Gil Penalosa’s Cities for Everyone webinars show how other people in the world are making their cities
more livable, green, and functional. The webinars are at https://www.gpenalosa.ca/index.php/webtalk
Gil (Guillermo) Penalosa who curates the webinars is very knowledgeable about city planning and very
well connected internationally. (Gil’s bio is at https://www.gpenalosa.ca/index.php/about.) The expert
he invites to present might be the Parisian guy who came up with the 15-minute city concept, a
Canadian couple who moved to Amsterdam to advocate for cycling, somebody who built a national park
at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, a person involved in the rebuild of Regent Park in Toronto,
the author of a book on walkable cities, or the mayor of Tirana, Albania who transformed a communist
dictator’s mausoleum into a place for teens to hang out, and in so doing, transformed his city’s
economy.
It’s random. Pretty much all you can predict is that it will be interesting and educational. The webinars
are a great opportunity to travel for free and learn new ways of doing things. Often what people are
really talking about is fixing past planning mistakes. They’re planting trees in pots on a street because
they’ve wiped out all their greenspace, or–at enormous expense—they’re hiding a freeway under a
grassy hill because they built the freeway too close to their river. Maybe we can learn from their
mistakes and ideas.
The webinars are live on Zoom for an hour every second Tuesday morning at 11:00. People from maybe
30 countries tune in and ask questions. Or, you can just access the archive of past webinars at any time.
It’s fun. Highly recommended!
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