January 29th, 2006
Smart Growth conference attracts diverse audience
by Susan Snipes
The fifth annual New Partners for Smart Growth Conference: Building Safe, Healthy and Livable Communities was held at the Adams Mark hotel in Denver, Colorado January 26-28th 2006.
The Smart Growth concept appears to be growing more prominent. This was the conference’s biggest year with nearly 1300 attendees. Numerous speakers highlighted the multi-discipline aspect, including during the thursday evening welcome, when we attendees were called “boundary crossers”. “Professionals coming together from varied disciplines” was emphasized repeatedly in the conference program and various promotional materials. In addition to the majority percentage of planners and land-use professionals, attendance included approximately 10% healthcare professionals, 8% city officials and 10% builders and developers.
As a president of a visual design and marketing firm, (with no real background in urban design or land use planning), I found the panel discussions and break-out sessions relatively easy to follow. Occassionally, I’d encounter some unclear phrases and acronyms including brownfield, greenfield, TOD, BRT, and LRT. And I was surprised to hear NIMBY so widely used.
While the conference was overall accessible to me, I had a difficult time finding where my design and marketing company could fit in. I was hoping the conference would provide clearer ways to facilitate smart growth as a non-planner, or how to contribute as a proponent of the smart growth message. The compact, transit-oriented, walkable, bicycle-friendly, mixed-use concepts aren’t exactly new, but are still developing and designs and rewards for well-planned communities are still being defined.
In a couple of the panel discussions, the idea of marketing “urban” communites or the encouragement of general adoption of smart growth ideas was mentioned. (In thursday evening’s panel discussion called “Smart Growth: For Communities that are Wealthy, Healthy and Wise” Peter Park, the planning directory of Denver, pondered how one markets and sells “urban”. During “Recognizing a Smart Investment: Private Sector’s Acceptance of Smart Growth” on friday morning, Tracy asked how to “expand the size of the smart growth market” and discussed people’s resistance to density.) However, beyond being touched on, means to promote and educate about smart growth was never fully explored.
After friday afternoon’s set of session, Molly Mowery related from her experience at a land use and planning firm that highly vocal citizens can affect change locally. If you’re the only person in front of the city council, you really can make a difference.
It would be great for citizens to have more knowledge about smart growth and learn how to get that knowledge to communities.
Though the conference had a variety of professionals (and students), I did not find the content widely useful. Maybe I was optimistic about my goals for attending, or perceived the wrong impression of “diverse appeal” touted by the conference’s promotional materials. Though diverse by typical conference standards, this conference still seemed best suited to the folks who were actually doing the work of implementing smart growth strategies, not the graphic design firm interested in communicating about smart growth and not the citizen wanting to learn how to make smart growth happen in their own community.
Visit the New Partners for Smart Growth Conference Web site>
