This year's Student Planning and Design Competition focused on the Division-Schoolcraft neighborhood along the Joe Louis Greenway in the NPC26 host City of Detroit. Situated northwest of downtown, the competition site is bisected by a newly completed section of the JLG and diverse land uses ranging from light industrial to vacant school buildings with established neighborhoods in between. This site presents a model opportunity to explore sensitive and strategic infill solutions while complementing the existing neighborhoods and facilitating growth of jobs through the rebirth of light manufacturing. Join us post-NPC conference with representatives of the three student team finalists and members of the final jury to discuss the student work and the broader response to reimagining the industrial past.

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Hybrid engagement has moved from a pandemic workaround to a defining part of planning practice. Yet for many teams, it still feels fragmented, hard to evaluate, and unclear in impact. This webinar introduces the Designing Hybrid Engagement guide and translates its core framework into practical application. The guide presents hybrid engagement as a design challenge that requires intentionally connecting participation across time, place, and format to reduce barriers and strengthen outcomes. Participants will explore how engagement choices shape whose voices are heard, how input is interpreted, and how decisions are ultimately made. Drawing on real-world examples, the session highlights both successful approaches and common pitfalls, including “parallel track” engagement that separates in-person and online participation rather than connecting them.

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All three Levittowns in U.S. are the prototypical American post-WWII residential development. Do they have anything to teach us after 75 years of existence? This session will explore their impact on suburban development and mixed legacy over the last 8 decades. It will cover Levittown's history (including several riots), its positive and negative planning legacies, and its role as both a model for suburbia and a cautionary tale about car dependency, discrimination and racial intolerance. Levittown remains a living and evolving example of the American suburban landscape.

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Our panel will discuss resiliency issues facing planners, tools available to planners, and how specific jurisdictions (Maryland, California, Maine, and Boston) are using those tools to tackle these issues.

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Extreme heat driven by climate change has become an increasingly urgent challenge for cities worldwide, and planners are uniquely positioned to lead efforts to strengthen heat resilience and adaptation. The APA Cross-Divisional Sustainability Working Group will present Local and Global Perspectives on Extreme Urban Heat featuring an open, facilitated discussion with a panel of experts who will share how planning policies, strategies, and tools are being used across communities and countries to address extreme heat. Participants will gain insight into current best practices for heat-resilient planning across different city types and learn from international and global perspectives that can inform local action.

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The 2026 APA Sustainable Communities Division’s annual virtual symposium will explore climate planning during a time of unprecedented uncertainty. The Symposium will explore how innovation at the intersection of planning frameworks, adaptive management, evaluation methods, and emerging technologies can strengthen climate planning in the face of uncertainty. It will also address practical challenges, such as advancing climate resilience efforts despite constrained resources, limited capacity, and resistant political environments.

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This session introduces professionals to the LEED v5 framework through real-world planning and design examples aligned with its core priorities. By analyzing projects that predate or operate outside of LEED v5 certification, the session highlights how many of the framework’s key themes—such as decarbonization, resilience, equity, and human health—are already embedded in practice. Through case-based discussion, participants will build foundational LEED skills, learn how to identify and translate these principles into future projects, and better understand how the framework builds on existing approaches in the field. This session is designed as an introductory, skills-building opportunity for those new to LEED.

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How can planners and downtown leaders cultivate Main Streets where LGBTQIA+ people feel visible, welcome, and celebrated? Join the APA LGBTQ & Planning Division for a panel conversation featuring practitioners from communities across the country who are advancing inclusive downtown initiatives through programming, partnerships, placemaking, and storytelling.

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Data centers are an industrial land use of considerable debate in communities as they have seen high levels of investment in recent years, driven by the expansion of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and digital infrastructure. Hosted by the APA Technology Division, this webinar will examine the broader landscape and drivers of data center development in the U.S. and explore how communities can proactively plan for this rapid growth. This includes a look at how data centers can be practically regulated by a local municipality's zoning power and the specific policies that must be in place before a proposal arrives. As proposals increase in urban, suburban, and rural jurisdictions alike, they often bring promises of expanded tax base alongside concerns about energy and water consumption, land use compatibility, and environmental impacts. This session will provide a balanced look at these implications, including strategies to improve these projects' impacts on community health, safety, and welfare in a sustainable manner. We will discuss typical development review pathways from by-right approvals to development agreements. The session will also feature a case study of "the extreme outlier project": how a project the scale of the Microsoft Data Centers in Mount Pleasant, WI gets done, while exploring how a relatively small community plans for a facility that breaks every metric in a standard code. This webinar will offer practical insights, national context, and actionable planning policies to help communities navigate proposals thoughtfully, negotiate effectively, and achieve better outcomes.

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