Online Webinar

Please join this important, informative, and engaging webinar on the ethical rules and considerations governing planners, plan commissioners, and lawyers who work with planners and appear before plan commissions. The webinar will cover the primary sources of ethical rules for planners and lawyers, common ethical mistakes and how to avoid them, and recent cases. In addition, the webinar will have an interactive component that will enable participants to interact with the presenters and other participants on ethical scenarios.

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."

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.