Higher ground

     We know what must be done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, say many of those concerned with climate change. What’s needed is a more sophisticated discussion of how transportation, land use, and development policies might be integrated to achieve fundamental change. The idea behind Elevate 09: Climate Change and the New Frontiers of Urban Development, an important upcoming conference in Denver and Boulder February 26-27, is to improve the quality of practice and policy in land use and real estate development, says organizer William Shutkin. The title refers to both the mile-high altitude of the location and the aspiration to push policy discussion to the next level.
     “Our hope is to dig deeper on the reality versus the fiction of cities reducing GHG and, simultaneously, maintaining and enhancing livability and affordability,” said Shutkin, director of the Initiative for Sustainable Development, the newest environmental program at the University of Colorado. “With the looming crisis of climate change and other threats, we are being forced to reconsider basic assumptions about growth, energy, land use, transportation, and housing,” he says, adding: “There’s a lot of money to be made in the transition to a sustainable society.”
     ELEVATE 09, which is being co-sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and will include presentations by Peter Pollock, the institute’s Boulder-based Ronald Smith fellow, and former visiting fellow Patrick Condon from the University of British Columbia, will bring together more than thirty of the nation’s leading thinkers and practitioners in real estate, law, business, and public policy. Writer and social critic James Howard Kunstler, University of Pennsylvania professor Witold Rybczynski, and architect and design entrepreneur Teddy Cruz. Interdisciplinary panels will discuss how policy design, social forces, and the private market intersect and accelerate or impede sustainability practices.
     Pollock said he planned to focus on the barriers to changing the urban development business, and how limitations might reside in implementation rather than the tools for sustainability, much of which already exist. “I’ve spent 25 years in the trenches of local city planning and seen lots of attention on better policies and regulations to improve the quality of development,” Pollock says. “Even where political leadership and community support align to support those policies, there are a host of implementation barriers that limit our effectiveness.  We should spend as much effort on figuring out ways to remove those barriers, as we expend on perfecting policy and regulation.”
    The conference is hosted by the University of Colorado Leeds School of Business and the University of Colorado Law School. Registration is available here .