Kicking off in September with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at AOL’s new headquarters on Maple Drive in Beverly Hills, Perfecting Los Angeles will be a forum for the Mayor and his staff to connect with Hollywood and discuss their most innovative projects and initiatives to move L.A. forward in every area, from transportation to education to the environment. It will give our members a chance to become more informed and get involved in projects that appeal to them.
Events will take place monthly, starting in September with the Mayor on “The State of the City” and continuing in October with his Chief of Staff Robin Kramer on innovating education, with Deputy Mayor Jaime de la Vega in November on transportation, and with Deputy Mayor Nancy Sutley in January on the environment. Further events to be announced as scheduled.
This event is being finalized. We are putting together an event on U.S. Broadband Policy, an absolutely fascinating and critical issue for our country's development and competitive edge in the next decade. Thomas Bleha is confirmed. He recently authored a controversial article on the subject in the Foreign Affairs Journal "Down To The Wire" and he is currently completing a book on the race for Internet leadership. He was formerly a Foreign Service officer in Japan for 8 years.
Cocktails & Hors d'oeuvres, Valet
Chongming Island, a marshy grassland near Shanghai, will soon be home to a scratch-built metropolis of half a million people called Dongtan. Envisioned by the cutting-edge "integrated urbanism" division of one of the world's largest and most innovative engineering firms - Arup - Dongtan will be the world's first green city designed entirely from scratch for total environmental efficiency.
In 2010 it will be connected to Shanghai via a bridge-and-tunnel system and subway extension. The Arup team that designed it, led by urban design pioneer Peter Head, wrote their own "integrated resource modeling" software to optimize everything from energy generation and waste flow to public transit and building placements. They then applied existing technologies in innovative ways, creating organic underground "plant factories", a recycling scheme that repurposes 90% of waste, and of course a ban on any vehicles that emit carbon dioxide. It is simply a marvel of human engineering an d a case study for the bright green city of tomorrow. Join us for a mind-blowing presentation and discussion with Peter Head and Gary Lawrence, Arup's Head of Global Policy. Peter is based in London; Gary is based in Seattle; and both will be flying in exclusively for this event.
Co-Presented by
Read Wired Magazine's article Pop-Up Cities: China Builds A Bright Green Metropolis.
Barber's apt sequel to his best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld, Consumed, offers a vivid portrait of a global economy that overproduces goods and targets children as consumers in a market where there are never enough shoppers - and where the primary goal is no longer to manufacture goods but needs. Kidults, rejuveniles, twixters, adultescents - these pop neologisms signal more than just a passing trend; they point to a new culture of consumerism that encourages adults to remain as infantile as possible, at the same time that it trains children to consume from an ever younger age.
Disturbing, provocative, and compelling, Consumed examines phenomena as seemingly disparate as adolescent fashion trends for adults, megachurches, declining voter participation, the privatization of the public sphere, branding, and the new twenty-four-hour shopper to show how the freedoms of the free market have undermined the freedoms of the deliberative adult citizen. Barber asserts that in place of the Protestant ethnic once associated with capitalism - encouraging self-restraint, preparation for the future, protection of and self-sacrifice for children and community, and other characteristics of adulthood - we are constantly being seduced into an "infantilist" ethic of consumption. With brilliance and depth, Barbar confronts the likely consequences for our children, our liberty, and our citizenship, and shows finally how citizens can resist and overcome the "civic schizophrenia" in which our impulses as consumers are forever in conflict with our convictions as citizens.