2005 AICP Community Planning Workshop Leaders

Walter Hood, Moderator

Walter Hood is a professor and former Chair of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and principal of Hood Design in Oakland, California. He has worked in a variety of settings including community design, urban landscape design, art, and research.

Hood was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in Landscape Architecture in 1997. He has exhibited and lectured on his professional projects and theoretical works nationally and abroad. His work was featured in Open, New Designs for Public Space, at the Van Alen Institute, 2003-04. Recent guest venues include Spoleto Arts Festival, Charleston 2004; the Monongehela Conference, Pittsburgh, 2004; Cornerstone Garden Festival, Sonoma, California, 2004; and the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, 2000.

His firm is currently designing a six-mile Waterfront Trail in Oakland, California, and is designing the gardens and landscape for the New De Young Museum in San Francisco with Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron. It is scheduled for completion in 2005. Hood Design has just completed the West Oakland Transit Village Design Development Plan (Seventh Street Streetscape Plan).

Walter Hood's published monographs Urban Diaries and Blues & Jazz Landscape Improvisations illuminate his unique approach to the design of urban landscapes. These works won an ASLA Research Award in 1996. His essay "Macon Memories" is featured in Sites of Memory, Princeton Press, 2001.

Hood participated in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's "Revelatory Landscapes" Exhibition 2000-2001. He is currently researching and writing a book entitled Urban Landscapes: American Landscape Typologies, to be published soon. His area of teaching, the American Urban Landscape, is intertwined with his design work creating a didactic approach to the design of urban landscapes.

Margot Lederer Prado, Workshop Coordinator

Margot Lederer Prado, AICP, has been a planner with local government for the past 10 years. She spent the previous 10 years in housing, child care planning, and community arts development. For the past five years, she has worked on West Oakland projects, including the nearly-completed Mandela Parkway ($11 million California Department of Transportation streetscape project), the new Amtrak Maintenance Facility, the (Loma Prieta Earthquake) Commemorative Memorial Park, re-zoning around the BART Station into to transit oriented development, and the West Oakland Transit Village Action Study. She manages the City of Oakland brownfields programs, and has recently completed a Streetscape Plan for Seventh Street with consultant Walter Hood. She currently works for the City of Oakland Redevelopment Agency.

Councilmember Nancy Nadel (District 3 West Oakland), Guest Speaker

Nancy Nadel is in her third term as an Oakland City Councilmember for District 3 (Downtown and West Oakland). She has been a West Oakland resident for 23 years and is a member of the Association of Bay Area Governments Executive Committee, Regional Planning Committee. She is an Executive Board member of the Oakland Community Action Agency and represents the City of Oakland for the National League of Cities.

Nadel works extensively on violence prevention and obstacles to employment. Issues important to her constituents include environment and environmental justice, arts, housing, and economic development in the context of sustainable community development.

Nadel has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Alfred University, a Bachelor of Science in Geology from San Francisco State University, and an M.S. from UC Berkeley in Engineering Geoscience.

She has worked as a teacher, an artist, a geophysicist, a small business owner, and an environmental engineer with the U.S. EPA. She has published several journal articles on the topics of water policy, affirmative action, environmental justice, and sustainable development.