2009 Greenways & Trails Forum

2009 Greenways & Trails Forum
"Connect with Tennessee"

Thursday, April 2, 2009 – Saturday, April 4, 2009*

D.P. Culp University Center
East TN State University
Johnson City, TN

Featured Forum Speaker: Dan Burden

*See PDF brochure or visit their website for a detailed schedule of events and additional information.

Dan Burden is a nationally recognized authority on bicycle and pedestrian facilities and programs, livable communities, healthy streets, traffic calming, and other design and planning elements that affect roadway environments. Time Magazine recently listed Dan as "one of the six most important civic innovators in the world." The Transportation Research Board (National Academy of Sciences) honored Dan by making him their Distinguished Lecturer in 2001, the national Smart Growth Coalition awarded Dan its first Lifetime Achievement Award and the League of American Bicyclists lists Dan as "one of the 25 most significant leaders in bicycling for the past 100 years."



Experience: Dan has thirty years of experience in the livable communities field. He served for 16 years as Florida DOT's first State Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator. This program became a model for other statewide programs. In 1996, Dan founded Walkable Communities, Inc. This nonprofit group has been assisting North American communities to become more walkable. Then in 2005, Dan and Walkable Communities joined Glatting Jackson, where Dan now works as a Principal and Senior Urban Designer. Glatting Jackson is a firm recognized for its excellence in livable communities design and innovative urban transportation planning and design services.


Method: In the past 11 years Dan has personally photographed and examined walking, bicycling and transportation conditions in over 2,500 cities in the U.S. and abroad. He worked as a bicycle consultant in China for the United Nations in 1994, and he has also worked in Australia, Canada, the Caribbean and many European countries. His pictures have been published in such diverse publications as the National Geographic, New York Times, Better Homes and Gardens, Sierra Club and Weekly Reader. Presentations given by Dan are always richly illustrated with examples from near and far. Dan's visual, information-rich workshops, with National Geographic quality images, showcase the most modern and best ways to plan and design better streets, town centers, and neighborhoods. Today many state and national organizations select Dan as either a featured or keynote speaker for their annual conferences.


Goal: Dan uses his experience and photography to teach people to speak one common language; his goal is to bring many professions closer together, to retool and rebuild for present and future urban living. Common professions and groups that learn to speak one universal community building language include the following: engineering, planning, health, development, placemaking, architecture, advocacy, historic preservation, and landscape architecture. Designs that incorporate this process lead to highly engaging activity centers, prosperous business districts, quiet, pleasant, well connected neighborhoods, and great waterfronts, parks, trails and open spaces with an emphasis on people and active living.