We are excited about being able to edit and publish the Proceedings for the 1997 National Planning Conference of the American Planning Association. All this and amazing natural resources. While it has been sixteen years since proceedings were last published by APA, the tradition of a national planning conference with proceedings began when the Committee on Congestion of Population in New York organized the first conference in 1909.
Conference proceedings are important to most professional organizations.
They are published to provide state of the art information and to serve as a historical benchmark and reference for recording what professionals were thinking and doing at a particular point in time. Unfortunately, some of the same observations will probably be made many years from now when future planners read the 1997 Proceedings . We believe that this year's Proceedings have significantly enhanced the value of the annual conference for all of our members. For the first in many years, a great deal of the information and knowledge which was presented in numerous sessions at the annual conference was made available at lost cost to planners all across the country and around the world. This Proceedings is the first to be published in paper form and on the internet as World Wide Web document, which truly makes it available world wide at very little cost.