Given the nation’s economic climate and looming fiscal constraints, many of us are looking for creative solutions to our communities’ problems. This Roundtable series, designed exclusively by and for Greater Philadelphia’s community and economic development professionals, invites you to share your challenges, bring your good ideas, and brainstorm answers to your colleagues’ tough questions.

Our current selection is The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. Our December 2012 meet-up will be held at BXL Zoute from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m.

The purpose of the workshop is to “bridge the gap” between planners and community based organizations (CBOs). The workshop will provide a platform for CBOs to better understand the role of city and regional planners in community development, and acquire access to information that can help them become strong and sustainable entities within their target populations. It will also give planners an opportunity to learn more about CBO’s, what they do, and their needs. 

The proposed webinar will explore the connection between aviation and other travel modes, and the challenges that airports and their communities face when integrating airports into regional transportation systems and nearby communities. We will provide background that transportation planners need to know when embarking on transportation planning or site development projects that involve direct or indirect connections with airports or federally obligated airport property.

More than half of Americans own and use a smartphone. Increasingly planners and the public are accessing information and engaging via mobile devices. Walk through the research and mobile applications out there to aid planners in using their mobile devices to the maximum effectiveness. This session is sponsored by the Ohio State University.

Please join us for the annual NJ Planning Conference!  Due to Hurricane Sandy, the originally scheduled conference was moved to January 31 and February 1.  There's still time to register!

New pressure from elected officials and city managers to reduce fees, regulations and process to make it easier to attract development may or may not be consistent with the Principles espoused by the Code of Ethics, much less the Rules of Conduct. This interactive session will engage participants in dialogue about the pressures we are facing in our jobs on a day to day basis and how to align our response with the AICP Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

Planning and plagiarism go hand in hand. We copy zoning codes, plans, and ideas from other towns and, in the process, we are responsible for killing any sense of identity in our own communities. This session is about gaining the self confidence to plan truly exceptional places. This session is sponsored by the Ohio State University.

Real progress will occur with a paradigm shift if generations work together and cultural imperatives are addressed. This session will highlight both research and on-the-ground experience in multi-generational planning.

APA-NJ Members use promotional code APANJ2-13 to receive a 10% discount.  A one-day intensive workshop teaching how to strengthen organizational communication & participation integrating the latest tools & innovations in social media and web applications. Designed for business district management organizations, chambers and other municipal, county and regional leaders. 

 MAPS 3 is a 10-year program designed to improve the quality of life in Oklahoma City through the construction of eight projects funded by a limited term, one-cent sales tax initiative that began in April 2010. Russell Claus, Director of Planning for the City of Oklahoma City, and Cathy O’Connor, President of The Alliance for Economic Development of Oklahoma City, will discuss the history of the MAPS initiatives, private investment that has occurred as a result, and ongoing planning for leveraging private investment from MAPS 3 projects.

What happens when a group of six planning consultants decides to create a new consulting firm during the latest Great Recession? Hear how this group of one-time sole proprietor planning consultants chose to join forces and start a new consulting firm as the market contracted….and they succeeded. What did it take? What lessons did they learn? What tools and strategies worked best? How did sole proprietors, used to being leaders themselves, adjust to the new normal of being part of a six-person firm? Learn how to succeed and what it takes to move forward in today’s market.

Design guidelines are an innovative tool for controlling strip development and helping to maintain community character. This session will present case studies of design guidelines being used to control strip development in Kittery and Scarborough, Maine, Salem, New Hampshire, and Cape Cod in Massachusetts. It will illustrate how design guidelines were prepared and implemented and how they have influenced new development.

High oil and natural gas prices over the last decade, combined with new technology have ignited a fossil fuel boom across the West. Drilling for oil and natural gas is a high-impact economic activity. Today’s unconventional oil development and its effects differ in important ways from oil booms of the past. This webinar charts the new “unconventional” fossil fuel boom, tracking production, employment, and fiscal trends in an effort to better understand the pressures boomtowns face and to identify best practices for benefiting from these new unconventional fossil fuel plays.

The Emerging Professionals Group has teamed with ASCE's young member group to host a joint networking event.

The City Planner Book Club Meet-up is scheduled for Thursday, March 21 at 6:00PM. The meeting will beat The Merchant in Jersey City. 

"From Jersey to Dixie: Issues of Place and Planning" is a documentary, created by Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy students Brandon McKoy and Susannah Dyen, that compares and contrasts planning issues in New Jersey and the Southern region of the United States (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana).

