I’m about to head out to Reality Check 2008, along with 250 of my closest business, environment, political and civic leader friends.

Held at the University of Washington and presented by the Urban Land Institute, it’s a high profile day-long event where leaders in their field come together to play with Legos. Yes, I’m serious. After a series of welcome speeches, the 250 leaders will do a planning exercise that uses Legos to represent people, transit and other things. They will physically plan for where a whole lot of people projected to come to this area by 2040 - 1.7 million people and 1.2 million jobs, to be exact - will go.

Perhaps the most impressive thing is the guest list, and the group of people ULI has been able to get it one place. Attendees should include Gov. Chris Gregoire, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, the mayors of Auburn, Redmond, Bothell, Sumner, Lynnwood (and other cities), and an impressive list of council members from different city and civic councils.

On the business front, there’s going to be representatives from Mithun, CamWest Development, Vulcan Inc., Microsoft, Opus Northwest, Wright Runstad and Co., Boeing, and Uwajimaya. Most of the attendees are high level executives, if not presidents. Basically, anybody who is anybody in planning and development is going to be there (or at least is sending a representative). The event is by invitation only.

The exercise has already been done in Washington, D.C. and Sacramento. For more information on it, press here. I’ll keep you updated as it moves along.

Tags: Density, Regional Issues, Seattle, ULI, University of Washington

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 7:42 am and is filed under Density, Famous speakers, Regional Issues, Seattle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.