Coral Gables

Back in Coral Gables for day 1 of the NCI charrette leader certification training as part of my fellowship at Miami - another fantastic and very inspiring day here. We spent the first half of the day getting background on the three parts of the charrette: preparation, charrette, and post-charrette implementation, and the second half of the day was spent practicing with hands-on public meeting simulations. I had to role-play as a city representative for a project for one part of the meeting, then facilitate a 9 person public visioning session for the second part of the meeting. Way more difficult than I expected, and I didn't think it would be easy... We'll be getting into more detail about how to facilitate public meetings and more intricacies of the urban design public process tomorrow.

Our fellowship group will be deciding this week whether to hold this year's Knight Program charrette this summer in Memphis or Austin. Both cities have put together incredible applications and will be presenting their case, and I really think the decision will be difficult because the proposals are very different from each other.

After the training was done for the day we grabbed pre-dinner cocktails at the Biltmore. Not too bad, especially for all of you reading back in Boston:


The view from our table of the biggest pool I have ever seen:


Then we headed into Miami for dinner at a Cuban restaurant. Chicken, rice, plantains, and endless sangria. I'm off to bed now to get some sleep before starting the day tomorrow with a run out in the warm Florida sun. Life is tough...