Some national conferences

When I first started out in revitalization, attending national conferences such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation, National Main Street Center, and the American Planning Association hyper-accelerated my learning, especially when I included site visit-based tours as part of the agenda.

You could learn as much in a few days of the conference + the tours + your own additional exploration as in a year or more of reading, classes, etc.

Some conferences on my radar (but don't necessarily have the money to attend) are:

Main Street Now
Seattle
March 25th-27th
(I attended the Main Street conference in Seattle in 2007, it was fantastic).

American Planning Association
San Francisco
April 13th-16th

Urban Land Institute
Nashville
April 16th-18th
(never made it to the national conference, usually there are regional chapter conferences that are quite good as well, which I have attended)

International Public Markets Conference 
Project for Public Spaces
London, UK
June 6th-8th

American Institute of Architects
Las Vegas
June 6th-8th
(never been to one of their conferences)

Rail-Volution (transit)
Vancouver, BC
September 8th-11th

National Trust for Historic Preservation
PastForward Conference
Denver
October 10th-12th

American Society for Landscape Architecture
Conference on Landscape Architecture
San Diego
November 15th-19th

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I do have a couple criticisms, which I've written up before.

1.  Some conferences, especially preservation ones, are moving all the presentations to digital formats so they don't have to pay for printing.  Paper is good.  A pain, but it helps the knowledge development process.

2.  Conferences could do a better job identifying local best practice organizations and figuring out a way to highlight it.  I've proposed a "metropolitan organizations best practice expo" as an element of such conferences.

3.  Same thing with gray literature and other relevant local publications and documents.

4.  Conferences could do a better job making access available to local advocates who otherwise wouldn't be likely to attend, as a way of "giving back" and facilitating capacity building and the development of better local practice as an outcome.

They counter by saying it will lower registration income, but the reality is that the average interested non-professional isn't likely to go otherwise.