Title:گروه ویژه آب APA: مصاحبه با بیل سسانک

امیلی پاسی از APA با نایب رئیس CDM Smith، بیل سساناک، در مورد ابتکارات آب انجمن برنامه ریزی آمریکا و یافته های اخیر کارگروه در کنفرانس برنامه ریزی ملی ۲۰۱۵ در سیاتل گفتگو می کند.

قسمتي از متن فيلم: Hi my name is Emily posi with the American Planning Association and we are live in Seattle Washington at the 2015 national planning conference I’m here today with Bill seznec bill is the vice president of CDM Smith and he’s also the APA co-chair of the water task force

Bill thank you so much for being here today with us thank you so we’re going to be talking about the water task force and how it got started and I know last year actually at the National planning conference that was that was the creation point of this entire task force

So why don’t you tell us the theory behind the creation and what you’ve been up to this past year sure I’d be happy to share that um at the conference last year the President Bill Anderson really set forth a number of initiatives that revolved around the planning goals for

The Planning Association and at that time one of the major themes was water he created a number of task forces which was really unheard of with in APA and he charged them all with coming up with a series of recommendations for improving practice for planners in general so one

Of the task forces he charged was the order task force and in in some way my name was recommended as somebody who might be available to assist so it the actual genesis of his selection of the issues is not entirely clear to me but it’s clear that water is as a

Premier ratio to planners and to the community and society at large so we move forward they formed a task force consisting of some prominent names in water and water management folks from HUD from result by design initiative some fairly prominent landscape architects and a whole series of practicing planners throughout the

Country and we met and began the process of trying to determine with the scope and scale of the project would be when it comes to water management it it’s really hard to begin to define what the boundaries of the problem might be in terms of what the role of planners is

And how large you want the examination of issues to be water is an issue that affects geographic scales from you know international to national to local it’s an issue that has a great amount of science surrounding it in terms of hydrologists and geologists and and other water professionals it’s a

Discipline and a study that engineers take great interest in in terms of civil and environmental engineering and it’s when the planners relate to in terms of the built environment and land development and accommodating the water needs of population growth so given this wide range of potential options and looking at the

Task force goals we narrowed it down essentially to say let’s look at this from a national perspective will venture into an international waters a little bit we don’t want to look at sub areas of the country quite yet we’ll save that for a future phase and let’s try to

Define sort of the core issues from the drivers that really begin to define why water is a becoming a crisis in many locations and why it’s a an issue that deserves the attention of planners so looking more broadly at the recommendations themselves can you describe the overarching themes of those

Recommendations if you had to break them down into different subgroups I know there’s more than 30 so there’s quite a few my goal would be not to bore you with all 30 yeah and actually 30 is probably the short list of what we originally developed but we started

Defining six core themes and if you don’t mind I’m going to refer to some notes on this but it the six core themes are essentially what we saw as the core issues that drove the examination of water issues and how it relates to planning practice and policy so the

First core theme was that water is a central and essential organizing element and a healthy urban environment so this is our sort of fundamental concept that you need to establish the value of water before you talk about how to better manage it or how to improve planning

Practice so it became clear to all the task force members and everybody that we spoke to in interviews related to this research that that water was perhaps underrepresented in our urban environments I needed to achieve a more dominant role in terms of planning and engineering and science

The second core team is that planning practice needs to take an integrated systems oriented approach to water management and in this we really wanted to better integrate water planning in the comprehensive planning sort of the comprehensive master planning that planners do for communities it water is affects so many dimensions of life in

Terms of supply and sanitation and natural environment that we really needed to take a holistic approach to that so that was the second one the third theme was that new mechanisms for interdisciplinary interaction are needed for effective water management so here we get back to the discussion of

Interdisciplinary and we reached out to engineers scientists hydrologist geologists architects Landscape Architects economists policy experts and began to talk about how do they intersect with themes of water how to do their jobs relate to water management and what we found was that all of them have key roles in defining water

Management issues and trying to better integrate planning into a more sustainable function a more sustainable environment and really the goal here is to begin to align the planning strategies with other pair professional organizations so we know the landscape architects are very involved in litter we know peer organizations such as water Environment

Research Foundation american water works association american society landscape architects american institute of architects all are involved in water in some way and we really need to think about ways to intersect more effectively and to share our agendas and our ideas about better water management and through that synergy there’s a great

