Goal 09: Industry Innovation and Infrastructure

Video Transcript:

Peter Aguirre, Greater Dallas Planning Council

[Music]

Peter Aguirre: Hi, I'm Peter Aguirre, a board member of the Greater Dallas Planning Council. Investments in our local infrastructure are crucial to achieving sustainable development and empowered communities. Our infrastructure must support economic development and human well-being. And it must be affordable and accessible for all.

The Greater Dallas Planning Council's mission is to shape, promote and advocate a creative, sustainable future for the Dallas region. We believe that good planning and new technology will improve the resilience and sustainability of our communities. Much of our success comes from our collaboration with other organizations such as the Sustainable Communities Institute, North Central Texas Council of Governments, Urban Land Institute, and others.

We support our communities by providing unbiased, reliable information and recommendations about urban development to our region's policy makers. We recognize that we cannot build our way out of the growth challenges we have today, we need to plan our way out.

For example, we strongly support the principles of "new urbanism." This includes walkability, connectivity, mixed use developments, quality architecture, and green transportation. Many of these ideas harken back to earlier times in our history when neighborhoods were walkable and included residential, retail and commercial properties. They were much denser than today's neighborhoods and had easy access to mass transportation.

Our goal is to create safer and more responsive communities. We can do that by adopting smart city solutions that blend transportation and communication technologies to solve last mile challenges.

New urbanism is just one of many ideas that we are promoting. If you are interested in learning more about our Agenda for Change in the Dallas Region, please visit our website at gdpc.org.