It is an exciting time to do what we do. In a couple weeks I will be back in India with our Lavasa team seeing first hand this series of communities taking shape. Each time we go, the collaboration with our clients and partners at the Biomimicry Guild and Buro Happold is enriched with new ideas for a more sustainable future and new breakthroughs for how we can incorporate nature’s genius into solutions for the built environment.   There is an energy now in the design community that you can’t help but be excited about.  Just check out the …

What makes metropolitan and regional economies thrive? The keys are talent, innovation, connections and distinctiveness, says Joe Cortright, an economist in Portland, Oregon. Joe’s firm, Impresa, specializes in regional economic analysis, innovation and industry clusters. He is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Policy Advisor for CEOs for Cities, a national network of urban leaders dedicated to creating cities for the future.

I talked to Joe as part of the HOK Planning Group’s exploration of the city of the future. I found his theory on the Green Dividend – a computation of the actual economic benefits that people and places (like Portland)

…

Petra Todorovich is Director of America 2050 for the Regional Plan Association (RPA), an independent planning organization for the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut region. She’s also fun to talk to, very cool and off-the-charts intelligent. America 2050’s goals include nothing less than developing a national infrastructure investment plan. Petra says that “making the connections between transportation, land use and climate change is going to be the key responsibility of urban planners in this century.”

I talked to her recently to help the HOK Planning Group with its ongoing exploration of the city of the future.

JG: What exactly is the RPA?
PT: RPA has been around since the 1920s, …

CNN has teamed up with Ericsson to ‘blueprint the future’ of what the world will look like in 2020. As most of you know HOK worked with ‘The History Channel’ to compete in the ‘City of the Future’ project for Atlanta in the year 2108.

What CNN has put together are the most innovative designers and thinkers, imagining something that’s not too far away. Interestingly enough the lifestyles we have today drive alot of these thoughts and relevancy. To plan for 2108 there are huge generalizations about a top-down perfect societal idealism that will exist in 100 years, as opposed to the bottom-up, usability apporach …