Registration Open!  As the lights come back on in New York and New Jersey, the region looks to the future. How can planning create a more resilient region? Who will make the tough decisions? And how will they change the way people live, work, and play along the coastal shores?

As bike sharing systems are proliferating in cities across the US, and early systems in Boston and Washington, DC are coming of age, we examine the different metrics on which bike share programs can be evaluated. What does bike share success mean? Financial self-sufficiency, or even profitability? Improved mobility? Improved public health? Reduced GHG emissions? How can we measure the cultural impact of bike share? Or should we simply be concerned about operational success--keeping the trains running on time.

Please join us in a candid and information discussion among students and professionals about the realities of the planning profession.  Obtain insight, career advice, and network with practitioners.  

 Using 13 cases studies of the largest PHAs in the Pacific Northwest Region, this webinar outline what activities PHAs are undertaking in this devolved, market-based context, speculating about the future. PHAs make trade-offs among paths that emphasize agency survival, producing more housing for the poorest households, identification as a non-profit housing provider (rather than depending on HUD), poverty alleviation, merging with another public agency, or closing. This diversity of responses points to the under-valued attribute of public housing authorities as local organizations receiving diverse mandates from the federal government and as local housing providers.

Join us on Saturday, April 20^th, for a leisurely stroll through the beautiful Borough of Frenchtown, named One of New Jersey’s Great Places by the New Jersey Chapter of the American Planning Association – and we’ll show you why it deserves this title! 

Members will learn the basics of energy pipeline operations and maintenance, facilities, and products transported. They will gain an understanding of the risks and benefits pipelines pose to the community. Members will learn the agencies that regulate pipelines at the Federal, State and local level. They will learn the role that local governments can play in improving pipeline safety. Additionally they will learn risk based practices for land use and development planning near transmission pipelines. They will be provided with examples of good and poor development near pipelines and well as the location of additional technical information and financial resources to support their efforts to improve safety of the community and the built environment near pipelines.

Save the Date: Thursday, June 6, 2013. The conference will be held at the Newark Museum. The conference is co-hosted by the NJ Historic Trust, NJ Historic Commission, NJ Historic Preservation Office, and the Common Wealth of New Jersey. 

Recent federal legislation on collocations, FCC non-binding guidance and now state level legislative proposals could dramatically impact your community's planning authority and local zoning of wireless facilities towers. In this webinar, BB&K telecommunications attorneys will provide an overview of the challenges and opportunities facing local governments as they attempt to protect local interests while complying with federal requirements governing zoning of wireless facilities and to defeat damaging state legislative proposals that are sweeping the nation.

The 5th Annual Sustainable Raritan River Conference will focus on action steps everyone can take as individuals, as families, as part of a company or as a leader in government – to improve water quality in the region through redevelopment, remediation, restoration and protection of the Raritan River and all its tributaries.

Featuring front-line Executive Directors from NYC - Kerry McLean from the South Bronx and Rebeca Ramirez from the Heart of Brooklyn - NJ'sJGSC Group, developer Steve Santola and commercial real estate CEOBrian Silbert.

 In this webinar we examine a few failed projects that damaged the financial position of the municipality that undertook them and consider what lessons we can learn from these unfortunate situations. “The wise learn from other people's mistakes and fools from their own.” –Old Proverb. “The way of fools seems right to them, but the wise listen to advice.” –King Solomon, Circa 950 A.D.

Please join APA-NJ as it celebrates one of its 2012 Great Place in New Jersey award winners with a Walking Tour of Broad Street, Hopewell Borough.  The Hopewell Borough Mayor, Council members and other local stakeholders will walk with us and discuss the efforts made to retain the historic qualities of the area while seeking and investing grant monies into streetscape improvements

Come explore Orange’s Valley Arts District - a strikingly rich multicultural community nested in the Valley of West Orange and Orange. This is a terrific opportunity for planners to uncover the history and vibrant culture in the Valley Arts District.

USGBC and the Land Use Law Center at Pace University have recently launched two new, free resources to help municipalities utilize the LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system to support their sustainable planning goals. While certification under the rating system is often best suited to development projects, many elements of the rating system can be utilized as an open-source tool to strengthen local government planning efforts. These two resources explore in great detail the ways in which the rating system can be utilized translating those into direct action for planners complete with numerous case study examples.

Addressing the Needs of LGBT Seniors: Seniors in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender community face a unique, and significant, set of obstacles to aging comfortably, including discrimination, lack of certain legal protections, and an absence of a family support system. Examine current trends in addressing the needs of LGBT seniors as well as innovative programs and services to help them age in place.

