As usual, the 2007 Planning Institute will be held the first Thursday and Friday of March 2007, 1 & 2 March, on the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign campus at the Levis Center. In conjunction with the institute, the Wetmore Planning Practice Lecture will be given the evening of 28 February in Plym Auditorium, Buell Hall, UIUC. The focus of the 2007 Institute is Imagining Communities—Plan, Design, Implement. As speakers and sessions are confirmed, the web site will be updated www.urban.uiuc.edu/ce.

For those of you unable to attend the very successful 2006 annual institute, sponsored by the UIUC Department of Urban and Regional Planning (DURP), you can go to the web site to watch the two featured lectures, which are streamed. Gary Hack, dean of the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, delivered the 2006 Wetmore Lecture and Michael Pyatok, Pyatok Associates and director of the Stardust Project, Arizona State University, talked about Good Design: Affordable Housing on 2 March. Pyatok’s housing design examples are must viewing to see that good design and affordable housing are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Macon Cowles, chair of the Boulder, CO, planning commission, another featured speaker, shared a reading list that not only his planning commissioners, but also those of Boulder County are reading as part of their book club. I am not aware of any other planning commission in the USA having formed a book club with the purpose of reading planning materials to help them make better planning decisions as citizen planners.

The Great American Job Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation, written by Greg LeRoy who is the founder and director of Good Jobs First, was the central theme of his talk. His argument is that the economic development incentives most often given away by communities do not necessarily result in the economic increase desired and that there are much less damaging approaches of economic incentives to bring businesses to communities. He argues that is a rare case when a community gets back as much or more than the decision makers gave away economically. Cowles added this book to the planning commission reading list.

Building on Pyatok’s lecture about housing, the session about universal design adaptation or integration into new construction has immediate application with the paradigm shift toward “aging in place.” Several extension educators at Iowa State University have developed models to show adaptability to universal design for kitchens and bathrooms. These models are housed in two racing car trailers, respectively, that were parked right outside the institute venue so community residents, students, and attendees could view the latest universal design equipment.

Visioning, scenario planning, and charrettes are being used more and more within communities as approaches to create open discussion environments about planning and design issues. A new collaborative program between DURP and the University of Illinois Community and Economic Development extension educators has integrated both scenario planning and charrettes. The work accomplished in Macomb, IL, during last fall as part of this program, Community Matters, was the topic of one of the institute sessions. The purpose of Community Matters is to work with small communities or neighborhoods, which do not have access to planning practitioners, on plan, design, and implementation issues identified by the community. This sets up collaboration with the students, faculty, community residents, and extension educators. Extensive inform about the program and work to date can be viewed at www.urban.uiuc.edu/ce/cm.

The 2006 institute materials will be available on an educational CD for purpose at cost. And all of the institute information can be viewed at http://www.urban.uiuc.edu/ce/06events/schedule.html.

This url includes educational hot links for all of the presenters and sessions.

We look forward to seeing you in March 2007.