Just got back from a few days in San Diego for the CEOs for Cities annual meeting where my head is still spinning from speaking with these smart people who came together in the name of improving the urban experience. We met people from all over the country, including Mayor Richard Daley, who dropped some hints about what Chicago is doing for the Olympics; Teddy Cruz, who speaks so passionately about using design to solve border issues someone should put him in charge of the whole thing; and of course I was thrilled to get some face time with former Bogota mayor Enrique Penalosa, who championed the city’s innovative rapid bus system (even he was surprised I didn’t have a car in LA!). Thanks especially to CEOs for Cities CEO Carol Coletta, whose gracious energy somehow managed to swirl around every aspect of the entire conference; I don’t think I saw her sit still once until a glass of wine was put before her at dinner.
While there, Casey Caplowe and I put together another version of GOOD Design, called the GOOD Design Challenge where we asked Scott Stowell, Valerie Casey and Dan Maginn to tackle s0me of the city problems contributed by CEOs for Cities partners from across the country. I’ll run through those amazing solutions in another post, but once again we were blown away by the extremely creative and quite do-able proposals dreamed up by these designers.
On the way out of town, Casey and I stopped by the Salk Institute, the iconic research campus perched on a bluff in La Jolla that was designed by Louis Kahn. I was most intrigued with watching people trying to get the “right shot” of the building.
PS: I couldn’t stay away for more than a few days! I’ll be heading back to San Diego for the Y Conference later this week.