New York is known the world over as a city of walkers and straphangers, not to mention one of the most popular tourist destinations anywhere with five very distinct boroughs, clashing street configurations, and a variety of naming and numbering conventions. Despite huge volumes of residents and visitors walking and using transit, most existing on-street directional information is aimed at drivers. This webinar will introduce participants to the basics of wayfinding with a focus on the system design and program development in NYC. There will be a Q & A session at the end of the webinar.

On Monday, October 29, 2012, Superstorm Sandy struck New York City, the most populous region in the United States. Sandy was the biggest Atlantic storm in history, devastating homes and businesses across the Northeast, and causing over $19 billion in damages in New York City alone. In response to this disaster, the New York Metro Chapter of the APA undertook a six month effort to assess how Superstorm Sandy impacted businesses in Rockaway, Queens, a community uniquely situated on a narrow peninsula and one of the hardest-hit areas of New York City. This webinar walks you through the process that the New York Metro Chapter team took to conduct its needs assessment and develop meaningful recommendations for strong planning.

Join the placemaking experts from Project for Public Spaces, Philadelphia's University City District, and the C.L.U.E Group (along the Montclair Center District itself) for this workshop.  You will learn about key principles for creating great community places, scalable & innovative placemaking in practice, and innovative funding sources for making local public improvement projects happen.

Last month, the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District. In this complex 5-4 decision, the court ruled that monetary conditions attached to land use permits are now subject to the heightened scrutiny tests of nexus and rough proportionality found in Nollan and Dolan – and that these tests also apply to permit denials, as was the case here. To help you understand what Koontz means, join with two of the country’s leading experts in land use law: Professor John Echeverria of Vermont Law School and Dwight Merriam, Esq., FAICP of Robinson & Cole LLP.

Functional classification is a transportation topic that is often left for engineers to sort out, but it has a huge impact on urban planning. Anyone involved in urban planning – including community stakeholders – should be part of the dialogue surrounding the function of public streets. This webcast will incorporate very specific examples that are typical of public transportation networks throughout the United States.

Addressing the Needs of LGBT Seniors: Seniors in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender community face a unique, and significant, set of obstacles to aging comfortably, including discrimination, lack of certain legal protections, and an absence of a family support system. Examine current trends in addressing the needs of LGBT seniors as well as innovative programs and services to help them age in place.

This presentation will demonstrate a small historic Connecticut town's efforts to create a form-based code that enables a significant amount of context-sensitive development within the existing town center. The town also established innovative stormwater management regulations and design guidelines integrated with the adopted form-based code. Issues common to many smaller towns will be discussed as will the approach taken to establish compact, walkable development patterns as a framework for watershed health.

The Common Ground Program is a community gardening and urban agriculture program created by the city of Lawrence, Kan. This webinar will provide an overview of the Common Ground Program, an outline the goals of the project goals, community benefits and lessons learned. The webinar will also provide insight on funding sources and potential partnerships that other communities or organizations may utilize in pursuing similar efforts.

Please join us for our APA-NJ Emerging Professionals Quarterly Meeting.  The committee will be discussing specific events for the remaining months of the year.  We'll also be looking for people who want to get involved and help to coordinate activities.  If you can't make the meeting, but would like to help, please contact Darlene Green.

This webinar session will highlight trends in transport, and explore sustainable mobility and solutions emerging from local and national partnerships. Successes around the country will be showcased, and strategies noted that scale up the movement. GPC’s tools include: Energy efficient technologies; Hosting of bike-sharing, car-sharing, carpooling, and mass-transit, EV charging; Responsible storm water management, Integration of intelligent transportation; Placemaking: parking assets right-sized, as well-designed, responsible neighbors; Resiliency: parking garages as energy storage and deployment centers in times of crisis; Green Garage Certification: a program inspiring parking assets to be a positive force in the built environment.

This one-of-a-kind event will bring together New Jersey’s top sustainability experts with
academics, state and local agencies, organizations, Sustainable Jersey Green Team and Task Force members and the interested public, at a sustainable venue, Duke Farms!

As we move toward more transit oriented development and work to retrofit our existing suburbs, we search for opportunities to use existing infrastructure and land area efficiently. As we evaluate these opportunities, it is important to fully understand the residential developments in these suburban areas of the post-WWII era -- both lower density modest single-family house tracts and garden apartment complexes with acres of green space. 

