We are excited about being able to edit and publish the Proceedings for the 1997 National Planning Conference of the American Planning Association. This year's conference with the theme of "Contrasts and Transitions," was held on April 5 - 9, 1997, in San Diego, California. The host committee selected the theme because the San Diego area is a wonderful case study of a region copying with opposites: wealth and poverty, superb open space and increasing infill, heavy development pressure and innovative development policies, and an old military-based economy and a new biotechnology industry. All this and amazing natural resources.
While it has been sixteen years since proceedings were last published by APA, the tradition of a national planning conference with proceedings began when the Committee on Congestion of Population in New York organized the first conference in 1909. Subsequently, Benjamin C. Marsh, Executive Secretary of the Committee, testified before the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia on June 1, 1909, and the Government Printing Office published a transcript of the hearing and the proceedings of the first national conference.
Conference proceedings are important to most professional organizations. They are published to provide state of the art information and to serve as a historical benchmark and reference for recording what professionals were thinking and doing at a particular point in time. As Frank So noted in the introduction to the 1981 Proceedings, "it is fascinating to read what planning pioneers had to say in the early years", but, "it is also sad to note that certain problems are still with us after three quarters of a century." Unfortunately, some of the same observations will probably be made many years from now when future planners read the 1997 Proceedings.
We believe that this year's Proceedings have significantly enhanced the value of the annual conference for all of our members. For the first in many years, a great deal of the information and knowledge which was presented in numerous sessions at the annual conference was made available at lost cost to planners all across the country and around the world. This Proceedings is the first to be published in paper form and on the internet as World Wide Web document, which truly makes it available world wide at very little cost. Each paper is presented as a seperate HTML 2.0 formatted documented, so it can be downloaded and viewed with any WEB browser including all versions of America Online, Compuserve SPRY, Mosaic, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Prodigy.
This year's Proceedings also contributed to promoting more participation at the San Diego conference by academics and scholars and to strengthening their involvement and relationships with practitioners. Many academics developed and proposed sessions and were able to justify their attendance at the conference because of the opportunity to prepare a paper for the Proceedings. We have also been advised by numerous speakers that by going through the exercise of preparing a paper, the quality and effectiveness of their presentations were greatly improved.
Our editorial role in producing this year's Proceedings was minimal in contrast to the efforts given by the many planners who prepared papers and whose individual contributions made it collectively possible to produce this landmark book. We thank each of them personally. We would also like to thank Arizona State University and the Herberger Center for Design Execelence in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design for publishing the electronic version of the proceedings. We also thank the Board of Directors of the American Planning Association for authorizing, supporting and entrusting us with the responsibility of producing these Proceedings. For us, it was truly a labor of love.
Bill Pable
Bruce McClendon