Functions
Like many professional organizations, the American Planning Association's main function is to serve as a forum for the exchange of ideas between people who work in the field of urban and regional planning. The organization keeps track of the various improvement efforts underway around the country, which may include the improvement or construction of new parks, highways and roads, or residential developments.
The organization is also a starting point for people looking for employment in the city and regional planning field.
The association holds an annual conference which attracts planners and planning students from throughout the United States, Canada and the world. The conference has been held in the following cities April 13–17, 2012- Los Angeles, CA; April 9–12, 2011 - Boston, MA; 2010 - New Orleans, LA; 2009 - Minneapolis, MN; 2008 - Las Vegas, NV; April 14–18, 2007 - Philadelphia, PA; 2006 - San Antonio, TX; 2005 - San Francisco, California; 2004 - Washington, DC,
The 2007 Conference was held in Philadelphia, PA, from April 14 to April 18; among the discussions were items on Hurricane Katrina, universal design, transit oriented development, protected open space, urban open space, land use, the development of Philadelphia itself (as well as the surrounding area), and other planning-related topics.
The association is subdivided into 47 state/regional chapters, such as the NJAPA (New Jersey Chapter of the APA) or the Western Central Chapter of the APA.
Read more about this topic: American Planning Association
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“In today’s world parents find themselves at the mercy of a society which imposes pressures and priorities that allow neither time nor place for meaningful activities and relations between children and adults, which downgrade the role of parents and the functions of parenthood, and which prevent the parent from doing things he wants to do as a guide, friend, and companion to his children.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)