Join Roger Brooks of Roger Brooks International (RBI) as he shared his high-energy, high-value expertise to take you through key strategies and tactics for building communities as destinations and then promoting them effectively.  Using uncommon common sense and his ability to cut through the B.S. in our media and marketing-saturated world Roger will leave you with great ideas that are both inspiring and actionable.  

This session will focus on the kinds of incentives and planning tools that can be used that promote both redevelopment in the traditional centers of a city—those outside downtown—and the unification of those areas through mass transit. The session will cover the use of a variety of economic development incentives, form based codes implementation, and use of the Institute for Transportation Engineers Walkable Urban Thoroughfares Manual as a package for revitalization in El Paso, Texas.

This session shows how to calculate the increase in value of private land due to public actions and develop a reasonable figure for developer contributions. This knowledge is particularly helpful to those working in urban design and preservation where much of what is achieved is through negotiating developer contributions. This session was first presented at the APA National Conference in Chicago in 2013.

The purpose of the 16th YP Multi-Group Mixer is to bring together young professionals from various organizations for a night of social networking and for group-to-group cross exposure. Young Professionals attend to make new contacts, make new friends, and to learn about other organizations.

The PP Exam Review Course for the Fall 2013 test period will be held Saturday, October 5 from 8:30AM to 4:00PM, at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Civic Square Building, 33 Livingston Avenue, 2nd Floor, Room 261, New Brunswick, NJ 08901.

Panel discussion the safety and land use implications of rail and truck freight routes through local communities. Learn from national research and from the experiences of the railroads, the City of Baltimore.

Join Camden County and Cherry Hill Officials and the American Planning Association, New Jersey Chapter, to celebrate Cooper River Park’s award as a... GREAT PLACE IN NEW JERSEY!

This presentation describes the scope of the problem in terms of public health risks. federal and state drinking water, water quality, and stormwater laws require permittees to address leaky infrastructure, but local implementers often interpret these requirements in ways that ignore the potential infectious disease risk posed. 

The City of Hoboken’s South Hoboken Waterfront has been named a Great Place in New Jersey for 2013 by the American Planning Association-New Jersey Chapter (APA-NJ).   The City will be hosting a Walking Tour on Friday, October 18 from 2pm-4pm. The Walking Tour will highlight the South Hoboken Waterfront and present the processes which were involved in its industrial-to-recreational transformation.

On Thursday, Oct 24th, from 6-9pm continue our Community Planning Month celebrations with fellow APA-NJ members at this Northeast Area networking event. Enjoy light fare at 12 West in Upper Montclair - conveniently located in Upper Montclair Town Center, adjacent to the Upper Montclair Train Station.

Moderated by Bloustein Local Director and University Professor Raphael J. Caprio, and Senior Research Fellow Marc Pfeiffer, the program includes a macroeconomic overview of  the region, presentations by representatives from Jersey City, Weehawken and Edgewater, all waterfront municipalities that have experienced significant impact from Gold Coast development, and a prominent developer’s view of the region’s future. 

Status quo parking requirements often stand in the way of making communities livable, equitable, and sustainable. Responding to criticisms of excessive minimum parking requirements, many planners feel that improvements should be made but they lack a solid procedure for generating reform. Webinar participants are provided with a handout showing a step-by-step technical and policy process for reforming parking requirements. A brief introduction explains that parking requirements are a policy choice, not merely a technical calculation. 

The downtown area of Freehold is the heart of the Borough, which is located centrally in Monmouth County. Like many towns of its time, it is the historic village center for much of the surrounding population.

On this Day of Service, APA-NJ volunteers will be helping to paint the playground at Belmar Elementary School in Belmar, NJ – renewing students sense of play after their playground was damaged by the effects of Hurricane Sandy. Belmar Elementary School is a public school serving 555 students from Belmar and Lake Como in grades K-8.

The North American urban landscape is dominated by the products of late 20th century suburbanization, leaving the built environment littered with dead malls, failing strip centers, foreclosed houses, vacant big boxes, and acre upon acre of asphalt parking lots. What to do? June Williamson will discuss promising planning and design strategies and tactics, illustrated with competition-winning proposals from her book Designing Suburban Futures as well as case studies from her previous book Retrofitting Suburbia, co-authored with Ellen Dunham-Jones.

The Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time. In this Webinar, Jeff Speck outlines the compelling economic, health, and environmental mandates behind creating more walkable communities. He then discusses his General Theory of Walkability, which describes the measures that communities can undertake to create larger walking and biking populations by providing the "useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting walk."