justice is supposed to be an explicit part of any definition of sustainability, the surge in environmental awareness in cities has not been matched with concern for social equity. Instead, the environmental dimension tends to obscure the social processes that created it. And yet, sustaina

Conservation has often been considered a non-use of land, what is left over when other human needs have been accommodated. More recently, the importance of conservation as an intentional land use has been recognized for its role in supporting a variety of human needs: cultural, recreational, and ecosystem services with significant socioeconomic benefits. However, conservation is different because the factors that make an area valuable for conservation are not nearly as flexible and transportable as other land uses that can use a variety of technologies to make sites suitable to accommodate nearly any type of development. NatureServe, an international conservation nonprofit organization, supports assessment and planning for conservation land use through a variety of products and services. The NatureServe Network of state natural heritage programs collect and provide data on the location of rare and imperiled species and ecosystems as well as expertise in the conservation of biodiversity. In this presentatio

In Chicago, 1.8 million trips are taken by transit per day, and more than half of these are by bus. However, because Chicago's congestion is the third worst in the country, buses are often caught in traffic, making them slower and less reliable than they should be. There have been many studies looking at new rail options, including a downtown circulator streetcar and the Circle Line L train, but all have stalled because of the time and money needed to plan and implement. For the last five years, the Chicago Transit Authority and the Chicago Department of Transportation have been planning Bus Rapid Transit in the city. The first new type of transit service since trolley bus service opened in 1930, the Jeffery Jump, is paving the way for Bus Rapid Transit in the Loop and along Western and Ashland Avenues. Christopher Ziemann, Chicago's BRT Project Manager, will discuss the unique approach that Chicago is using to advance BRT economically, politically, and technically.

Professor Thomas O’Rourke, Thomas R. Briggs Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, spoke in July 2012 at the Natural Hazards Workshop in Broomfield, Colorado, on the subject of “Infrastructure Too Big to Fail.” Jim Schwab, AICP, manager of the APA Hazards Planning Research Center, caught up with him later to explore that subject in the context of natural disasters. Their conversation is the focus of this podcast.