Regional Planning Comes of Age
The Regional Planning Comes of Age conference was held on September 28-29
in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The conference drew 300 people from Virginia,
Maine, and everywhere in between.
Bruce Babbitt, former Secretary of the Interior and a champion of regional planning, gave the opening keynote address, in which he singled out the Pinelands as the country’s foremost regional land use plan.
Robert Yaro, President of the Regional Plan Association, showed us the surprising number and extent of regional planning efforts now underway in this part of the country.
Eighty-four experts in a wide range of fields led 37 different breakout seminars on topics like protecting threatened and endangered species through regional planning, social equity in regional planning, and how to plan for growth.
The conference closed with a plenary address by Doug Foy, recently retired Secretary of Commonwealth Development of the state of Massachusetts, who spoke eloquently of the critical role that successful cities play in limiting sprawl and in controlling the greenhouse gases that are driving global climate change today.
The conference aimed to spark a discussion of regional land use planning among practitioners and experts from the mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States a discussion of all the many policy issues, regulatory strategies, and challenges that our society faces in trying to save natural resources and bring about truly sustainable growth in a rapidly suburbanizing region. The conference also aimed to help people form new connections and collaborations, sharing information, ideas and experiences from the field. In both these aims, the conference succeeded.
Our work is not over, but has just begun. We are collecting ideas on how
best to continue the dialogue and the collaborations begun at the conference.
If you are interested in this field of endeavor and want to be involved in
our ongoing efforts, please contact us.
Carleton Montgomery
Chair of the Steering Committee
Executive Director, Pinelands Preservation Alliance (NJ)
carleton@pinelandsalliance.org