[Foodplanning] GPEAN conference in Mexico, next July

[Joe Nasr]

Hello to all,

Good to see the Foodplanning list gradually become steadily used!
As many of you know, we have had roundtables and/or organized sessions on
food issues at most of the last few conferences of the Association of
Collegiate Schools of Planning, and more recently, at the most recent
American Planning Association conferences.
The next big event will be the conference that all associations of planning
schools or departments will be holding jointly - an event that happens
every five years only.  The next conference of the Global Planning
Educators Associations Network (GPEAN) will be held in Mexico City, 11-16
July 2006.  Details on the World Planning Schools Congress can be found at
wpsc-06.unam.mx.  The deadline for submitting papers or full sessions is
16th January - 4 weeks from now.

I think this is a great opportunity to continue to put food and related
agricultural issues 'on the map' of planning education.  I'd be interested
in organizing a roundtable, and in coordinating informally formal papers,
so as to try to develop preorganized sessions on the subject.  If you are
interested and seriously thinking of going to that conference and would
like to have some role in something related to food (besides eating it -
I'm sure there'll be plenty of that too!), please drop me a line as soon as
you have a chance, in the next week or so.  These things take some time to
pull together, so let's see if we can manage this.

For now, all you need to tell me is:
1- whether you're definitely planning on going to the conference, or just
thinking about it;
2- whether you'd be interested in a roundtable, in a formal paper, in
organizing a session, or any combination of these;
3- what you think you'd like to talk about IN JUST ONE SENTENCE.
As you can tell, this is just a sounding exercise; based on the responses,
we'll figure out what to do.

Please don't delay reacting to this if you are thinking of going to this
event.
Regards to all, and best wishes for the new year.


Joe Nasr
joenasr at compuserve.com
(alternates: joenasr at cyberia.net.lb
                  jnasr at ryerson.ca)