People Habitat

The elements of our built environment — our homes, workplaces, neighborhoods, cities and regions — must work in harmony with each other and with the natural environment to be sustainable. Today, that is often not the case, but it could be. Longtime sustainability leader and PlaceMakers senior counsel Kaid Benfield, author of People Habitat: 25 Ways To Think About Greener, Healthier Cities, will share eight key thoughts about better communities, including why “cities” sometimes don’t matter as much as we may think, how green housing developments may be no such thing, why Americans don’t walk much anymore and why, ultimately, sustainability must come from the heart.

Kaid Benfield is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on how cities, towns and neighborhoods can better work — for both people and the environment. A longtime leader of the smart growth movement, he served for two decades as director of the smart growth and sustainable communities programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, driving positive, forward-thinking approaches to environmental challenges in the places where Americans live, work, and play. He co-founded LEED for Neighborhood Development, a national process for defining and certifying smart, green land development, and is a founder and board member of Smart Growth America.

Kaid was named one of the “most influential people in sustainable planning and development” by the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, voted one of the “top urban thinkers” on the leading city planning website, Planetizen.com, and named “one of the top 100 city innovators worldwide” by the website Future Cities.