Island Press: Thought Leaders on Walkable Urbanism
Town Hall Settle
Thursday, July 1, 2010
6-8 pm
 
This event is the first in a new series, the Thought Leaders Discussion Panel on the Built Environment, sponsored by Island Press at Town Hall Seattle.
 
The American Dream has long been defined by two markers: the suburb and the automobile. Though planners and environmentalists have worked to redefine that vision, the economy has recently produced a confluence of factors—the rising cost of oil and the declining value of suburban homes, among them—that have ordinary citizens rethinking this archetypical image of our prosperity. Island Press has assembled a panel featuring Brookings Institution fellow Christopher B. Leinberger, developer, teacher and author of The Option of Urbanism; Bruce Agnew, Director of the Cascadia Center; Alex Steffen, Executive Editor of Worldchanging.org, and Scott Matthews, Vulcan Real Estate’s Senior Director, Acquisitions along with moderator Ron Sher, owner of Third Place Books and a nationally-recognized pioneer in the realm of commerce, community and civic space. They will discuss ways to create walkable urban centers and encourage transit in the context of local and federal policy, as well as opportunities for architects, developers, and preservationists to consider current regulations and policy change.

Location                                                                 
Downstairs at Town Hall, enter on Seneca Street     
1119 Eighth Avenue (at Seneca Street) in Seattle, WA 98101
Phone: (206) 652-4255

Panelists
Christopher Leinberger is a land use strategist, developer, teacher, consultant and author of The Option of Urbanism (Island Press, 2007), helping to make progressive development profitable. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, focusing on research and practices to help transform traditional and suburban downtown to places that provide “walkable urbanism.” He is also a professor and director of the Graduate Real Estate Program at the University of Michigan. In addition, he is a founding partner of Arcadia Land Company, a progressive real estate development firm. Chris was co-chair of the New Mexico Governor Richardson's Task Force on Our Communities and Our Future and served on the Planned Growth Strategy Implementation Task Force and the Impact Fee Task Force in Albuquerque. He also serves on the advisory boards of The Conservation Fund and the Enterprise Foundation. Chris has written award-winning articles for publications such as the Atlantic Monthly, the Wall Street Journal, and Urban Land magazine. He has been profiled by CNN, the Today Show, and National Public Radio. He lives the Dupont Circle area of Washington, DC with his wife, Lisa.
Alex Steffen has been the Executive Editor of Worldchanging since he co-founded the organization in 2003, as the next phase in a lifetime of work exploring ways of building a better future. In the last six years, Worldchanging has become one of the world's leading sustainability-related publications, with an archive of over 10,000 articles and a large global audience (Worldchanging was rated the second largest sustainability site on the web by Nielsen Online in 2008). Worldchanging's solutions-based journalism has played an important role in revealing formerly obscure innovations and groundbreaking ideas, thereby pushing forward the sustainability movement and changing the way we think about the planet's most pressing problems.  Steffen also edited of Worldchanging's wildly successful first book, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Abrams, 2006), a 600-page compendium of leading solutions from around the world.
 
Bruce Agnew, Fellow Discovery Institute, Director, Cascadia Center.  Since 1993, Bruce Agnew has been the Policy Director of Seattle-based Discovery Institute's Cascadia Center. The Cascadia Center is a strategic alliance from Vancouver, BC, to Eugene, Oregon, promoting high speed passenger rail, Interstate-5 freight mobility, seamless border crossings, bi-national and bi-state tourism marketing, and sustainable community development. From 1987-93, Mr. Agnew was Chief of Staff for U.S. Representative John Miller from Washington state's first district. Before his congressional service, Bruce Agnew was elected to two terms on the Snohomish County Council, and served as President of the Puget Sound Regional Council in 1985. He is a former member of the Citizen Oversight Panel for Sound Transit, and is a member of the Regional Freight Mobility Roundtable. Mr. Agnew is a 1974 graduate of Stanford University, and a 1977 graduate of U.C. Berkeley, Law School.
 

Scott Matthews, Vulcan Real Estate’s Senior Director, Acquisitions leads the strategic North American efforts for Vulcan’s real estate portfolio.  His more than 27 years experience spans multiple product types and markets with a concentration in high-density urban mixed-used projects. In the past he has served as a Vice-President and Area Partner for JPI and other organizations including Trammel Crow Residential, in Seattle.  Scott is a graduate of the University of Missouri at Columbia.

Moderator: Ron Sher, Founder METROVATION / THIRD PLACE COMPANY and Sher Partners is a developer and national pioneer in the effort to integrate commerce, community and civic space in a mutually sustaining way. He and his family have run the largest retail leasing brokerage in the west.  An avid bicyclist he logs in 3,500 miles a year. Sher is an environmentalist with a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Washington State University.