Agenda for meeting with Dr. Alven Lam:
We have arranged for Dr. Alven Lam, The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Director of International Research, to come meet GPEIG for a discussion on Thursday, July 10 from noon-1pm at the ACSP/AESOP meeting in Chicago. Please see program for latest location information.
Since it is a short amount of time, let’s have an on-line discussion about what should be the focus of the meeting. Please post your thoughts to this thread.
As background, starting with the ACSP meeting in 2006 in Fort Worth, Faranak Miraftab led a stimulating, substantive brainstorming meeting with great participation from GPEIG members about what we might advance as a collective. From those meetings emerged a focus to advance scholarship on the particularly complex ethical and political implications of working as global planners. | View Archive info |
The next ACSP meeting in 2007 in Milwaukee, GPEIG sponsored many panels along those themes. We also had another brainstorming meeting where we discussed what to do moving forward. We converged on three foci: 1) share the intellectual resources we have already built up through web-based media; 2) promote more international exchanges 3) explore further collaboration with HUD’s international programs.
Toward this end, we will be having a meeting with Dr. Alven Lam. He has been a long-time supporter of GPEIG, working most closely with Keith Pezzoli. Last year his office also sponsored two GPEIG member authored papers to be published in HUD’s Cityscape publication next year. He has also funded a concept paper for GPEIG members Faranak Miraftab and Neema Kudva to advance a web-based teaching resource. So, he has already done a lot and we are grateful!
At our Milwaukee brainstorming meeting we had discussed that we would like to invite Alven to Chicago and discuss ways that we might both contribute to HUD’s work and how HUD might further support GPEIG’s work. Some initial ideas discussed in Milwaukee included:
1) how we might contribute towards American construction companies being more ethically sensitive to local community needs in overseas projects.
2) the future of COPSI funded programs at HUD
Any other ideas or thoughts you would like to share?
Annette M. Kim, GPEIG co-chair
Posted by Annette M. Kim on 06/24 at 12:17 PM in Business Management • (1) Comments
Alven Lam is a real champion of globalizing US approaches to housing and urban development. In our meeting with him, it would be good to find out what his research needs are (how might GPEIG colleagues add value to what it is he does?).
We got some funding from the Worldwide Universities Network to continue building the Global Planning Grid. Alven knows about the GPG initiative. Perhaps we can tailor the GPG’s research thrust, at least some element of it, to put wind in the sails of some project direction Alven sees as promising.