2nd Annual Sustainable Authentic Florida Conference - October 23rd-25th, 2013

Tourism, metro narratives and community:

A fresh outlook for these creative times

Miami Beach will host the 2nd annual Sustainable Authentic Florida Conference October 23-25. Conference theme is the value of metro narratives for attracting visitors, newcomers and entrepreneurs from among populations relocating into storied American cities elsewhere.

Can compact, Deco-legendary Miami Beach help other Florida cities find their own authentic stories?  Does sprawling Miami, let alone Gainesville, Orlando or Tampa Bay, resonate for people who prize green neighborhoods, easy social connections, public space for art and performance, local shopkeepers, and for getting around by transit, foot and bike?  Panelists will look for practical advantage from what¹s real and appealing about Florida's own cities.

Conference sessions will start from the successful turnaround of Miami Beach generated by its Art Deco architecture that captured the imagination of investors and travelers from around the world. Creative people flocked in, so that today Miami Beach is one of America¹s leading green cities. What¹s more creative than dealing with sea-level rise in a city with an average elevation of four feet?

It used to be that travelers went looking for where the locals hang out. Today's super connected generation wants to hang out with them whether they're vacationing or looking for where to start a new business.

As Americans increasingly flock to cities, "place" that quaintly European notion newly counts.

Herb Hiller, Conference Director ***@***.***

Caroline McKeon, Conference Associate Director ***@***.***

Wednesday, October 23                                                                 SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Hosted Lunch and Registration

Introductions

Denis Russ, Host Chair Conference Coordinator, Miami Beach CDC

Hon. Matti Herrera Bower, Mayor, City of Miami Beach  

William D. Talbert III, GMCVB President & CEO

Herb Hiller, Conference Director

Miami Beach and the Rise of Authentic Florida Narratives; Miami Beach, Preservation and the Arts

Charles D. Urstadt, Moderator, Chairman, Miami Design Preservation League

George Neary, Cultural Tourism Director, Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau

Herb Sosa, Cause Marketer

Craig Robins, Chief Executive Officer & President, DACRA (invited)

Miami Beach, Green and Sustainable

Moderator (TBD)

Tracey E. Gallentine, Senior Account Executive, Ameresco: Energy Efficiency/Renewable Energy

Elizabeth Wheaton, Miami Beach Environmental Resources Manager

Brian Scheinblum, Cambean Hospitality, Chairman, Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce Sustainability Business Council

Hosted tours of the Miami Beach Art Deco District by Miami Design Preservation League

Hosted reception, site TBD

Thursday, October 24

Metro Narratives to Attract Creative Visitors, Newcomers and Investors

Robert H. McNulty, Founder/President, Partners for Livable Communities

Views on the Miami Metro Narrative

Moderator (TBD)

Dorothy J. Fields, Ph.D., Founder, Black Archives History and Research Foundation, Inc. of Greater Miami

Mitchell Kaplan, Books & Books: Endless re-invention and pop culture (invited)

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, FAIA, principal, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company

Speaker to be invited on Miami as “Capital of Latin America”

Select neighborhood speakers

Lunch at site TBD

A Survey of Metro Narratives Elsewhere Through Florida

Kevin McGeever, Moderator, Senior Editor, VISIT FLORIDA

Gary Mormino, Ph.D., co-founder Florida Studies Program, USF (ret.)

Randy Wells, Gainesville City Commissioner

Bruce Stephenson, Ph.D., Director, Planning for Civic Urbanism, Rollins College; Orlando

James Moore, Ph.D., Director Planning, HDR Architecture, International Program, Tampa Bay

Dinner at site TBD

Friday, October 25

Moderator Sourcing, Strengthening, Applying and Evaluating Metro Narratives

John Stuart, AIA, Executive Director Miami Beach Urban Studios & Associate Dean for Cultural and Community Engagement FIU College of Architecture

Facilitated discussion and next steps

Closing Remarks

Denis Russ, Community Development Director, Miami Beach CDC

Caroline McKeon, Associate Conference Director, Florida Journeys Communications

Herb Hiller, Conference Director, East Coast Greenway Alliance

Speaker Biographies

Dorothy Jenkins Fields, Ph.D. is an historian, preservationist, and certified archivist who founded The Black Archives, History & Research Foundation of South Florida, Inc. There is no place you can go in Miami-Dade County and speak of the history of African Americans without referring to The Black Archives and its founder, Dr. Dorothy Jenkins Fields. The mission of The Black Archives is to not only preserve the documentary and photographic history of black South Florida and black Miami, but to enrich the present and protect the future through the revitalization of Miami’s former black business and entertainment district Overtown. Its purpose is to document the black experience in Miami-Dade County from 1896 to the present. The Black Archives preserves the identity of black South Florida because of her vision and perseverance.

