Inspiration From Afar
In this era of budget cutting, I’m regularly hearing from my fellow campus sustainability professionals that they’ve had to reduce or eliminate their travel. I’m no exception. The challenge then is to find opportunities to be inspired by the great thinkers and practitioners of the sustainability arena without actually leaving our campuses, for it’s often after attending these talks that we develop our own big ideas.
This past March, Rice University hosted an extraordinary conference entitled “Transforming the Metropolis: Creating Sustainable and Humane Cities” that featured many of the speakers whom we would hope to see as keynoters when we travel to conferences. The talks from this conference are now available online and are posted below. In lieu of actually going to a conference, consider blocking off time on your calendar, closing your email, unplugging your telephone, and allowing yourself the time to be inspired from afar (without the CO2 emissions from air travel!):
- Day 1a: The City in the Twenty-First Century: What Works, What Doesn’t – Mayors Bill White (Houston), Antanas Mockus (Bogotá), Mustafa Seyed Kamal (Karachi), Shuku Forer (Rehovot)
- Day 1b: Natural Tendencies and Natural Limits, Part 1 – William E. Rees (Univ of British Columbia) and Robert Bruegmann (University of Illinois)
- Day 1c: Natural Tendencies and Natural Limits, Part 2: Water, Energy, and the City – Perry L. McCarty (Stanford University) and Amy Myers Jaffe ( Rice Energy Program)
- Day 1d: Afternoon Welcome – David Leebron (President of Rice U.) and Globalization and the Transforming Metropolis – Saskia Sassen (Columbia University)
- Day 1e: The Stratified City: Ethnographic and Demographic Challenges – Elijah Anderson (Yale) and Do Cities Need a Middle Class? – Joel Kotkin (Chapman University)
- Day 1f : Sustainability in Action: A Better Way, Ray Anderson, Founder and Chairman of Interface, Inc.
- Day 2a: Building Better Cities – Welcome and Opening Keynote – Strategies of Hope by Cameron Sinclair, co-founder and executive director, Architecture for Humanity
- Day 2b: Design Frameworks for Sustainable and Humane Cities – Gary Lawrence (ARUP) and David Crossley (Houston Tomorrow)
- Day 2c: Movement and Access – Catherine L. Ross, Georgia Tech, and Antanas Mockus, former Mayor of Bogotá
- Day 2d: Designing Ecocities – Ken Yeang, Llewelyn Davies Yeang, and Snapshots of Success: Urban Spaces -Fred Kent, Project for Public Spaces
- Day 2e – Planning for the Sustainable Metropolis – Lars G. Lerup (Dean of Architecture), Larry Beasley (City of Vancouver), Gary Lawrence (ARUP)
- Day 2f: After-Dinner Keynote: Majora Carter, Founder, Sustainable South Bronx
- Day 3a: Lifelines of the Sustainable Metropolis: Water, Infracture, and Hope (William J. Mitchell and Volker Hartkopf)
- Day 3b, The City’s Infrastructure: Solutions for the Present and the Future (cont.) – Alexander Zehnder (TWH Board) and Wayne L. Gordon (Lawndale Community Church) and Harvey Clemons Jr. (Pleasant Hill Ministries)
