Speaker: Shelley Poticha, Senior Associate, Calthorp Associates, San Francisco, CA.

The environmental, economic, and social limits to growth in our metropolitan regions are reaching crisis proportions. Serious environmental stress, intractable traffic congestion, lack of affordable housing, declining retail centers, and life-styles that burden working families and isolate the elderly are common features in many American Cities. In response, communities throughout the country are rethinking the way in which we plan our streets, neighborhoods, and regions. Shelley Poticha will discuss new theories of urban planning, which seek to reestablish lost connections between individuals, their communities, and regional urban form. Case studies from the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland, Oregon, and other west coast communities will be used to demonstrate the feasibility and growing appeal of these ideas.

Shelley Poticha is an urban planner whose work focuses on using transit systems to foster economic, social, and physical revitalization of neighborhoods. She, working with Peter Calthorpe, has pioneered the concepts of Transit-Oriented Development-the notion that safe streets and walkable neighborhoods connected to transit can serve as fundamental building blocks for creating healthy regions. She has worked on these concepts as a Senior Associate with Calthorpe Associates, a San Francisco based planning and urban design consulting firm, where she developed the prototype for the firm's Transit-Oriented Development Design Guidelines. These guidelines provide strategies for locating new growth within proximity of regional transit systems, reducing auto congestion, and encouraging mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented development patterns. They are published as a part of a book she authored with Mr. Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream. She has also had the primary responsibility for projects with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development - Vision/Reality: Strategies for Community Change and the Empowerment Zone Guidebook, the Federal Highway Administration - Suburban Activity Centers, and the 1000 Friends of Oregon - "Making the Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality Connection (LUTRAQ) ".

Ms. Poticha has lectured extensively throughout the United States and has served on the faculty of the University of California at Davis, the University of Oregon, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Ms. Poticha holds a Master of City Planning from the University of California, Berkeley.