Greetings from APA Virginia’s Annual Planning Conference (#APAVA14).

Hey everyone. Taking a real vacation of sorts to address the APA Virginia membership tomorrow on “The New Diversity of Planning” and “Planning Around A Civic Inferiority Complex.

Here’s a photo of where we are at right now. (It’s cloudy, you don’t need to be jealous).

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Meanwhile, if you are here at the conference and coming to the page for the first time, you can do a couple of things.

Read my about page. This will help you during my talk tomorrow morning to get a sense of my background and what I’m doing with this site and my various workings.

Learn what I mean with the civic inferiority complex. Bonus points if you read up on how it affects the “voting with your feet” phenomenon.

Follow me on Twitter.

Subscribe to my email list. (You get essays, podcast episodes and the like before anyone else).

Keep up with planning and development news in North Carolina with my sister site, North Carolina Placebook. You can get that info directly in your email box too.

Special thanks to Earl Anderson, Andy Boenau, Malcolm Kenton and all of you lovely people that I’ve met this week here at the Wintergreen Resort.

Come back here as I’ll be updating this post with pictures and speech audio as soon as all those things happen.

By Kristen Jeffers

Kristen Jeffers has always been interested in how cities work. She’s also always loved writing things. She went off to a major state university, got a communication degree and then started a more professional Blogger site. Then, in her graduate seminar on urban politics, along with browsing the urbanist blogosphere, she realized that her ideas should have a stronger, clearer voice, one that reflects her identity as a Black southern woman. And with that The Black Urbanist blog was born. Seven years, one Twitter account, one self-published book, two podcasts and a litany of speeches and urban planning projects later, here we are.