 We're here this afternoon for the session called Lean Green Past, Lean Green Future. My name is Steve Devon. I'm an Associate Professor of Economics at St. Mary's University and Director of the Civil Research Institute. I'm going to be the moderator for the panel this morning. We have with us Steve Tillison and Jeff Crane who are going to give presentations here in a little bit. I'm going to talk for a few minutes and sort of set things up. I'll turn over these fine gentlemen and then make some questions. They're going to talk about 15-20 minutes and then we'll have some questions and you can come to the mic up here and prepare all those questions if you wish. Now part of it is, as I'm sure you've seen in the program, the purpose of the session is to explore San Antonio's past and future in terms of local food, economic empowerment and a low environmental footprint. Talk is covered include infrastructure, lighter quicker, cheaper, entrepreneurship and placemaking. There are several issues here that I think have played a key role in the ability of San Antonio's economy to thrive and to continue to develop. As I mentioned, I'm an economics professor and I focus on urban economies and spent a good number of years studying those and as I've studied and read and researched and sort of watched the evolution of economic development and its practices and how urban economies develop over the past 15 or so years, there's certainly been a shift. Now it's been the case for a long, long time and I would argue 100 years at least, if not even longer than that, but at least the life of the U.S. that entrepreneurship is what drives, we can't really go behind that and see what really drives entrepreneurial activity. And in San Antonio's historically, at least as I've observed, a lot of that entrepreneurial activity, at least on the technology side to some extent, has come out of our military bases. I think I could make the case, for example, that none of us probably wanted to see any of the bases closed down, but when they closed the Kalei Air Force Base and they got converted to the port of San Antonio, we actually saw quite a few companies as folks left. I keep wanting to call the port of San Antonio. The Kalei Air Force Base started on technology companies and became very successful, so there's a lot of spin out of technology there. We see that interaction with the military bases in San Antonio being the home of military medicine and our medical center and the military complex here and the interaction there. So it's played an important role in our entrepreneurial activity. And part of that activity, part of the urban theory and my observations as well, is part of that entrepreneurial activity is driven by density. San Antonio, I think in its past, was far denser. Steve's going to talk about this and may have some hope we support it, may have some other thoughts on this as well. But I think in our past, as a city, we were a lot denser. And like a lot of cities, especially cities in Texas, as the highway infrastructure was built out, we continued to scrawl and scrawl and scrawl to where we are today. But entrepreneurial activity thrives on the mixture of people and ideas and this was serendipitous conversations that everybody has, what we would call localization and urbanization economies in the literature. And as San Antonio through its history is sort of sprawled, and again this is not something that's unique to just San Antonio, I think we probably lost a little bit of that. So this sort of movement back into the downtown core and this effort, we heard a lot of discussion at the lunch panels. Unfortunately I wasn't able to make it for the morning sessions. I'm sure there were some discussions there about it. But this movement to more of a live, work, play spaces. And they talked about the pearl, the efforts of Grand Westman making downtown. Southtown is an area that I think has grown up a lot more organically, if you will, in a lot of other areas of downtown. But these types of movements are very important because they do bring the density back to the city. There's even pockets out in the suburbs. Somebody might throw something at me for this and that's fine. I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you. You can disagree with me. But things like the shops at Lock and Fair and the rim even down into a city base that aren't in the inner city core, they're out of ways, but they're developing these pockets of live, work, play space. I would prefer that they be in the downtown area. I think the focus on that and the density we can build around that can only help in a lot of different ways, particularly with respect to entrepreneurial activity and health and so on and so forth. But I think that's been an important transition. Some of those speakers at lunch talked about, and I think it was Mayor Taylor talked about the fact that it used to be the case that we would spend a lot of time in economic development trying to attract companies and now it's the case we're trying to attract people. So again, coming back to this whole creating the quality of life and the whole thing that Graham was talking about with the software developer that he was trying to recruit, I've heard stories and I'm sure many of you have along those same lines. So building a community that's able to attract and maintain talent is going to be hugely important to the future of our economic development. And if we're going to continue to develop as a community, as a city, as a metropolitan area, one of the two key things that I think come back to economic learning is not the incentives that we talk about. I spent, I worked at the cities then, 20 over six and a half years in economic development as their chief economist. I spent a good amount of my time working with companies looking to come into San Antonio as well as developing the incentive programs. So I'm not against the incentive programs, I think they're necessary. But there's been a shift away from, we're