Peter Calthorpe, thoroughly fawned over architect turned New Urbanist planning and urban design principal and the name brand on Ann Arbor's recent well attacked downtown development steering plan, is apparently set to receive the Urban Land Institute's JC Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development.

If Calthorpe feels the slightest awkwardness at being honored by an industry that many intellectuals instinctively loathe, he isn't letting on.

"It feels great," he grinned after a breakfast conversation that caromed from topic to topic. "I find a lot of developers to be a lot more progressive than bureaucrats and neighborhood groups."

While I'm not necessarily a Calthorpe fanboy, I do think he deserves the "visionary" title for his backstory. As I understand it, he spent the 1970s being a leader in solar/energy-efficient architecture, but eventually realized that the individual buildings had less of an impact on energy use and the environment in general than does the context - the land use and transportation fabric that those buildings are placed in. At that point he switched gears from designing super-efficient office buildings that stood in the middle of car-dependent sprawl or solar-powered homes that sat on a few acres of land to looking at the bigger picture.

It's a direction that, in my opinion, most environmentalists don't seem to have caught onto quite yet.