With COVID-19, the rural divide just became bigger. The presence of adequate broadband impacts distance learning K-12 in Higher Education, economic development and many other aspects of land use planning. This session discusses how planners can impact broadband distribution through telecommunications ordinances, comprehensive plans and other local ordinances and policies. The discussion will include the uncertainties surrounding small cells and 5G technology.

The sixth annual Jersey Water Works Conference is a multi-day virtual event that will bring together more than 300 state and local decision-makers, practitioners and stakeholders to amplify the importance of addressing New Jersey’s water infrastructure, explore innovative solutions and celebrate the Jersey Water Works collaborative as an effective, comprehensive approach to achieving statewide impact.

This online program has been designed to help individuals better understand how economic activity – and the programmatic decisions it drives – may impact the health of the environment and society. The course will examine how and why natural resources are often undervalued or ignored completely by traditional accounting practices and economic data. It also will discuss why natural assets, such as clean air and water, tend to be abused precisely because they are the "common property" of society at large.

This second presentation in a two-part series will begin post-installation. We will look at best practices and federal and state laws pertaining to the maintenance and conservation of public art works. The presentation will focus on how communities and public art programs address issues of retaining, repairing, relocating, and removing public art. From current court cases challenging the application of the Visual Artists Rights Act to street art, to the heated debates raging over the removal of monuments, we will explore the hot topics challenging public art programs and making newspaper headlines. The presentation will last approximately one hour with at least 30 minutes for questions and answers.

The premiere downtown economic development event of the year, the annual New Jersey Downtown Conference hosts industry experts who provide insights into downtown management best practices, as well as development, business, and retail market trends.

Integrating qualitative practices into planning work also can help support more inclusive planmaking and account for important and persistent inequities present in quantitative data by surfacing the rich, unique, and varied lived experiences of marginalized communities, who in addition to being undercounted in quantitative data, are often excluded from formal decision-making structures and institutions. Ineffective collection and analysis of community feedback can lead to biased conclusions and alienate community members. Adopting a qualitative methodology in your project can help you address these risks, improve your work, and nurture stronger relationships with stakeholders. In this session, the speakers will present an overview of a qualitative methodology for planning and share tools for developing a coherent and practical methodology to collect, analyze, and incorporate qualitative data into your projects. This session’s speakers will draw on their extensive experience with community-based qualitative practices, as well as their diverse personal and professional backgrounds, to share how they approach working with a qualitative methodology in their own work and the impact it has on their projects. Attendees will leave this session understanding how to incorporate a qualitative methodology into their work and projects.

This two-part series will explore three situations of vulnerable communities adapting to and surviving the threats of climate change and urban development and present planning best practices. First, Sally Russell Cox with the State of Alaska will share her work with four communities and the reports she co-authored on a relocation framework and the unmet infrastructure needs of Alaska Native villages due to erosion, flooding, and permafrost thaw. Then, Pat Forbes with the State of Louisiana, will describe the Isle de Jean Charles project. This marsh island has lost 98% of its land due to sea level rise and coastal land loss, which is forcing the resettlement of the community that inhabited that land for generations. The speakers will demonstrate how citizen participation is critical to the relocation and cultural preservation and describe how interagency collaboration is critical to ensure housing affordability and infrastructure planning. This is the first of a two-part series looking at resilience in vulnerable communities. The second part will look at the Gullah-Geechee community and their resilience in the face of urban development encroachment.