Events

Lunch graciously sponsored by Contech Engineered Solutions LLC and Rain Bird
 
In our City’s first ever, full-day Professional Architect and Landscape Architect Partner Assembly (PALAPA), LASAN will call upon some of our City’s most visionary and technically savvy leadership to highlight our watersheds needs, opportunities and constraints, and to put storm water into a Low Impact Development (LID) context for working professionals.  Local leaders within Los Angeles’ societies of architecture and landscape architecture will be identified by their respective programs for their abilities to communicate and to share information with other professionals who are responsible for designing and engineering our City, with the goal of focusing on Low Impact Design (LID) practices, and One Water principles.  Slides from individual projects will be rapidly presented, with the goal of identifying their opportunities and challenges, and to illustrate LID’s potential benefits as a sustainable and climate-buffering tool for the building and landscape design trades. Issues that arise from these sessions will help to identify the appropriate public entities to speak to LID problems and resolution scenarios.

After lunch, professionals will engage in an informal working charette, using a workshop to identify focused opportunities and issues needing further resolution, with an avenue to facilitate LID implementation – and to assist in identifying relevant City and government entities for our next engagement.

In the second half-day professional seminar, the City will invite our in-house department representatives as technical professionals who will respond to the issues identified in the first session. A panel will be formed to both explain the City’s perspective on the issues and challenges, and to engage the local program representatives with the goal of moving towards viable solutions. The panel will be selected to address any technical challenges, permits and regulatory hurdles encountered while implementing LID in order to make these practices more available, practical, and implementable.

LASAN’s environmental mission, and green infrastructure programming supports this professional outreach approach, and these first meetings will offer a pilot with lessons for improving the process.  Building on a solid framework established in these sessions by some of the most visionary leaders in Los Angeles, the active design leaders will gain sound information funding and permitting goals.

LASAN supports such efforts, and seeks to invite as many leaders as possible to share their visions on these topics.  Technical discussions on materials and methods, testing, monitoring, are subjects that should become tools of the pro-practices groups in order to to be prepared to address the many technical LID related topics that arise, and that were discussed during the planning for this event.  Ultimately, PALAPA’s are needed to support more informed, watershed-based, cross-disciplinary and professional projects and discussions. Through “innovation, integration and inclusion”  PALAPA’s may be refined to enhance citywide implementation and effectiveness, and should expand to include other professional societies such as our esteemed colleagues within the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the American Planning Association (APA) and or other active professional societies or memberships.