2008 Maryland-Delaware APA Regional Conference
Growing Greener– Planning Healthy Communities for a Healthy Planet

Loews Annapolis Hotel
Annapolis, Maryland
November 19-21, 2008

The conference theme reflects a lot of discussion among both chapters about what is important to the region and Planning in the near term.  It reflects the increasing role and responsibilities of the planning profession as they seek to apply Smart Growth and greening principles to environmental and sustainability challenges that face the communities of today and tomorrow. One unique twist is that we are going to seek out advice from real estate and development professionals to help us understand what the impediments have been to implementing compact development patterns and other Smart Growth tenets.  Four session tracks will be presented.  The preliminary tracks and suggested topics are:

• Housing: Barriers to affordability, challenges of meeting housing needs, transit-oriented development, etc.
• Infrastructure: Personal mobility, traffic congestion, sewage and water capacity, transit in the 21st Century, etc.
• Development Economics: Building codes and design costs, financial feasibility, life cycle costs, defining the real estate market, etc.
• The Profession: Planning law, ethics, technical issues, etc.

In addition, Climate Change and Low/No Impact Design are acknowledged as cross-cutting issues.  A session on these topics will be offered in each formal track.  Finally, we are continuing our succesful collaboration with AARP in highlighting Universal Design, mobility, and the challenges seniors face when trying to stay in the communities they built.  We think this conference will be a valuable and very informative venue.  We already have a beautiful, centrally-located host city: Annapolis.  Please plan to join us.

Call for speakers in PDF Form is here.

Information on registration and hotel reservations will be posted as it becomes available.