I just finished the Gaining Ground Summit in Victoria, BC. The summit was designed for urban development leaders experimenting in sustainability and happened a few days before WUF3, the UN World Urban Forum sustainable cities conference met in Vancouver. Sustainability everywhere!
The Gaining Ground Summit in Victoria connects leading developers innovating sustainable and community minded approaches.
I went to Gaining Ground because it featured 2 of our clients as primary case studies: Loreto Bay Company in Mexico and Dockside Green in Victoria. The Chair of Loreto Bay, David Butterfield, has a keen and longstanding interest in sustainable development projects, and on the first day of the summit we helped him launch his new website, for the holding company of Loreto Bay, the Trust for Sustainable Development.
I learned a lot at the Summit about new urbanism, the leading edge of community design, some hopeful statistics and trends (for eg: there are only 2 indoor malls being built in the US today, and over 400 mixed use town centre type developments, which aren’t just nicer to look at but also are better to shop at). James Howard Kunstler was one of the keynote speakers, he’s just written a pretty influential, controversial, let’s face it it’s downright scary book, The Long Emergency. It’s about the end of oil and how that is going to impact our economy and our lives, and he doesn’t paint a rosy future.
Overall I left with much more hope than despair as it was heartening to see over 40% of the attendees as actual land developers, as well as some key people in government and the financial world, who are not just looking at doing projects more sustainably but are actually doing it, leading the economy so to speak. I keep saying that many of the more effective change agents that I know are from the business world and this proved it yet again.