Following a successful fundraising campaign, this summer, over 80 students and 30 faculty members representing almost every Weitzman program—including architecture, environmental building design, landscape architecture, city planning, urban spatial analytics, fine arts, preservation, and Integrated Product Design—and several labs are working on projects that are led by PennPraxis or led by faculty and supported by PennPraxis.
When spring semester study moved online in mid-March, suddenly Zoom or Blue Jeans or Panopto was as integral to teaching at Weitzman as the mastery of a subject and a commitment to students’ learning. Design Weekly asked six faculty members in the departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, City and Regional Planning, Fine Arts, and Historic Preservation talk about adapting their courses for the screen, and the rewards and constraints they found in the process.
Ashley Hahn, a city planning and historic preservation alum who received a new prize from the American Academy in Rome, talks about the experience of public spaces in Italy before and after the coronavirus pandemic.
Photo courtesy Wharton Customer Analytics
A team of City and Regional Planning students at Weitzman won the latest datathon organized by the Wharton Customer Analytics (WCA) for Electronic Arts (EA), the entertainment company behind such hit games as FIFA 17 and The Journey.
Lisa Servon, the Kevin and Erica Penn Presidential Professor and Chair of City and Regional Planning at the Weitzman School, has been named research fellow at the Filene Research Institute, where she’ll lead the newly-launched Center of Excellence for Consumer Financial Lives in Transition. The Center will focus on strengthening credit unions’ capacity to adapt to consumers’ changing financial lives and livelihoods as they face new forms of economic struggle and financial fragility.
Over the course of the fall 2019 semester, Weitzman students added their voices to the public discussion on climate change adaptation and infrastructure, as part of an interdisciplinary Landscape Architecture and City and Regional Planning studio called Designing a Green New Deal: The Spatial Politics of Our Response to Climate Change.
Housing affordability is a growing issue for Pennsylvanians, and renters, low-income households and minorities are disproportionately burdened by housing costs, according to a study shared online today by the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency. The Pennsylvania Comprehensive Housing Study, as it’s called, was co-authored by Vincent Reina, assistant professor of city and regional planning and faculty director of the Housing Initiative at Penn (HIP), HIP Director Claudia AIken, and city and regional planning students Jane Christen and Jason Schunkewitz, in collaboration with the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency.
As faculty across the Weitzman School have adapted their courses for webcams and computer screens this semester, they’ve found new ways to connect with students and make assignments meaningful.
In Designing the Megaregion: Meeting Urban Challenges at a New Scale (Island Press, 2020), Jonathan Barnett, retired professor of practice in the Department of City and Regional Planning, describes how to redesign megaregional growth using mostly private investment, without having to wait for massive government funding or new governmental structures.
Two teams of Penn students received honorable mentions in the highly competitive 2020 Urban Land Institute’s (ULI) Hines Student Competition.
Having played a key role in Philadelphia's first citywide housing plan, the assistant professor of city and regional planning is working to understand frictions and discrimination in the L.A. housing marketing and elsewhere.
In 2019, the national estimates remain jarring: Three out of every five fire-related deaths in homes occur in properties without working smoke alarms.