In a city and state that seem perpetuallyon the verge of somethingbig, the Louisiana Smart Growth Summit gets people talking about how to do it the right way.
And with enough local leaders talking about smart growth and planning at the Nov. 18-20 event, the major projects on the horizon for Baton Rouge could drive home the fact that we’re also in the midst of finding a new Planning Commission director for the city-parish and the selection committee seems pretty meh and blasé about its potential.
The summit gets people talking about trends in urban planning, about successful transit systems, about getting rid of blighted properties, about bike-friendly communities and about what we may have been doing wrong the last 15 years.
One of the keynote speakers, urban planner Andrés Duany, helped develop Plan Baton Rouge 15 years ago. Years later, while the city was headlong into transforming downtown and the country’s economic stability was changing drastically, Duany had what’s essentially an urban designer’s spiritual awakening.
He’s all but abandoned those ideas he helped thread into Plan Baton Rouge that have subsequently made it harder for small businesses to sprout up organically and tend to favor major developers and grandiose, mixed-use projects. “The old ways of throwing money at projects like this—that kind of idea is an out-of-date idea,” Duany says.
What he calls “lean urbanism”—including low-tech urban design, smaller building types and lightening the red tape for younger entrepreneurs—goes back to the way cities grew naturally. A one-story business later becomes a two-story business and so on.
He talked a bit about the effects of bypassing smaller stages to instead launch into large, sprawling developments in this recent interview.
His keynote address, which is free to the public and will likely have planners and local leaders rethinking their approach to improving downtown and other parts of the city, is scheduled for opening night, Nov. 18.
Early registration for the event ends Friday, Nov. 8, and you can find out more about registering at summit.cpex.org.
Below are some other highlights you’ll want to check out.
• “Pedal Power: How to Make Our Communities More Bike-friendly” features Beaux Jones of Bike Baton Rouge, members of Bike Easy from New Orleans and others.
• In light of the new IBM development currently going up downtown, members of Louisiana Economic Development, Baton Rouge Area Foundation and others are featured on the panel “Smart Deals: How to Learn from the IBM Case Study.”
• Downtown Development’s Davis Rhorer, who has been encouraging Baton Rouge to embrace its waterfront, moderates the panel “Million-Dollar View: Capitalizing on Community Waterfronts.”
• “All Aboard: Proving the Potential for Rail in Louisiana.” Connecting the urban centers of New Orleans and Baton Rouge has long been a hot topic, and rail transit has been an important part of that discussion.
• Baton Rouge-based director Zack Godshall and LSU professor Michael Pasquier’s documentary about Louisiana’s vanishing wetlands, Water Like Stone, will be screened at the end of the day.
• Baton Rouge and New Orleans council members will participate in the panel “Multi-modal Mindset: How to Complete Our Streets for All Users,” and it’s likely that long-term plans for Government Street will be discussed.
• Blight removal and code enforcement are a big part of projects like Smiley Heights, and representatives of the East Baton Rouge Redevelopment Authority will likely talk about this as part of a panel called “Vacant to Vibrant: Best Practices in Blight Removal and Redeployment of Properties.”
Above image taken from Plan Baton Rouge II, courtesy of Downtown Development District. While Andrés Duany was involved in the original Plan Baton Rouge, a different planning firm helped develop the update in 2009.