always going to be trying to attract companies, but I agree 100% with the mayor that we need to have this shift towards creating more live work place-based places that are going to attract the millennials as well as others into a more dense space. So we can get this new view of ideas and interactions and to me, that's going to be vitally important to this. And what that is also going to drive, one is I think it's going to improve education not necessarily in a formal sense, but again, just those accidental conversations if you will to give one very general example, but it drives health. In my mind, if you don't have an educated labor force and that labor force is not of good health, in terms of those economies, it's going to be very difficult to develop. So you talk about incentives and all these other things that really to me in my mind comes back those sort of two key factors. So again, to me the built environment then becomes extremely important and not only its ability to attract and retain labor, but its ability as many, many studies have shown for it to maintain or to help improve and maintain the health of the workforce. We do, I was driving home yesterday and David Clear was on NPR TPR radio and David Martin Davies showed and was there talking about the conference and the livability and all that stuff. And there are actually a couple people called in from Seattle and one of them was here. They've been to San Antonio now, they're generalizing very quickly, but they've talked about the difficulties getting around San Antonio and seeing the things in Seattle. And one of them we mentioned, I'm not coming back. So that's the kind of struggle that we're going to have. I think we've made huge strides in that area. They've mentioned it once again in the Pearl area and I just bring that up because I wanted to talk a little bit about the local food and the importance of local food production and that type of thing. Not only from a health perspective, but I think in my mind not only the development of the Pearl, we're bringing the culinary institute, American Pearl in combination with the culinary schools and the other culinary schools working around the community. I put a huge role in sort of putting San Antonio on the food map, if you will. And I think that's, I moved down here in 1998 just in that time period. I've seen a huge change in the food culture in San Antonio. When I came down here from the bank fleet got out of Dallas and came down here, Dallas at the time had a massive farmers market, just huge. One of the sort of frustrations we had down here was there weren't very few of any farmers markets around here. Now there's a proliferation of them everywhere. We're starting to see some community gardens that I know just been talking about. But this all sort of feeds into that community, that sort of healthy community and sort of ability to attract and retain labor, especially millennial generation and the importance of that. I was at another conference this morning. He gave a talk there and the folks were, it was a bunch of furniture, furniture manufacturers group and some of the retailers and that. And it's been a lot of time after my conversation talking about how this changes and shifts what they're having to make to be able to attract the millennials into the store, get them to buy their products and so on and so forth. It's just different. They think differently. They look for quality of life and that type of thing. But that's the future of our economy and so we need to be able to have a community that can attract and retain them. So I think going forward, I didn't touch a lot on the transportation and the infrastructure, but a lot of this, if we're building this litwork plate community, a lot of that is around the infrastructure. Personally, I think the transportation infrastructure is huge going forward. It's going to be one of the key things that we have to continue to develop. And when I say transportation infrastructure, I mean a broad variety of transportation. I'm not necessarily, I'm not talking about just roads, I'm talking about plightings infrastructure, walking infrastructure and the whole host. And then that, to my mind, leads to more density. I think that's a key piece of San Antonio's ability to grow and develop for the reasons that hopefully I've talked about a little bit. So I'm going to shut it off there with my rambling and hopefully I've set it up a little bit for Steve and Jeff. Let me introduce them and then I'll turn it over. Steve Land Tillson, right here to my left, is an architect and partner at Munoz company. Engages in cultural phenomena with revelatory nature, a place and design of new architecture, historic preservation and site-sensitive planning. He has produced a variety of award-winning civic and institutional projects throughout Texas and is an ardent investigator in the urban process. I work with Steve on his projects and I can surely attest to that. You're going to enjoy what he has to say. He's been an advocate for sustainable and context-sensitive development and community revitalization in South Texas for over three decades. He's currently engaged in the restoration of St. Pedro Creek to reimagine the one-and-a-half mile drainage ditch as a linear urban park. And I was fortunate enough to do the economic impact study that you guys come up with and to see that new plan. It's going to be a huge boost to the downtown area. Jeff Crane, to the left of Steve here, I grew up in Washington State and earned his PhD in history at Washington State University. His scholarship is focused on river development, protest against dams, impacts on salmon and other fisheries and river restoration efforts. He's been working in farming, greening the cities, and climate change. He is the Associate Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of the U.K. and serves on the Board of Greenspaces and Lions. He's published three books, which is quite far from my opinion. One, The Environment and