Unlocking Civic Data: Shaping Future Cities through Information

December 8, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Guest Host: APA Technology Division

Join us for an engaging and informative webinar with APA’s Technology Division in partnership with the Seattle's Chapter of Women in Data, a non-profit organization focused on increasing diversity in the data field. Together, we will explore the transformative potential of data-driven urban planning and advancing technological best practices. This dynamic session will cover how we can humanize data, effective ways to communicate the use and risk of data and technology, how to build a data team, and case studies from the field. Key themes will include data responsibility, opening up the “black box” of the data and technology fields, and best practices in how data visualization impacts representation.

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Planning for Sustainable Energy Production: A Nature-Based Approach to Large-Scale Solar

January 20, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Guest Host: APA Sustainable Communities Division

Ecosystem services and… solar energy? It’s not exactly chocolate and peanut butter. This webinar will present the ground-breaking results of the PV-SMaRT project and the “community co-benefits” approach to solar development. This U.S. DOE funded project developed new tools for planners to assess water quality risks and opportunities associated with solar energy. The webinar will also introduce a new project, launching in 2023, on nature-based solutions for solar development that can provide communities with more tools for ensuring local benefits from large-scale solar development.

Large-scale solar is a rapidly growing land use that is critically important to solving the climate crisis, but also poses unique risks and opportunities to local ecosystem functions, including water quality, soil health, habitat, and cultural/visual functions. Indeed, some solar projects have resulted in spectacular water quality failures or ecosystem damage. But the opportunity for creating “co-benefits” in local ecosystems is also remarkable. Planning professionals strive to protect community natural systems in the development process. If we restore watershed functions, create new habitat and build soil health… is it a solar farm, or is it green infrastructure?

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The Climate Data Power Hour

February 3, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Guest Host: APA Technology, Sustainable Communities and Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Divisions

As climate conditions change, understanding what data and tools are available to inform planning decisions is critical. This webinar features a climate data & technology vendor panel to introduce urban planners to data and tools to help communities reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and respond to climate impacts. During this session, each climate data and technology provider will speak for (5-7 minutes). These presentations will be followed by a facilitated discussion with all providers.

This webinar is sponsored jointly by The APA Technology Division, APA Sustainable Communities Division, and APA's Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division and is based on a similar event organized by Alta Planning + Design.

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Main Street After COVID: Lessons Learned on Design and Land Use

March 3, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Guest Host: APA Northern New England Chapter

Assuming we are past the worst of the COVID-19, what happens to our downtowns? Before the pandemic, people were rediscovering the traditional New England town center. You can stop in a few different shops, maybe pick something up for dinner at a local fish market or bakery, and enjoy the building and people. Once COVID hit, people were reluctant to leave their houses, let along go downtown. Some experts, citing research that suggests people like working remotely and don’t want to return to work in an office, suggest that downtowns may be dead. Other suggest that the natural open air character of downtowns means they are well-positioned to adjust to a post-COVID world. This webinar will present the findings of a multi-year research project on this topic. Working with funding from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Urban Studies & Planning, we set out to see what these small downtowns would need in the future to grow and thrive. We found that, with the right planning and bold and consistent actions, small city downtowns continue to have great potential. We based on research on six communities in New England and the Upper Midwest, including Nashua, NH; Haverhill, MA; and Portland ME. After completing an initial report, we have created two additional reports to date. One is on redesigning downtown Main Streets in response to best practices learned during COVID, and the second is on the challenges of creating upper story housing downtown.

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The Climate Planner: Strategies for Engaging on Climate When It’s Challenging

March 24, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Guest Host: APA Sustainable Communities Division

The world’s changing climate is a global problem that must be solved at the local level and yet many urban planners are averse to getting in the middle of another political hot-button topic; especially because they don’t know how effective they can be. At the local level, there is neither consensus that the climate is changing nor an agreed-upon approach to mitigate or to adapt to change. Jason King’s The Climate Planner: Overcoming Pushback Against Local Mitigation and Adaptation Plans (Routledge, 2021) demonstrates how urban planners can make a visible and important difference through local community actions that address the global climate problem. The book has stories from 16 years of climate planning in every kind of place: from progressive coastal cities facing sea level rise to conservative rural municipalities contending with an increasingly arid landscape. This webinar is about overcoming the objections to climate change mitigation and adaption that planners face everyday. Two climate planners will describe how to draft climate plans that encounter less resistance because they involve the public, stakeholders, and decisionmakers in a way that builds trust, educates, creates consensus, and leads to implementation.  

