Features

The panel charged with helping draft a new plan for downtown Berkeley will hear from a panel of experts Wednesday discussing “What Makes a Great Downtown?” 

The meeting, scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. in room 22 Warren Hall on the UC Berkeley campus, is located just east of the intersection of University Avenue and Oxford Street. The meeting is co-sponsored by UCB’s Advisory Committee on the Downtown Plan. 

Creation of the new plan was mandated as one of the conditions of the settlement agreement that ended the city’s lawsuit against the university’s Long Range Development Plan 2020. 

Panelists will include: 

• Former San Francisco Planning Director and UCB Professor Emeritus Allan Jacobs; 

• Dena Belzer, a member of the board of the Center for Transit-Oriented Development and a principal of Strategic Economics, a consulting firm; 

• Donlyn Lyndon, an emeritus UCB professor of architecture and urban design and the editor of PLACES, an environmental design journal; 

• Paul Okamoto of Okamoto Saijo Architecture and a former board member of Urban Ecology and the Greenbelt Alliance. 

• A representative of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. 

Among the subjects to be discussed related to the downtown plan are economics, livability, cultural identity, social equity, design and environment. 

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