I was asked to give the closing keynote address at the American Society of Collegiate Schools of Planning one year. But I did not have a clue what most of the things being talked about in this Collegiate Schools of Planning conference were about. Student research, PhD dissertations, academic research—all the topics bordered on abstractions to the extreme. I tend to think more in terms of how we actually take these ideas and either diffuse them or push them out into practice so they can be much more readily applied to the problems that we must solve as societies. So I'm going to try to be a little bit provocative here this morning about the research agenda. My base case will be, in case we miss it at the end, is that as the AIA takes on its research, if it's not building partnerships with all the other disciplines also doing research that have to do with the urban form and the quality of life for people, then it is missing a big bet. It's much harder to integrate this research after it's done, rather than work with various disciplines upfront and figure out what we need to focus on and actually make a difference for the future.

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