Urbanism Next at National APA Conference
If you’re in New Orleans kicking off the National APA Conference today, here are a few sessions to check out featuring Urbanism Next representatives!
Saturday 2:45 pm
Automated Vehicles: Effects on Urban Development
This deep-dive charrette will highlight presentations from experts and in-depth conversations about how automated vehicles impact land use, physical city design, urban densification or sprawl, and local vitality and activity.
Sunday 1 pm
Planning for Autonomous Vehicles
Autonomous vehicles will begin to revolutionize mobility in communities across the nation by 2020. This session will present the latest research from APA, along with examples of places that are introducing shared autonomous vehicles to reshape development.
Fast, Funny, and Passionate
These six bite-sized presentations will both entertain and inform you, capturing the flavor of today’s planning by making you laugh — and think. This grouping is ideal for those interested in learning about how transportation, mobility, and technology impact the world we live in.
Monday 1 pm
Getting Ahead of Self-Driving Cars
Self-driving cars are coming — and fast. Hear from a public works director, national researcher, and national consultant who examine two key areas where planners should be focusing on autonomous vehicle impacts: street design/management and parking-garage design/management.
Monday 4:15 pm
Impacts of Emerging Technology on Development
Examine emerging technologies – autonomous vehicles (AVs), e-commerce, and the sharing economy – and the profound impacts they may have on parking, residential preferences, housing prices, and transit-oriented development.
Share your takeaways, thoughts, and insights with us on Twitter at @UrbanismNext, and happy conferencing!
Why do you think we always get so excited about technology, allowing it to direct urban design so completely, rather than guiding the technology to facilitate a new urban paradigm? Clearly, autonomous vehicles are still “automobiles”. The model will be adjusted, but not really changed. Innovation requires thinking outside the box. How about a conference on “Urban Design – Revolutionizing the Paradigm”. What we mainly do now is facilitate the same-o-same-o, tarting up the old model for the sake of glossy glosses and futuristic renderings more about presentation than people; a la GMs Futurama Exhibit at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Unfortunately, except for the then contemporary dependence on passenger rail, its dystopian transportation exhibit has nearly come true in detail, a pean to the automobile and its urban facilitation of expressways and sprawl.
There is a great You-Tube video of it. Note that the expressways, cloverleafs, and feeders are running so smoothly, absent any traffic jams, bottlenecks, or congestion.