Speaker Series: Agents of Change: Local Perspectives on Federal Design

Christine Saum, AIA serves as the National Capital Planning Commission’s Chief Urban Designer. Her areas of expertise include architecture, urban design, land use, and the environment. Prior to joining the agency in 2003, she was the executive director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, an initiative established by the National Endowment for the Arts to improve the design of cities by educating elected leaders. Ms. Saum received a Master of Architecture from the Catholic University of America. She was a 2008 Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
 

Faroll Hamer has been the director of the Department of Planning and Zoning for the City of Alexandria since 2007. Prior to this she was acting director for the Montgomery County Planning Department (Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission) from 2005 to 2007. She worked in the Planning Department of Prince George’s County from 1987 until she left in 2005, as the chief of development review, where she led and managed a staff of 45. Before that she was employed in the private sector, working on a variety of projects, including urban parks, office parks, plazas, and streetscapes. Ms. Hamer is a registered landscape architect. She graduated from Smith College with a BA in English, and from Morgan State University with a Master’s Degree in Landscape Architecture.
 

Rollin Stanley is the planning director for Montgomery County, overseeing one of the largest, well-respected planning departments in the nation. Previously, he was the planning director for the City of St. Louis for six years and, before that, a planner in Toronto, Canada for 21 years. Stanley is rethinking strategic urban growth in the suburbs, focusing on creating land use opportunities for strategic infill. In his four years, the department has initiated some of the largest land use shifts in the county’s history. Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley appointed Stanley to the Maryland Sustainable Growth Commission, where he heads a Funding Work Group that is developing legislation geared to funding sustainable transportation and other infrastructure.
 

Harriet Tregoning is the director of the Washington DC Office of Planning, where she works to make DC a walkable, bikeable, eminently livable, globally competitive, and sustainable city. Prior to this Ms. Tregoning was the director of the Governors’ Institute on Community Design and co-founder, with former Maryland Governor Glendening, and executive director of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute. She served Governor Glendening as both Secretary of Planning and then as the nation's first state-level Cabinet Secretary for Smart Growth.