Kevin McGeever, the senior editor for VISITFLORIDA.com, is a longtime Florida journalist. In 27 years as a newsroom leader at the Tampa Bay (formerly St. Petersburg) Times, Kevin directed reporters as assistant sports editor and assistant metro editor. Finally, as senior editor for online news, he led a web-first culture change while overseeing tampabay.com. Kevin’s charge at VISITFLORIDA is to build a statewide network of journalists to write, photograph and film stories of Florida and distribute those stories to interested media across Florida and throughout our biggest feeder markets. Numerous VISITFLORIDA stories have appeared on tampabay.com, pbpost.com and philly.com.

Bob McNulty, founder and president of Partners for Livable Communities, champions public and private partnerships for revitalizing American cities. Partners networks 1,000 organizations that range from the World Wildlife Fund to the Urban Land Institute, and has become the national leader on issues of livability and better communities. Partners embodies the diversity and consensus building needed in the recovery of the American city. Bob has been a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and has served as Acting Director of the Columbia University Graduate Program in Historic Preservation.

James A. Moore, Ph.D., AIA, AICP, LEED AP is Senior Vice President and National Director Community Planning & Urban Design for HDR, a global architectural, engineering and consulting firm. James has over 20 years of experience in all aspects of Urban Redevelopment, Urban Design, and Community Planning. Dr. Moore has been the project principal on a number of notable HDR projects including “Pinellas by Design,” a unified economic development and physical redevelopment strategy for all of Pinellas County FL.  His areas of expertise include redevelopment planning and urban design, and leading multi-stakeholder participatory events including charrettes and visioning exercises. Most of his projects integrate concerns for physical and economic redevelopment and involve intense client and community outreach and participation. Projects range in scale from tens of acres (Downtown Dunedin FL) to several hundred square miles (Pinellas by Design) Prior to joining HDR, Dr. Moore also served as an urban design and planning consultant to a number of national firms, where he worked on downtown and neighborhood master plans, sustainable development strategies, regional master plans, urban design, infill development, and transit-oriented design.

George Neary has been Director of Cultural Tourism for the Greater Miami Convention Bureau since 1998. As Director he is in charge of the creation and implementation of a new arts and cultural program for Miami Dade County. He directs promotional programs which encourage and increase visitor attendance at local cultural events and attractions. His job also includes creating linkages and partnership between Greater Miami Businesses and the arts community.  Prior to his current position, George was the executive Director of the Miami Design preservation League of Miami Beach, Florida, where he was responsible for creating marketing and public outreach programs to preserve the historic Art Dec District better known as South Beach. He was President of Neary Enterprise in Brooklyn, New York, which created, directed and administrated marketing, advertising and promotional plans and Director of U.S. Marketing for AFS Intercultural Programs, Inc. in New York. George was with Peace Corps for seven years as training and orientation coordinator, recruiter/ publicist and a volunteer in Vincent, West Indies.

Herb Sosa, community activist, historian, preservationist and freelance writer, is a founding member of, and current President of Unity Coalition|Coalición Unida, offering Leadership, Protection & Promotion of Latino|Hispanic LGBTQ rights (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning)- the only organization of its kind in South Florida since 2002. Sosa also is Pubisher|Editor-In-chief of AMBIENTE Magazine, the first & only LGBT publication offered in English, Spanish & Portuguese and distributed digitally around the globe to thousands of readers. He brings over 20 years of corporate and not-for-profit leadership experience in the community. Previously, Mr. Sosa was Corporate Creative Director for Burdines Dept. stores, was Executive Director of Miami Design Preservation League and the Art Deco Weekend Festival in Miami Beach. Sosa currently serves as chairman of the City of Miami Beach Historic Preservation Design Review Board and in May 2011 was named one of 5 “People To Know” in Miami Beach by the Miami Herald and was recently featured in PBS’ In the Life: Orgullo Latino.

Bruce Stephenson, Ph.D., directs the Masters of Planning in Civic Urbanism program at Rollins College. His books, editorials and journal contributions examine the intersection of environmentalism and city planning, and authenticity as an overlooked factor in economic development. “Visions of Eden” analyzes city planning since John Nolen in 1923 drew Florida’s first plan for St. Petersburg. A second book – “John Nolen and the Promise of a New Jerusalem Urbanism”-- Is forthcoming. Bruce is a Florida Humanities Council scholar and contributor to the PBS documentary, “Imagining a New Florida.”

