Tuesdays at APA–DC — January 2011

Inaugural Event

Sustaining Places

February 8, 2011

The featured speaker was APA President Bruce Knight, FAICP, who discussed APA's Sustaining Places Initiative and its efforts to reexamine the comprehensive plan with a focus on sustainability.

As Knight said in his remarks during the United Nations Fifth World Urban Forum last March in Rio de Janeiro, "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. ... 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."

About the Speaker

Bruce Knight is Planning Director of Champaign, Illinois, and an adjunct lecturer at the University of Illinois in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. He also has worked as a city planner in Liberty, Missouri, and Iowa City, Iowa, and as a regional planner with the Mid-Iowa Development Association Council of Governments in Fort Dodge Iowa. Knight joined APA in 1980 and became a certified planner in 1985. He was elected to the AICP College of Fellows in 2003.  Knight served two terms on the APA Board of Directors from 2000-2008.  He served two terms as APA Illinois Chapter President from 1997 to 1999, and served on the Fellows of AICP Task Force and selection committee and the APA Mission Statement Task Force. He also chaired the 2000-2005 National APA Awards Juries. Knight has a B.S. in Urban Planning from Iowa State University and an M.A. in Public Affairs from the University of Iowa.