The Sustaining Places Initiative is a multi-year, multi-faceted program to define the role of planning in addressing all human settlement issues relating to sustainability.
APA President Bruce Knight, FAICP, formally announced the association's Sustaining Places Initiative in March 2010 during the first day of the United Nations Fifth World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Knight chaired the WUF session on "Planning Sustainable Urbanization and the Right to the City" that was put together by the Global Planners Network of 35 nation-based planning organizations. APA, a founding member of the GPN, also actively participated in previous World Urban Forums in Vancouver and Nanjing.
APA's blog, Sustaining Places, delivers the details on the association's sustainability partnerships, policy efforts, and research programs, and provides observations on sustainability planning.
In his announcement, Knight noted that, "The planning movement and its professional planners are uniquely qualified to provide leadership in defining, analyzing, and debating these issues and in integrating place-based strategies in the broader discussion of sustainability. Thus, Sustaining Places will examine both how places can be sustained and how places themselves sustain life and civilizations. Planning's comprehensive focus is not limited to a building or a site but encompasses all scales and all forms of organization of human settlements, from rural areas and small town to cities and metropolitan regions. The challenges of sustainability and possible solutions require planners' values, skills, and leadership."
A key element of the APA's Sustaining Places Initiative is the newly formed Sustaining Places Task Force. The task force will focus on the role of the comprehensive plan as the leading policy document and tool to help communities of all sizes achieve sustainability. It will survey current best practices, evolving needs and practices, and how to change practices so the comprehensive plan will better achieve its role as the leading policy document for communities.
Task force co-chairs are David Godschalk, FAICP, the Stephen Baxter Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill; and Bill Anderson, FAICP, Director of Planning and Community Investment for the City of San Diego.
As Bruce Knight noted, "David Godschalk is known among both practitioners and educators as one of the most influential 'thought leaders' of the profession over several decades." He specifically identified Godschalk's expertise with respect to comprehensive planning and comprehensive plans. According to Knight, "His accomplishments in these areas are legendary and we are honored that he has agreed to co-chair this critical new initiative."
Knight continued, "Bill Anderson has achieved recognition as a leader among his peers as he has combined a career in private practice as a senior vice-president of Economics Research Associates, volunteer chair of the San Diego planning commission and, most recently, Director of Planning and Community Investment for San Diego. Bill's unique combination of leadership experiences—in the private sector and as an appointed official and planning director — nicely complement David's experiences in research, teaching, and public policy."
A Corresponding Committee will broaden the task force's activities. APA will invite each division, chapter, and Planning Student Organization — as well as other partners — to designate a committee member. APA will establish a website to support committee communications and document sharing.
APA is engaged with UN-HABITAT's World Urban Campaign, an international effort to raise awareness about the challenges of global urbanization.
Other APA activities, some already under way and others that will be launched in coming months, will supplement the work of the task force. These include the ongoing work of Rebuilding America, a research review undertaken by APA's National Centers for Planning, and expanding educational offerings in the broad area of sustainability.
In 2010 at APA's National Planning Conference in New Orleans, Sustaining Places began a two-year stint as APA's supertopic.
APA organized a Sustaining Places Day at the 2010 Federal Policy & Program Briefing, in collaboration with the American Institute of Architects and its Challenge 2030 and the American Society of Landscape Architects and its Sustainable Sites.
Innovation in Sustaining Places was a special category for the 2011 National Planning Awards, and Sustaining Places was a featured track at the 2011 National Planning Conference in Boston.
APA, a longtime advocate for sustainability, has adopted a number of policy guides on key issues: Climate Change, Energy, Waste Management, Water Resources Management, and Planning for Sustainability.
APA's CEO Paul Farmer, FAICP, attended the WUF session and noted that, "APA has been a supporter of both UN-HABITAT's World Urban Campaign and the GPN's commitment to a new urban planning, both in the United States and throughout the world." Farmer remarked on APA's leadership in forming the GPN and maintaining a close working relationship with UN-HABITAT. He said, "We were honored to help sponsor World Habitat Day in D.C. last fall — the first time that it had been unveiled by the U.N. on U.S. soil — and even more honored that Dr. Anna Tibaijuka, UN-HABITAT's Executive Director, chose the APA Policy Conference the next day as the site to formally release the U.N.'s Global Report on Human Settlements."
Dr. Tibaijuka, who spoke at APA's 2008 National Planning Conference in Las Vegas, continually reminds the world that more than half of its population now lives in urban areas.
As Bruce Knight said in his remarks at WUF, "Planners are uniquely qualified to be global leaders in integrating these two concepts of sustainability and places. Ours is the place-making profession and the places that we make must have lasting value for all."
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