The charrettes will take place during Greenbuild in order to harness the talents of its 10,000+ professional attendees and the value of its 150 educational sessions. Greenbuild attendees, many of whom represent chapters and other USGBC organization members, have expressed an interest in helping with rebuilding in the aftermath of the hurricane. Thanks to fast action by the Greenbuild local host committee and under the direction of Peter Templeton , Vice President of Education & Research, USGBC, charrettes with Gulf Coast experts and government leaders and mini-charrettes on specific topics with regional experts have been organized.
"Scholarships" have been arranged for 30 Gulf Coast community leaders to come and be a part of the proceedings.
To take point on USGBC's effort, Rick Fedrizzi, USGBC president, CEO & founding chair, has tapped Bill Browning, a partner in the Washington, DC-based firm Browning + Banning, LLC, and the founder of Rocky Mountain Institute's Green Development Services. Browning was instrumental in the Council's development, and has experience in disaster recovery work gained during the massive flooding in the 1990s of the Mississippi flood plains and from working with relief agencies on sustainable design for refugee settlements.
The Greenbuild panel sessions will focus on embedding sustainable strategies in the rebuilding effort and will culminate in a documentation work session on Friday, November 11, 2005 that will compile all the ideas generated in order to quickly produce a workable document to guide the reconstruction efforts.
Greenbuild will include around 10,000 participants and several hundred exhibitors. The series of design workshops related to the hurricane reconstruction efforts will include:
• work with the Enterprise Foundation to customize their Green Communities program to better fit the needs of the Gulf Coast. This will be done in partnership with Community Development Corporation representatives from the region, and will help guide the placement of Enterprise Foundation funds;
• a partnership with the Trust for Public Land to continue their efforts on master planning of a mile long park on largely industrial land in New Orleans. This 'Greenprint" process includes local citizen groups, the city, the Army Corps of Engineers, and others. This effort will involve the design of parks, infrastructure, ecological restoration areas, affordable housing and civic buildings;
• work with the Congress for New Urbanism to incorporate green building and infrastructure measures into the documents that will come out of the charrettes that they are currently holding in Mississippi;
• work with a school district on the redesign of a destroyed K-12 school, to apply green building strategies that create a healthier learning environment.
