Feet First Developing the Walkable City

On Friday, the event that I have spent the last several months working on came to an end with a bash. Developing the walkable city was an event designed to take a group of developers, community members, government people, etc up to vancouver to see how a place like Vancouver develops itself into the community that it is today.
For me, I think the experience was different than most that went on the tour because I have more of a love for Vancouver than most any other city that I have lived in or visited more than a couple of times. To me, Vancouver represents the idea city. A little expensive, but also very user friendly.
Seattle, has the potential to be so much more than Vancouver in a number of ways, but the problem has always seemed to be the same--the people in charge of making decisions do not actually do so, politicians do not form together and set a list of common goals to move the city in a positive direction--instead, they seem to sit ideally by and let process take precidence over judgement.
Developers need to be lobbied by community leadership that will say that you can build smartly, the city will cooperate if you build with intellegent design. It is an interesting parellel to get involved in. Developers want to develop land to make money. Community leaders want smart developments that allow for a stronger community process to take place. Politicans want to make sure that process is followed and that the people are heard through their elected leadership. Seems easy enough on paper, but the difficulty is getting all the different people together to work out smart resolve. Going on this trip showed where the difficulty comes in and most of it comes from the personality and career angles. To be realisitic, developers are not going to listen to non-profits if they dont have to because they speak a different language. A developer would not mind building pedestrian friendly buildings if they were able to make more money and not have to deal with as much regualtion, but it seems as soon as people are ready to pay attention to developing smart projects, then everyone with a cause comes a knockin and it holds up the process.
What seems to need to happen is that a coalition needs to be formed that takes into account public input regarding proposals to the city to speed up their process. Once these two colloborate, the next step is to work with government to move process along.
Seattle needs to make some major changes downtown if it ever plans to grow.

I will be adding more to this in the future, but I am excited to add the pics and go riding today, so I must rap this up.