IN PERSON - William Fulton - PLACE AND PROSPERITY

William Fulton in conversation with Luis Guajardo.

Please note: face masks are required to attend the event.

There are few more powerful questions than, “Where are you from” or “Where do you live?” People feel intensely connected to cities as places and to other people who feel that same connection. In order to understand place – and understand human settlements generally – it is important to understand that places are not created by accident. They are created in order to further a political or economic agenda. Better cities emerge when the people who shape them think more broadly and consciously about the places they are creating. In Place and Prosperity: How Cities Help Us to Connect and Innovate, urban planning expert William Fulton takes an engaging look at the process by which these decisions about places are made, how cities are engines of prosperity, and how place and prosperity are deeply intertwined. Fulton has been writing about cities over his forty-year career that includes working as a journalist, professor, mayor, planning director, and the director of an urban think tank in one of America’s great cities. Place and Prosperity is a curated collection of his writings with new and updated selections and framing material.
 

William Fulton is one of America’s most established thought leaders in the field of urban planning. He currently serves as a Senior Advisor to PFM Management and Budget Consulting and a Fellow at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. From 2014 to 2022, he served as the director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research. He is a former Mayor of Ventura, California, and Director of Planning and Economic Development for the city of San Diego. His previous books include Guide to California Planning, the standard urban planning textbook in California, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles, which was a Los Angeles Times best-seller, and The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (with Peter Calthorpe). Fulton holds master’s degrees in mass communication from The American University and urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Luis Guajardo is an urban and regional planning professional dedicated to fostering equitable and sustainable communities through planning, design, and policy. His work consists of policy research at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research in housing, transportation, land use, resilience, and urban design. Luis is also the director of the American Planning Association’s Houston section and is excited to discuss Place and Prosperity with one of his mentors – William Fulton – a nationally-renowned thought leader on cities and urbanism.