John Stuart, AIA, Associate Dean for Cultural and Community Engagement in the FIU College of Architecture + The Arts, and Executive Director of the Miami Beach Urban Studios, is a practicing registered architect in the State of Florida. He also works as an architectural historian, and a visual artist developing collaborative research projects on complexity, community, identity, technology, the environment, and public space with funding from Van Alen Institute, The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Science Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Stuart's books include: The Gray Cloth, Paul Scheerbart's Novel on Glass Architecture (MIT, 2001);Ely Jacques Kahn, Architect: Beaux-Arts to Modernism in New York (Norton, 2006, with Jewel Stern), and The New Deal in South Florida: Design, Policy and Community Building, 1933-1940 (University Press of Florida, 2008, with John F. Stack, Jr.). His publications have received a 2006 New York Book Award and a 2008 Silver Medal for Non-Fiction from the Florida Book Awards. He has been a Visiting Associate Professor at Columbia University and a visiting design critic at Columbia, Yale, Cornell, Harvard, University of Michigan, the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, and the University of Miami.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Wheaton is the City of Miami Beach Environmental Resource Manager. The mission of the Environmental Resources Management Division is to preserve, protect, restore and enhance the environment of the City of Miami Beach through the management of regulatory compliance programs for the City’s drinking water and stormwater systems, storage tanks and maintenance facilities; implementation of natural resource protection programs and coastal resource management programs; waterway and shoreline restoration projects; and through the development of habitat restoration, urban greenspace creation, and public access enhancement projects. The quality of life within the City of Miami Beach is closely linked to our environment. The Miami Beach Environmental Resource Management Division routinely coordinates with Miami-Dade County’s Department of Environmental Resource Management (DERM) to maintain environmental standards throughout the City.

Charles D. Urstadt is President & Director at Urstadt Property Co., Inc., Chairman at Miami Design Preservation League, Inc., a Managing Director at Urstadt Real Estate LLC, and Chairman and Member Planning Board at City of Miami Beach (Florida). He is on the Board of Directors at Urstadt Biddle Properties, Inc. and Urstadt Property Co., Inc. Mr. Urstadt was previously employed as Executive Director-Sales by Halstead Property Co., President & Director by The East Side Association, Executive Vice President by Brown Harris Stevens, and Publisher by New York Construction News. He also served on the board at New York State Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation, Friends of Channel 13, and The New York Building Congress.

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is known as one of the most important thinkers of smart growth, sustainable development and community planning in the world. Elizabeth brings a unique and highly sought expertise that lends itself to planning at every scale, from the village, to the campus, to the town and the city. Plater-Zyberk is a founding principal of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company and dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture, recognized worldwide for its Suburb and Town Design Program that she created in1988. She is a founder and board emerita board member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, established in 1993; the same year that the New York Times characterized the New Urbanism as 'the most important phenomenon to emerge in American architecture in the post-Cold War era.' She has been awarded several honorary doctorates and awards including the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Medal of Architecture, the Vincent J. Scully Prize, the Richard H. Driehaus Prize, and the Seaside Prize for contributions to community planning and design. Her publications include The New Civic Art and Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. She remains actively involved in master planning and code development. Her projects local to Florida include those for Downtown Doral, Downtown Stuart, Downtown West Palm Beach and Downtown Kendall. Most recently, she spearheaded the overhaul of the zoning code for the City of Miami, Miami 21 known as the largest example of a form based code, which was approved in 2010.

Conference Leadership

Conference Director Herb Hiller organizes programs about placemaking. In 1977, he organized the Miami- Bahamas Goombay Festival that annually draws up to 350,000 celebrants. His bicycle touring program in rural north Florida revived the 50-year dormant Florida bicycling movement for which he was named charter recipient of the Florida Governor’s Physical Fitness Honor Award. A 1978 conference in Puerto Rico re-focused Caribbean tourism on locally resourceful business development. Herb led formation of the Florida bed-and-breakfast movement. introduced the Great Florida Birding Trail, and serves as Southeast Region Program Consultant to the East Coast Greenway Alliance.  He has published three books about placemaking.

Conference Associate Director Caroline McKeon is a seasoned communications professional and owner of Florida Journeys Communications (www.floridajourneys.com) a full service company that specializes in creating strategic communications and branding campaigns that promote the economic value of Florida’s natural and cultural heritage. Since 1998, she has been developing, writing, producing and distributing Florida content that captures Florida’s unique sense of place. Her big picture vision, ability to integrate complex subjects and attention to detail translates her client’s message into a visual format and recognizable brand. Clients include Island Pearl Excursions, Anna Maria Island Water Shuttle, Florida Park Service, Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute, Sarasota Bay Watch, Sarasota Bay Estuary Program, Global Organic Specialty Source, Inc., 1000 Friends of Florida, Little Everglades Ranch, Coalition to Preserve Our Water Resources, Wildlife Foundation of Florida, Discovery Communications, Inc., The Travel Channel, and Tampa PBS station WEDU/Channel.  Prior to launching her own company McKeon developed and acquired television programming for national cable networks The Discovery Channel and The Travel Channel.

Conference Host Chair, Denis Russ was one of the first in Florida to see the potential of historic preservation for economic development. In 1981 he founded the Miami Beach Community Development Corporation. Its collaboration with the Miami Design Preservation League and the city's planning and community development departments soon returned Miami Beach to resort world eminence, to outstanding livability and to green leadership.  

MBCDC organized the workshops that attracted pioneer developers to the Art Deco District, guided plans and programs for public and private investment on Ocean Drive, Lincoln Road, Washington Avenue in South Beach, and now plays a similar role for preserving Miami Modern - MIMo -- Architecture in the renewal of North Beach. 

Denis' overarching respect for "place" and for collaborative process makes him the perfect host chair of this year's Sustainable Authentic Florida Conference.