The public-private partnership, sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency and the International City/County Management Association, is the largest gathering in the nation devoted to the remediation of brownfields or contaminated sites. William McDonough, an architect, consultant and developer, helped to kick off the convention in a new meeting room in the Colorado Convention Center, where he showed slides of a new city in China that he is creating from scratch on a heavily polluted site. Called Huangabiyu Village, the city will incorporate many of the sustainable factors he espouses in his book, "Cradle to Cradle." For example, a large part of the energy will be supplied from the sun through huge solar panels. And the waste will be seen as an asset, supplying power to run the city in a virtually pollution-free manner. In addition, rooftops will be covered with dirt and indigenous grasses, creating oxygen.
Locally based Brownfield Properties, which is cleaning up the former Dahlia Square shopping center in the city's northeast sector also hosted a deal-making seminar at the convention. "It's sort of a mini-convention inside the convention," Mary Hashem, principal of Brownfield Properties, tells GlobeSt.com. It is a smaller version of the annual International Council of Shopping Centers Convention in Las Vegas, where thousands of brokers, developers and owners actually put together deals.
ICSC is one of about two dozen private sponsors of the Brownfields event. Others include AIG Environmental, Arcadis, Cherokee Investment Partners, Stapleton Forest City Development, the HOK Planning Group, Ch2Mhill and TerraGraphics. There were so many private sponsors that that the EPA did not charge a registration fee.
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