Regional Livability Symposium Facilitates Multidisciplinary Dialog

Participants in the 2013 Envision Central Texas Regional Livability Symposium were inspired by diverse perspectives on water issues in Central Texas

30 speakers from multiple disciplines engaged with participants from throughout the Central Texas region during last Friday's 2013 Regional Livability Symposium. This inaugural symposium, themed Water: Key to Our Future, was held at the University of Texas Union in partnership with the UT's Center for Sustainable Development. Sessions addressed a full range of water-related topics including Designing Sites for Water, Water Reuse, Social Equity and Water, Economics, Innovative Conservation and Education, Infrastructure, Water Policy, Strategies for Dealing with Drought and Sustainability Metrics.

Each session featured multiple presenters and panelists from different professional and academic perspectives, allowing participants to gain new understandings at the intersections of disciplines. A final panel of elected officials discussed key policy-related questions from each of the day's sessions, moving the conversation from knowledge to implementation.

Envision Central Texas plans to host the Regional Livability Symposium as an annual event. Each symposium in this series will facilitate a multidisciplinary dialog about a pressing growth-related issue in our region. These conversations will foster a systems-based approach to meeting the challenges and leveraging the opportunities of growth in Central Texas.

A report and available presentations from the sessions will be published on the Envision Central Texas website. Click to view films of the keynote addresses by Dean Frederick Steiner and Pliny Fisk. The symposium program, session synopses and speaker bios may be found in our resource pages under "Presentations and Publications".

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See the Vision!
Envision Central Texas was founded in 2001 to address the tremendous growth pressures on our five-county region. Regional leaders realized the need for a common vision that would help us take steps to shape growth in a positive way. The two-year ECT visioning process was unprecedented, with thousands of people throughout the region discussing future growth as a connected community. See all the Vision materials by clicking on the picture.