Symposium Opens Safe Growth Activities

Planning for Safe Growth is essential for ensuring that growth and redevelopment in urban, suburban, and rural areas result in communities that are less vulnerable to loss.

On December 16, 2004, APA's professional institute, the American Institute of Certified Planners, will hold a symposium on Safe Growth to share the stories of those communities that have developed safely and those that have encountered unsafe physical, social, or economic situations.

Click here for full details about the 2004 symposium

What Is Safe Growth?

The goal of Safe Growth is to build environments that are safe for current and future generations of people and to protect structures, transportation and utility infrastructure, and the natural environment — including food systems — from damage.

Planners and policy makers must consider the sources of risk, such as geologic or weather-related natural hazards, technological hazards that generate pollution or poisons, terror, error, crime, and economic hardship.

Planners might intervene to make development safer at many different points. They might affect the degree of risk through:

• wise location decisions
• influencing policy decisions
• adopting and enforcing appropriate construction design standards and regulations
• providing incentives for compliance
• following procedures that insure participation and accountability
• introducing safety considerations into discussions
• encouraging conservation of land and energy

The Symposium

The symposium will present the Safe Growth America Checklist, a new safety assessment tool to help identify exposure to risk at the neighborhood level. Planners, developers, homeowners, and interested citizens will be able to use the assessment tool to begin the process of working with planning agencies to mitigate unsafe situations in neighborhoods.

It will begin with a retrospective on the purposes of planning in the early 20th century, such as minimizing risks to health and safety in the early industrial age and separation of uses to minimize nuisances, and will include a summary of APA planning's achievements in building safer communities.

The symposium will be taped and transcribed for publication.

Future Safe Growth Activities

Many other activities throughout the organization are planned on the topic of Safe Growth, in addition to the growing literature from APA on wildfires, landslide hazard, and planning. In March 2004, Practicing Planner, APA's quarterly publication for certified planners, featured a mini-case study of how Arlington, Virginia, has approached security design. Late this year and early in 2005, The Commissioner (APA's newly redesigned publication for planning commissioners) will include features on Safe Growth and Risk Assessment.

The National Planning Conference in San Francisco, March 19-23, 2005, will also feature a special educational track on various aspects of Safe Growth.

APA's audio/web conference, "Planning for Safe Growth," will be held on April 20, 2005. Click here for full information.