I met Neal Peirce at the American Planning Association conference in 2009. He was a speaker at the conference, and according to my notes he commented that we need another 1 million person city to be built every five days for the next 45 years to accommodate forecast global population growth. Immediately after that panel discussion I introduced myself, and what I don’t need notes to remember is that he knew who I was. I had been writing and blogging as Joe Urban for half a decade at that point and apparently he had read something of mine because we…