Urban Design 2022 Speaker Series: Action on Resiliency

Thursday, July 28

5:00 pm / Social

6:00 pm - 7:30 pm / Panel Discussion

Join AIA Houston Urban Design Committee Summer Speaker Series, to understand sector roles, agency perspectives, and resident expectations as agencies pursue funding for resiliency projects in our communities.

Title: Data Leading Resiliency: How Data Informs Resilient Infrastructure

AIA Credit: 1.5 HSW/LU

Description: 

Across the metropolitan region of Houston, public, academic, and private-sector agencies are taking on opportunities to prepare projects for President Bidens November 2021 infrastructure bill earmarked to help communities build toward resilience measures. The AIA Houston Urban Design Summer Series 2022 kicked off its first panel in June with city design leaders and guests discussing project enablers, inhibitors, and best practices for project preparation and delivery of resilient infrastructure projects. Building from panel one in understanding what agencies are utilizing to prepare projects to be competitive for the nationwide 2021 infrastructure bill, panel two will focus on bottom-up information of data and metrics industry leaders are using to identify projects as regionally accountable and impactful to the Houston metropolitan area.

As a design community, we will continue to discuss and understand what industry leaders are doing to identify transformative infrastructure projects driven by understanding public life data over time, tools, and metrics. Join the design community to discuss how agencies are preparing projects eligible for resilience and prevention programs funded by the infrastructure bill. You will learn about resilience priority projects per sector, and identify with us how sectors can work together to streamline resilience efforts.

Speakers:

Lauren Grove - Lauren is a Senior Staff Analyst with Houston Public Works at the City of Houston. She helps to implement the Vision Zero Action Plan and other safe streets efforts aligned with the goal to end traffic deaths and serious injuries in Houston by 2030. She is a dual University of Michigan graduate, with a Master’s Degree in Urban and Regional Planning and a Bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience. Before moving to Houston in 2018, Lauren sold her car and has since enjoyed the perks of walking, biking, and taking public transit to get where she’s going.

Luis Guajardo - Luis is an Urban Policy Research Manager, Kinder Institute for Urban Research.  As an urban planning professional, he is dedicated to fostering equitable and sustainable communities through planning, design, and policy. His work consists of supporting communities with planning and policy guidance on housing, transportation, land use, resilience, governance, and placemaking. He is certified by the American Institute of Certified Planners and serves as the Director of the American Planning Association’s Houston chapter.  Luis grew up on the borderlands of the Rio Grande Valley in a binational setting near his family in Monterrey, Mexico. In his spare time, he enjoys dedicating time to family and friends, cooking, and exploring parks with his two sons, Sebastian and Rafael, and wife, Patricia. He earned an MS in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA in Political Science from the University of St. Thomas.

Armandina Chapa - Mandi Chapa is a planner at Huitt-Zollars, where she leads the Houston Downtown urban planning team, and a lecturer at Rice University, where she teaches transportation in the schools of Architecture and Engineering. Mandi has been the project manager and planner for a wide range of planning projects in Houston and around the United States, including Livable Centers studies in Downtown, Rosenberg, Galveston, North Houston, Washington Avenue, Fourth Ward, and Midtown, a community-driven vision plan for Galveston, a comprehensive plan for Aldine, transit studies in the Twin Cities, Northwest Arkansas, South Carolina, Fort Worth, and Philadelphia, greenway planning in Houston, new street design manuals for the City of Dallas, a flood resilience consortium in Houston, and the I-45 public engagement process for the City of Houston. Her work has focused on design, on metrics, on equity, and on integrating community outreach to identify projects that build more resilient communities. She also serves on the RDA Editorial Committee. Mandi is a graduate of the University of Houston College of Architecture.