Takeaways from the “Planning in the West” Conference
If you missed NewWest.net’s “Planning in the West” conference on June 17 and 18, you missed a great opportunity to see a snapshot of regional planning trends. If you want to relive the conference, you can get a DVD of the production at the NewWest website. Below I offer a few of my own takeaways from the conference.
There is a real debate between those who believe we are in a recession, and those who believe the economy has fundamentally changed (the “reset”).
In his morning keynote, Professor Chris Nelson from the University of Utah, discussed his predictions for growth along the Snake River Plain. One of the world’s leading urbanists with 25 books and 200 journal articles to his credit, Nelson’s work is taken seriously. He predicts that the Snake River plain stretching from Ontario, OR to Idaho Falls, ID will in the next 40 years grow to a megaregion of three million people or more. He also predicted a quick rebound to Idaho’s housing market predicting a full recovery in 2011. All of this was quickly dismissed by Mark Rivers.
Rivers, the well known developer of BoDo and the Water Cooler, in his conversation with NewWest’s founder Jonathan Weber opined that Idaho wouldn’t see the growth in the next 20 years that it saw in the last 10. His also believes that the real estate market and real estate finance have fundamentally changed and that economic developers operating in these markets must now operate from an entirely new playbook. He urged more public private partnerships to reach common goals.
What I take away from both Nelson and Rivers is this: it really doesn’t matter who is right - either way, Idaho is in serious trouble because of the next takeaway.
Elected officials are conspicuously absent from the conversation.
Just like the Chamber’s Sun Valley Leadership Conference, the Northwest Energy Summit, Idavation - Idaho’s Innovation Summit, and the ULI conference on transit in the Treasure Valley last month, elected officials failed to show up to this conference which attracted about 175 people. Idaho’s political leadership just isn’t participating in any of the debates that are critical to the future of the State and region. If Chris Nelson is correct in his predictions, powerful legislators like Mike Moyle and Dean Cameron who think they represent rural interests will soon wake up to find that they are part of an urban metropolis. The urban/rural divide will settle itself once and for all without their input, but their inaction now will have heavy consequences for the people in their districts.
If Mark Rivers’ predictions are correct and we are operating in a whole new environment, then we are probably in even worse shape as the ennui that grips our political leadership will most certainly doom Idaho to a second-rate future. It is high-time for Idaho’s elected officials to start not only participating in the debate, but leading the debate. Political leaders aren’t the only one’s at fault, however.
The media was also conspicuously absent.
Big props go to NewWest Publishing which sponsored the event in conjunction with Boise State University’s program for Community and Regional Planning. But there wasn’t a single representative from a mainstream news organization there, and not a column inch or minute of coverage in the local press. Last month’s ULI conference on rail prompted a front-page above-the-fold story which veteran urban beat reporter Cynthia Sewell got dead wrong, prompting a Reader’s View column from the conference keynote panel correcting the story. Was it for this reason that no story appeared covering the issues raised in this conference? Whatever the case, that the media isn’t interested in the conversations that are taking place between large contingents of pubic and private interests on the critical topic of growth is a huge disservice to the state. That the media isn’t asking our political leadership why they aren’t participating is an even bigger disservice.
The news isn’t all bad, however.
The Northwest has has a significant population of incredibly sophisticated people working in the planning, architecture, landscape, and design industries.
Dean of U.S. land use lawyers Christopher Duerksen prophesied that we are now in a new age of planning. We have moved from form-based and smart codes to an era dominated by sustainability. No longer a buzzword, sustainability is now the dominant ethos in city code and municipal comprehensive planning.
Seattle based architect Richard Franko from Mithun - a firm specializing in sustainable architecture, planning, and design - highlighted a plan his firm did for Portland’s Lloyd Crossing. The project team began by investigating how the natural environment performed sans the built environment. The level of scientific inquiry and computer modeling necessary to answer such questions is far beyond what most people would imagine occurs among architects and planners. The work is absolutely incredible.
Questions of sustainability, growth, development, the built environment, and our landscape are being driven from the ground up by a passionate and engaged citizenry.
While political leadership in the state is obviously disengaged, the region’s people are not. Unlike previous eras of urban renewal and redevelopment, this era is being led from the ground up, not the top down. Bingo Barnes provides a great example with his Urbane Farms organization. Urbane Farms is a collaboration of sustainable urban farms located in Boise, Idaho which uses unused portions of property such as backyards, front yards and empty lots (with permission) to grow vegetables, herbs and flowers for sale to local businesses, the public and at local farmer’s markets. Through the website, Bingo and his organization help connect people who want to farm with people who have land. A great example of leading the next generation from the ground up.
Those are a few of my thoughts on the conference. What are yours?
Conferences, Development | admin June 21, 2009
1 Comment
Other Links to this Post
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
By sagechicken, June 22, 2009 @ 8:34 pm
Kudos to Mark Rivers for telling it like it is. As much as the pro-development cheerleaders don’t want to hear it, the real estate market and real estate financing have fundamentally changed and the next couple of decades won’t be anything like the last one.