Name: Retrofitting Bend for a Livable Future
Start: 2025-05-08T18:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-05-08T20:30:00-07:00
Location: Deschutes Brewery Mountain Room

Note: Tickets required due to limited capacity. Purchase tickets here: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/6619517
Doors open at 6 pm for happy hour and networking. Lecture begins at 6:45 pm.
Bend is growing fast and if we don’t add more neighborhood gathering places and mini-downtowns in more parts of our city, our quality of life is at risk and we won’t meet our climate goals. Cross-town traffic will get worse; kids, the elderly, low-income neighbors, walkers, and bikers will suffer; and our existing special places could get loved to death.
Overcoming this challenge requires reimagining aging strip malls and empty big box stores into a new network of vibrant, walkable, mixed-use “mini-downtowns” for shopping, gathering, and playing. What happens to the old Costco on the east side? At 10-acres, the old Costco site is about the size of downtown Bend!
Imagine if kids could walk to the grocery store, to school, and to the park all across our city - including far east, south and north? The wide, fast and unpleasant commercial corridors we've build in the past can be retrofitted to be livable, safe, kid-friendly and fun. New state planning requirements (called Climate Friendly Areas) are requiring Bend to focus on these areas, but how that happens depends on us.

Director of the Urban Design Master's program at Georgia Tech, Ellen Dunham-Jones has studied communities who have "retrofitted suburbia" and will share inspiring examples and key lessons learned to help us jumpstart this complicated but important work here in Bend.