How can the Equity Planner be the Climate Planner? Equity planning is an ethic in which urban planners use their skills to mobilize underrepresented constituencies and implement policies and programs that redistribute resources to people who are poor or have low- and moderate-incomes. How do we fund potentially expensive adaptation solutions in places with only modest means? What is our responsibility as planners to engage in climate planning even when our clients or the public is resistant? How can we act equitably when it is clear that mitigation or adaptation will disproportionally affect the most vulnerable in our communities? How do we avoid or mitigate the displacement of the poor? Learn how our panel is climate planning and how they think the climate planner’s role must expand in the future to act more equitably.

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What are they teaching those planning students? The State of Accreditation of Planning Programs

April 28, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Guest Host: APA Kansas

Get an overview of what is being taught in today’s planning schools. Accredited planning schools must meet certain standards. In general, accreditation recognizes educational institutions and professional programs for performance, integrity and quality. For planning programs, the accrediting body is the Planning Accreditation Board. PAB recently updated their requirements to keep pace with the profession and push it forward. PAB accredits 78 master's and 16 bachelor's programs at 80 North American universities. This session will cover what PAB requires and how they ensure quality through: Stewardship, Collaboration, Communication, Integrity, and Leadership. In addition to covering curriculum requirements, we will also give an overview of how accredited schools are doing in regard to diversity, faculty quality, and student engagement with the profession.

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Let's Level Up our Community Engagement Game

May 12, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Guest Host: APA Ohio + Women and Planning Division + Urban Design & Preservation Division

Public engagement is a vital component of any planning project or planning process. This session will review innovative best practices and considerations when engaging with the public.

Della Rucker will offer a framework for deciding how to conduct public engagement and know what you are (and are not) promising the public. She'll also review ways to ensure an equitable participation process.

Staff from the Cincinnati Simcinnati Department of City Planning and Engagement will discuss how they have “gamified” engagement during their ongoing Connected Communities public outreach events.They’ll share the ideas behind the innovative activities, lessons learned, initial findings, and next steps.

Finally, Corrin Wendell and Lauren Trice will deep dive into connecting with youth in our communities. They will share general principles for engaging youth, including how to frame planning in a way that is appropriate for each age group, how to ask the right questions, tips for partnering with school districts, how to leverage youth engagement to energize a process, and general lessons learned about what works and doesn’t work.

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Regional Collaboration of Utilities and Communities Toward Sustainability and Resilience Goals

June 9, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Guest Host: APA Sustainable Communities Division

How can energy providers work collaboratively with local communities to provide resources and coordinate on planning to accelerate progress in clean energy, equity and resilience? This webinar will feature two initiatives from different regions of the U.S. that involve innovative collaboration between energy providers, local government and community stakeholders to achieve enhanced sustainability and resilience-related outcomes. Panelists will include Tami Gunderzik and Sofia Troutman of Xcel Energy’s Partners in Energy (PIE) initiative, as well as Georgia Caruthers and Nicole Wobus of the Tennessee Valley Authorities’ Connected Communities initiative. Xcel Energy’s PIE works with communities in Xcel Energy’s service areas in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Colorado. TVA’s Connected Communities initiative supports communities in TVA’s service area that includes all of Tennessee and parts of 6 surrounding states, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand two different models of collaboration between regional utility providers and local communities, and their histories
• See how social equity has been incorporated programmatically in each example
• Gain knowledge of a variety of tools and resources available to planners

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LEED for Communities: Planning for Sustainability, Resilience and Equity

July 14, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Guest Host: APA Sustainable Communities Division

Communities starting their ‘Race To Zero’ with social equity will need innovative solutions for achieving the triple-bottom-line. This talk will showcase LEED for Cities and Communities rating system framework and highlight a few examples from more than 360 global communities with ambitious, impactful, and actionable roadmaps, implementation, and management strategies. This program is catalyzing energy, emissions, water, waste, transportation, social equity, and quality of life innovation and continuous improvement with credible frameworks for effective decisions. This talk will help planners and other professionals understand how to utilize such frameworks to revolutionize the way communities are planned, developed, and operated.  Program outcomes will improve social, economic, and environmental performance indicators and strategies with clear, data-driven means of benchmarking and communicating progress.

Learning Objectives: Familiarity with the LEED for Cities and Communities framework and criteria, Knowledge of how LEED for Cities and Communities has been applied around the world and Understanding of how to utilize this program as a planner to benefit local communities.