American History. I say it's in the history of American environmentalism, and the environmental history of the Hell War. The environment and American history nature in the formation of the United States. He's currently editing with Charmiller an edited collection titled The Politics of Hope, grassroots organizing, environmental justice, and social change to be published by the University of Colorado across 2016, early 2017. Obviously a very busy gentleman. So with that, Steve, let me turn it over to you. And then we'll go to Jeff and we'll take some questions. Thank you. Well, thank you for that introduction and it's a pleasure to be here today. I spoke at last year's conference and it was the first time that I had to begin to really think about the environment, the relationship of the environment to health. Really my view is it's a fairly focused view on some historic aspects of how we've built in the past and how the phenomenon of health is really been affected or influenced by that. And looking from that, taking some ideas and kind of patterns that existed in the past and looking at how that might apply in the future. And looking at the San Antonio way that I think some people forget to look at. So anybody find it really easy to drive around and get around San Antonio and know where you are? Is it kind of really easy or is it kind of difficult? Like the streets are crooked and you don't know where you are and everything like that. What you're looking at is really a map of San Antonio I did some years ago and it was really to identify the provenance of all the street geometries in the city. The area kind of around the river is really a curvy in downtown and you kind of twist around and there's no numbers and there's no letters, it's just all names. But once you get outside of that, there's a fairly regular grid that was established and you see that in that kind of larger colors and then when you get into the suburban parts it starts to get all wiggly again and you get lost. But the lesson from this really was my interest in understanding how the city grew because nobody built streets kind of without thinking about them. The old story about San Antonio's roads were laid out by cows and drunk herders and things like that really doesn't apply. It was actually very deliberate and very well engineered. And if we understood that then we might get around a little bit easier. It was laid out according to a plan. There's a planning document for all the towns of New Spain that really goes back to the 1500s and as planning precepts we're really to deal with regulations for water for arable land. Sevens had to have dependable food and water supplies. Building shelter and town planning and governance. There's a lot of governance but there's a considerable amount of town planning and those helped those were actually the planning guidelines for that time period. The form, the image that you see here again is San Antonio but really structured at the time of about 1800 or so, the early 19th century. And what let me see if I can move an arrow here. No. What you see in the dark green really are the cultivated fields lining either side of the San Antonio River basin from Brackenich Park all the way down to Aspira. And there were about seven to eight Asakia systems that really supported these fields, these porcelains. And the Asakia systems, the irrigation water was essential because this is a place of really marginal rainfall. So if you're going to have any kind of dependable local food supply you have to have a relatively dependable supply of water. And the Spanish engineers and the priests were very well trained in the construction of Asakias and very good inventory tools produced over about 35 miles of ditches that are precisely a 0.3% gradient. They're just remarkable. So a lot of the kind of the road system all those Asakias followed the porcelain and essentially developed a pattern of land tenure that was agriculturally based that really centers along the creek along the creeks from along the river. What you see in the light green is actually the Achilles that was the eight lead grant which was about 67 square miles. And that was essentially the public lands and those could not be developed, they were health or public development and that had to be regulated through the authority and in this case the authority was in Mexico City. So development was really constrained to some degree by a lot of bureaucracy and red tape on that so people had to be resourceful with unlimited means. Now if you focus a little bit closer this is actually the downtown area I'd like to go back to this one. You see the little brown area where it seems like there's a spider web and that's the center of that's the actual settlement town itself. And really what this is is a cultural landscape it's not just a natural brown but it's how people have amended it and changed it. And when you look at the focus area in the downtown area you'll see the San Antonio River and inside the familiar bend of the river that is downtown you'll see the Alamo is to be about the right center that really formed the nucleus Mission San Antonio at the time. The civil settlement was on the other side of the river between San Pedro Creek and San Antonio River and you'll see the main military plaza there with the Presidio was first established. And really the town essentially started as that core out to the north, east, south and west in different small initial suburbs that from about 1730 to 1800. And this really represents really the kind of the peak of the Spanish colonial era all of the green striped areas that you see to the north all around the city those were the Orsillones, those were the fields that were cultivated there were herds, there were pastures there were grow crops, there were gardens there were basically all the food stuff that could be grown to support the community and you see they kind of have an outline you'll see a little kind of a lighter blue line and that was the