Walker Wells
Walker Wells is a Prinicipal at Raimi + Associates and a lecturer at Pomona College and UCLA.
Contributed 12 posts
Mr. Wells is a Principal at Raimi + Associates, an urban planning consultancy based on sustainability, equity, health, and authentic stakeholder engagement. Prior to joing R+A, he was Executive Director and Driector of the Green Urbanism Program for Global Green USA, a national non-profit organization headquartered in Santa Monica. He works with local governments, affordable housing developers, and school districts across the country to further sustainable development practices via technical assistance, charrettes and workshops, and developing public policy related to green building, renewable energy, and sustainable development. He is a lecturer in green urbansim and green development at the Claremont Colleges and the UCLA Urban Planning Program.
Mr. Wells has held positions as a Senior Urban Design with Gruen Associates in Los Angeles, an Associate Planner with the City of Santa Monica, and an Urban Planner for the City of Malmo, Sweden. Mr. Wells holds Bachelor's degrees in Sociology and Environmental Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara and a Master’s of City and Regional from the California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo. He also studied at Lund University and the Lund PolyTechnic Institute School of Architecture in Sweden. Mr. Wells is a certified urban planner, a LEED and EcoDistricts Accredited Professional, and a 2015 Fulbright Fellow to the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Sanitary City vs. Sustainable City - Who Wins, Who Loses?
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Net Positive Urban Retrofit - Is It Possible?
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Lapped on Urban Sustainability - can the US ever catch up?
<p> Summer travel took me out of the US and back to Sweden for the first time in five years. While my initial reaction was that things seemed much the same, I quickly realized that the Swedes had quietly pushed forward a number of projects that, if located in the US, would be on the vanguard of sustainability. But over there it's just called urban planning. </p>
What is Green Urbanism?
<p> The term Green Urbanism keeps showing up unexpectedly in newspaper articles, conference session titles, blog posts, and casual conversation. While there is an innate, intuitive sense of the meaning, green urbanism may also seem as elusive as it is evocative. Having given this topic a fair amount of thought over the past several years, I, and my colleague and collaborator Ted Bardacke, arrived at the following working definition: </p> <p> <strong><em>green urbanism:</em></strong><em> the practice of creating communities mutually beneficial to humans and the environment </em> </p>
Building Green in Los Angeles
<p> Last Tuesday was a big day for me and an even bigger Earth Day for the City of Los Angeles. After 18 months of meetings, focus groups, workshops, conference calls, briefings, and a lot of collective putting together of heads the City Council unanimously passed a landmark green building ordinance. Three hours later it was signed into law by the Mayor. </p>