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Uncovering Resiliency and Equity in Disaster Recovery

July 28, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Guest Host: APA Oregon

​The 2020 Wildfires across Oregon have had devastating and long-lasting impacts on the people displaced and lives interrupted. Many of the people who lost homes and property in the wildfires were of modest economic means, had endured prior life traumas, and/or have been long underserved and unengaged by government institutions. The disasters also present planners with a window to understanding the challenges, systemic barriers, and opportunities for a more resilient and equitable community rebuilding.​ ​The Oregon APA Chapter's Community Assistance Planning Program (CAPP) provided pro bono planning services to Lane and Lincoln Counties to explore a better way forward for disaster recovery. This webinar will highlight new planning methods that OAPA CAPP teams have undertaken in partnership with the counties’ leadership, disaster recovery coordinators, and public health and planning professionals. The panel will share lessons learned - the good and the unsuccessful - in trying to serve displaced survivors who have a historic distrust of systems, the structural challenges with meeting the needs of often-overlooked community members, and glimmers of hope for a resilient and equitable recovery.

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Using the Envision Sustainable Infrastructure Framework to Guide Sustainability and Resilience Planning

August 18, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Guest Host: APA Sustainable Communities Division

The Envision Sustainable Infrastructure Framework (Envision), published by the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI), helps communities deliver more resilient and sustainable projects. The framework may also be used to conduct sustainability and resilience planning at community scale. The webinar will provide an overview of Envision and highlight how planning methods are built into many aspects of the framework.

Climate change, aging infrastructure, inequality, and population growth continue to place new pressures on communities across the globe. Increases in temperatures, changes in extreme weather, sea level rise, energy consumption, water availability, and resource consumption call for communities to plan for the coming changes, embrace sustainability, and increase resilience. 

Failing to plan for these changes will have significant social, economic, and environmental consequences.  Communities are increasingly calling on planners and allied professionals to conduct resilience and sustainability planning. The preparation of climate action plans, resilience plans, and sustainability plans are becoming more common.

Envision provides a roadmap to plan, design, and deliver community interventions that enhance economic, environmental, and social outcomes.  Envision can also guide the planning and delivery of interventions that increase community resilience, minimize risks from projected future hazards, adapt to changing conditions, and rapidly recover from damage.

ISI published Envision in 2012 and in that time over 124 projects worth over $100 billion have been verified, yet Envision’s use in a planning context has not been fully leveraged.  A search of the American Planning Association’s Knowledge Center returns no APA publications or events related to Envision.

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Food + Freight in Metropolitan Areas

September 22, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Guest Host: APA Food Systems Division

Leveraging research and practitioner perspectives, this presentation will discuss the interdependent relationship between freight movements and land use in metropolitan areas. The presenters will share their experiences researching and planning for freight movements with a focus on food supply chains.

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Manufactured Housing Impacts on Sustainability and Affordability

October 20, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Guest Host: APA Pennsylvania

There are approximately 1,600 manufactured home communities (MHCs - also known as “mobile home parks” or “land-lease communities”) in PA, home to thousands of working families, seniors, and ordinary Pennsylvanians.​ In the last 10 years, private-equity and large real estate investment corporations have “discovered” MHCs as the foolproof “cash cow” of commercial real estate and have rushed to purchase communities, aggressively raise “below-market” rents, and trade or consolidate for ever-increasing returns. The homeowners who own homes in these communities are finding themselves priced out and with no options to own or rent anything in their hometowns.​ Over the last 40 years, Resident Owned Communities (ROCs) have proven themselves to be a solution to preserving this “largest source of unsubsidized affordable homeownership in the country”.​

Representatives from ROC USA, the National Consumer Law Center and the Centre County Planning and Community Development Office will bring you up to date on why MHCs are an important part of every community’s housing market, how ROCs preserve and revitalize these neighborhoods, and what the role of community planners are in ensuring that communities are not losing existing affordable housing while they struggle to create new. This is an opportunity to test your assumptions, raise your concerns and challenge the practitioners.

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New Developments in Planning Case Law

October 27, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET

Guest Host: APA Illinois

From due process to the First Amendment, planning and land use cases present interesting issues for lawyers and planners alike. Join attorneys from Ancel Glink, P.C. in Chicago for a discussion of the most recent and interesting updates in planning law, including riparian rights, affordable housing, short-term rentals, and adult uses.

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