Belief that much more effective approach can be developed to learn management so that was along when I’m sorry but that was the third the fourth is that planners need to apply new improved and innovative professional practices to manage water more sustainably and provide greater social equity so in this

Theme we’re essentially trying to create you know what are protective planning processes the natural environment and we see in California water has been over developed it’s been oversubscribed there’s some science in Texas there’s there’s water quality shortages that occur throughout the country that these are being defined by the US Geological

Survey in many ways and we also need to find ways to connect health metrics to essentially the water environment and understand how water environment in terms of green infrastructure for example can improve heat island impacts and that directly affects health of urban dwellers the keynote speaker today spoke a lot about distressed communities

And the importance of health issues and the water environment really offers a huge opportunity for professional planners to begin to improve the stress communities and communities in need so that was our fourth theme the fifth theme is that innovative land-use planning and urban designs are needed to expand and improve the water environment

And really what we’re trying to do here is create example what are emphasizing urban designs urban designs that feature water that provides great water in terms of the natural context and most cities most of the streams were covered over and piped and buried as part of the development originally it was because

The people thought that the streams carry disease and actually a lot of them did carry raw sewage originally later on it was determined that maybe that land was more economically valuable and so many of the stream networks and sales have been piped and contained and removed from the urban environment so

There’s really an effort now to begin to think about through urban design how to reintegrate water features even in representative fashion into the urban environment and the last theme relates to adaptive land use environmental and infrastructure planning and in the way that it can help to increase community resilience and climate change and

Essentially provide more resistance to extreme climate change events so there’s been a lot of work done through rebuild by design initiatives from HUD and other initiatives to look at how the natural environment can really begin to attenuate the effects of storm surges and floods and high winds and there’s

Also a lot of attention about better land use practices and avoiding flood paint playing and present and other management approaches based on land use practices can really you know help to shelter the society from increasing effects of climate change so those are the six themes in short and you’re

Probably happy I didn’t go into the 33 practices well you know of all the things that you were mentioning and it’s really exciting because I can see in different areas of APA our members are already doing those things on an individual level which is very exciting some of them are getting recognized with

National Planning Awards tomorrow some of them as far as coalition’s go I know it was water week last week which was really exciting and so EPA was able to partner with the water environment foundation Wes and an ASL a American Society of landscape architects so it’s really

I mean those beginnings are there and there’s there’s things in place but that leads me into my next question so what does the board do next and what does our APA leadership do next to kind of make sure that these things go just beyond the individual acts that our entire

Association is working toward those goals yeah you make a good point there and I think it’s important to emphasize that the planet community at large has been heavily engaged in individual water practices and and water management improvement approaches for many years what we’re seeing now is that the

Problem is worsening you know for example the drought in California and we’re also seeing that there’s an interest in our sort of sister organizations our peer organizations of working more closely together so I had the opportunity on Saturday to deliver the task force report to the AP Board of

Directors and I was a little uncertain about what the reception might be water tends to be like I said before it’s rooted in science and engineering and many other fields lay claim to water management but planners really seem to be the connective tissue if you will among many of those groups and

Especially in so far as they relate to many of the factors that drive water problems like land development and development of sensitive environments and just the imprison of population and the demands of new employment so I presented the task force report to the board of directors and I was really

Overwhelmed but positive response they had they were quite keen on the recommendations they saw enormous importance of BPA trying to take a leadership role on moving this agenda forward I promised the task force when my came to the meeting to the APA conference that I would make an affirmative request for continuing

Action and the word essentially said absolutely you know we’re going to move this agenda forward we’ll set up a working group will continue to work with our peer professional organizations and this is just the start so I really couldn’t have been more pleased or overwhelmed or gratified by the response

Of the APA board of directors it was was very positive well I speak on behalf of all the AP staff and our APA members and I I know we’re going to be so excited to see where your work continues and we’ll be looking forward to touch base with

You again and at our next national planning conference to see what the what the work has amounted n yeah hopefully I can come back and share some of our progress with you next year we would love that thank you so much bill thank you I’m Emily posi signing off with the american

Planning association in seattle until next time

ID: bj2blU-Lzkk
Time: 1438700654
Date: 2015-08-04 19:34:14
Duration: 00:14:38

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