Highlights...continued! (Day 2 of NPSG)

I feel like I'm back in high school playing hooky with the cool kids, except I never played hooky in high school. In fact, I've skipped class intentionally maybe once in my life and I had to really justify it to myself. And I definitely played hooky by myself, sitting at home being grumpy.

What I'm getting at is I'm seeing a lot less of this conference than I originally intended, but it has definitely been worthwhile, because I'm seeing a bit more of L.A. And getting to know some individuals that already have strong connections to NCI. It turns out there are interesting and walkable neighborhoods in L.A. and with its history it does make sense to have the smart growth conference here, because a lot of cities imitated the codes of L.A. (for better or for worse, mostly for worse arguably) and L.A. is one of those cities with neighborhoods that were originally built around a streetcar system, which makes for a nice, New Urbanist, non-car centered atmosphere. That was one of the messages I picked up from the one full conference session I attended this morning, presented by Gordon Price, from Vancouver, B.C. I'm going to link a few of his websites and materials, because of course he can explain it better than I can.

After the session, which got out a little after 11:30, I caught up with my boss Bill and we ended up getting lunch with Andres (yes, I think we're on a first name basis now) and Debra. Debra used to work for Andres at DPZ until 9 months ago, where she started at a national urban design firm called HDR. There are a lot of connections here--HDR has merged with the firm that Bill used to run with Steve Coyle, and Bill is going to conduct something like 4 NCI trainings for HDR at different offices in the U.S. Debra is our point person for those trainings, so I'll be communicating with her a lot over this year. She's very experienced with charrettes, as she coordinated them for DPZ for the past 7 years. She's submitting a couple pieces for our Best Practices report coming out in a few months. She's very knowledgable about our process, as our process has its roots in, among other things, charrettes that Bill used to conduct for DPZ.

Lunch was great--both Andres and Debra are very personable and welcoming, Andres was even ribbing me about my degree from Reed and was trying to convince me throughout the afternoon that the European or Hispanic way of pronouncing my name (with the accent on the "mah" syllable as opposed to the "Ta" syllable) was far superior and that I needed to seize this chance to recreate myself and start going by that pronunciation. Bill unfortunately had to rush off because the hotel wouldn't let him check out late and he needed to get on a plane this afternoon anyway. We were later joined by Jim, also at HDR and also a primary point person for the trainings we're doing through them, and Robert (who is French, so pronounced the French way) who is at the HDR office in San Francisco, so he works with Bill's old partner Steve (who is also a NCI Board Member).

We sat and chatted for a couple hours. Before Bill left he had a chance to bounce an idea off Andres about our future plans for NCI, that we are considering creating a destination in Portland for trainings and reducing our travel considerably. From that we got into a very interesting discussion about DPZ's plans to become more academic. After Bill left and Jim and Robert arrived the conversation flowed from subjects such as gossip about a contentious peer in the New Urbanism world, to more of the theories Andres touched on in his presentation yesterday (when he found my mother was an ecologist and a statistician he insisted I ask her to help develop an equation for a sort of currency exchange between nature and humanity--this idea of each having a value, as Jim put it, Times Square being as valuable as Yellowstone, human density being as valuable as solar energy or daylighted streams, and figuring out how to balance it) to the movie Borat.

After we left the restaurant, the four of us went to see the CalTrans building in downtown L.A., which I had actually read about several months, if not a year or so ago. It's a pretty original and conspicuous design---Jim and Robert and I took pictures. It is mostly glass but has metal grating over the windows, and apparently at night the building appears transparent. On the way there we were chatting and I found that Jim went to University of Pennsylvania and I told him that I was considering their dual degree program in law and urban planning. It came up later in conversation and Andres asked me about it. When I told him my plan for the dual degree, he approved, saying that UPenn is a good planning school and that the combination I was interested in "wasn't one of the worst" I could do, though I never got to hear what the worst was. He seemed sincerely approving, though. Then he pointed to a billboard towering on a metal pole above us and pointed out that it was the same aesthetic as the building we'd just viewed, which was actually fairly astute. He encouraged me to check out the Disney concert hall and the cathedral, both within walking distance of the hotel, and according to him some of the most famous and interesting buildings built in the last 20 years. I'll see if I can do that, maybe tomorrow at lunch.

On our way back to the hotel, Jim took us on a detour to see the Bradbury Building, but Andres had to get back and check out of the hotel, so he left us.

I genuinely had a very fun time with the group, the most amazing thing being that, after the initial 15 minutes or so at lunch, I felt completely relaxed (and no, I hadn't had anything to drink with lunch). I hardly think I could hold a spirited debate with one of the foremost gurus of town planning, but I also didn't feel like a complete idiot, and I actually had some comments (I won't go so far as to qualify them as either interesting or intelligent) to contribute to the community development and design-related conversations we had. Similarly, I was able to chat comfortably with Robert and Jim and Debra about related subjects as we strolled back to the hotel, especially Robert, who was very kind and conversational, and who educated me a bit about the area of L.A. we were walking in, and who I could discuss the Bay Area at length with. So hey, my voracious appetite for books and articles planning related pays off in that I can at least hold a conversation with people who have been in the field since before I was born.

The Bradbury Building turned out to be the oldest commercial building in L.A., built in the 1893, where scenes from Bladerunner were filmed. It was a beautiful building, with water-powered bird-cage elevators and lit by a glass atrium roof. After we poked around there, we walked back to the hotel and I dropped in on a session for about half an hour before coming up to my room to check e-mail and write this.

There's an evening plenary from 7:30 to 9 that genuinely looks interesting, unlike some of the other plenaries we've had. It's about the future of housing in America, and will probably explore a concern that has been touched on already a few times at this conference--that in the next couple decades we're not going to have nearly enough housing for the population growth we're going to experience, and that the studies seem to be suggesting that more Americans want to live in walkable urban areas and not the large lot suburban homes we've put so much work into building already. But as this is my last night in L.A. and I made a promise to myself to see Koreatown, I think I'm going to have to blow it off, though I'll try to get as many sessions in tomorrow as possible before I have to hop a shuttle to airport at 4:15 pm.