Ezequia system it's very skillfully engineered and very well regulated What you might understand about the Ezequia is that they were really a totally a community effort and living in that area of one square mile there was about 2,500 people about 1810 so if you look at the density you have about 2,500 people in one square mile. I'll mention the Ezequia so I just wanted to show you an image they're not brand Roman aqueducts by any means although they're worse and really nice structures of course the Aspire Aqueduct is one of those but they were not just for delivering irrigation water they were a domestic water supply they also supplied water for industrial uses and they were totally essential the word of safety comes from the Arabic word saikiaw which is waterway and water was precious in North Africa, the southern Spain and it was viewed as very precious here I want to zoom in even a little bit closer this would be about that same time and at that point San Antonio was the Vietta San Fernando it had the prosidio that you see in front of the square on the left-hand side closer to the San Pedro Creek the church and the main plaza the Plaza de las Islas for the Canary Islanders themselves and within that area there were townhouses that had gardens and support areas there were workshops there were service yards and you had people living in those houses that were for a domestic living and then they were running their businesses out of them but you also had people living there that had land on the outskirts of town so a lot of the prosidios that you see were not occupied they were simply farmed and utilized by people living in town people actually living on the outskirts of town itself so the very fine brain of people living walking to their work close by having lots of open space although it was in production and cultivation most of the time is fairly well represented in this image and when you think about kind of a model if you will this again reminds you this is a density of about 500 living in a place that is essentially in the middle of a series of gardens I would like to go back one more to this slide just to tell a story to about a generation after the founding of San Antonio 1731 they built up the Asseki assistance for about 20 years and they began to suffer from erosion and it was really a crisis for them because they could not hold water in the Asseki they could not get clean water it was contaminated from runoff storm water and they realized that all the wood the trees that they had been cutting down for the wood to fuel the fires to build the houses to build the fences to do everything they needed they had completely denuded the landscape around them the trees could not hold the soil anymore every time it rained they could not tear into the Asseki so the first piece of environmental legislation actually in San Antonio was in the 1750s and it was declared that they had to repair all the Asseki that they had to plant trees along all the creeks and rivers and stabilize the banks and you could not cut wood down for a full lean around the city that's two and a half miles so that was a huge sacrifice for that community of about a thousand people that said at that point that you had to go further, you had to spend more energy work harder and get risk getting scout just to cut wood because you had to protect the water and I think that's a really interesting indication of what a community has to do to commit themselves to maintaining their environment by the 1850s of course the entire cultural context had changed there was no longer a dominant Hispanic culture there was really a dominant Anglo culture the Hedos of the large the public lands were actually sold off and the city limits were defined as a six square mile area or six miles by six miles actually a 36 mile square area that was centered at the dome of the San Fernando Cathedral and if you look at that one square mile by 1910 the population was about a hundred thousand so the density was about 2750 square miles by 1910 there was a pipe water system there was a sanitary sewer there was a streetcar system there was electric lighting and power so it was a relatively sophisticated infrastructure it was plugged in with a national rail grid it had regional, commercial passenger rail and so it was a fairly thriving city in this 36 square miles not too much more dense than how it was almost a hundred years before by 1940 the population had more than doubled 254,000 people in the same 36 square miles density of 7,000 more than 7,000 and how that was achieved was in little big houses around the outskirts and in higher rise walk-up three, four storey apartment buildings and this is the elevation of the skyline of San Antonio from 1910 to 1940 this is where you got all of early the pre-World War II skyscrapers that you see today so density went up and it did not, the city did not grow out of it so they grew within it and so just to summarize the growth of the city really looking at from the existing density figures 2,500 square miles in the 1800 century later, 2,775 people per square mile in 1940 this pre-World War II 7,000 square miles and now our density is about 3,000 square miles so of our 1.4 million population an area of 467 miles we really have dropped back on density and for two reasons, of course the expansion of the city limits from 36 square miles to 467 that we have today but also the D densification of San Antonio's already developed urban areas and that was largely a result of model cities and renewal and things like that that was designed or implemented as some slump there is but one of the fatal flaws of the economics of our city has been rebuilding areas already settled at lower densities and when you think about what density really means as we have a population now our density is about 3,000 we compare that to Dallas and Houston they have a higher density more people same amount of infrastructure so it's more affordable to the population for public infrastructure