Place and Prosperity Book Talk with Bill Fulton
Moderated conversation with Michael Lens
Thursday, Feb. 9, 12:00 – 1:15 p.m. PST
Zoom webinar
Join the Lewis Center and advisory board member, Bill Fulton, as he shares his new book Place and Prosperity. People feel intensely connected to cities as places and to other people who feel that same connection. In order to understand place – and understand human settlements generally – it is important to understand that places are not created by accident. They are created in order to further a political or economic agenda. Better cities emerge when the people who shape them think more broadly and consciously about the places they are creating. In Place and Prosperity: How Cities Help Us to Connect and Innovate, urban planning expert Bill Fulton explores the process by which these decisions about places are made, how cities are engines of prosperity, and how place and prosperity are deeply intertwined. Fulton has been writing about cities over his forty-year career that includes working as a journalist, professor, mayor, planning director, and the director of an urban think tank in one of America’s great cities. Place and Prosperity is a curated collection of his writings with new and updated selections and framing material. A moderated discussion with Lewis Center Associate Faculty Director Mike Lens, will follow the book overview.
Bill Fulton, AICP, is one of the nation’s leading thinkers on urban planning and land use. He currently serves as a Senior Advisor to PFM Management and Budget Consulting Group, a member of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies advisory board, a Fellow at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
His career history includes serving as Director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston. Bill previously served as Director of Planning and Economic Development for the City of San Diego and Mayor and City Councilmember for the City of Ventura, California. Bill’s first career was as a journalist specializing in writing about cities and urban issues and his expertise includes transfer of development rights, the role of land use regulation in housing production, the structure and organization of local government, and equitable economic development. He is an alumni of the UCLA urban planning master’s program and author of Guide to California Planning, the standard land use planning textbook in California Place and Prosperity: How Cities Help Us Connect And Innovate.