Welcome to the 28th edition of Panorama, the Weitzman School of Design’s City and Regional Planning student journal. As a student-run publication, we strive to share the best and most innovative work from our peers: the next leaders of planning and design. The work included in this edition explores critical planning issues from the U.S.
Residents of Austin, Texas, located in “flash flood alley,” are accustomed to dry landscapes and intermittent rising waters. Similar to other cities along inland waterways, Austin has long battled periodic inundation. However, pressures from climate change and rapid population growth, coupled with historic inequality, present a newfound urgency to find solutions. Austin needs to create a culture of resiliency and equity that can support residents through the new extreme weather reality.
This studio focused on the sub-barrio Machuchal, located in the center of San Juan’s densest neighborhood, Santurce. The goal was to create strategies for Machuchal and its residents to overcome the impending change brought on by touristification. Touristification is a phenomenon that takes place when development pressures and other impacts of tourism can cause an area to change dramatically. With housing, services, amenities and appearance of a touristifying area becoming catered to tourists and neglecting the needs and well-being of local residents.
This PennPlanning Equity Initiative Working Paper takes a careful look at the current magnitude of rural and urban-rural divides across America.
This PennPlanning Equity Initiative (PPEI) working paper uses recent data from the American Community Survey to investigate whether residents of minority and poor neighborhoods in America’s largest metropolitan areas suffer from systematic accessibility and mobility disparities.
This report summarizes the findings and recommendations of the 2019 "New Prospects for New England" studio. The 2019 studio builds upon the conclusions of the 2016 Rebooting New England studio which proposed the creation of a modern passenger rail network linking all of New England's "left behind" mid-sized cities with New York City and Boston.
This studio focuses on three key elements of this broader rail and economic development strategy:
In research supported by the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning Vincent Reina presents a new method to model household energy cost burdens based on actual energy use patterns at the building level across several major U.S. cities.
Professor Tom Daniels is conducting the first analysis of the economic impact of Pennsylvania’s farmland preservation program.
The Puerto Rico Resilience Plan is the result of a semester-long interdisciplinary studio at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. A team composed of nine planning students and eight landscape architects worked collaboratively to engage with three sites in Puerto Rico: the area surrounding the San Jose Lagoon and Caño Martín Peña in San Juan; the mountainous region of Utuado, in the western central part of the island; and a region spanning from El Yunque National Forest to the coastline in the southeastern portion of the island.
“In Fall 2018, a group of ten graduate city planning students developed a suite of design and policy recommendations for the City of Philadelphia’s Vision Zero program. Vision Zero, a movement which began in Sweden in the late 1990s, advocates for eliminating traffic deaths on our roads. The City of Philadelphia adopted Vision Zero through an executive order from Mayor Kenney in 2016, and subsequently released its Three-Year Action Plan in September 2017.
Newport is predominantly surrounded by water, and the city’s identity has been shaped by its connection to the sea. Serving as one of the major ports during the Colonial Era, infamous for being a prosperous trading city, Newport later became a place for wealthy Southerners to enjoy cool summers by the sea. Furthermore, Newport has housed a major Navy port for the US military, which is now slowly moving away from the area in order to consolidate in existing hubs in Virginia.
On February 7, 2019, Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey (MA-07) and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) introduced a House Resolution detailing a sweeping plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030 and achieve a goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2050. Commonly referred to as a Green New Deal, the 14-page non-binding resolution lays out the goals and aspirations of the program, upgrading efficiency and sustainability for national infrastructure and creating millions of jobs in the process.
This report summarizes the findings and recommendations resulting from the Fall 2019 Decongesting New York Studio at the University of Pennsylvania. The semester-long studio was convened to advise the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) on the design and implementation of a new tolling program set to launch in Manhattan in 2021. The studio focused on strategies to ensure that the Central Business District Tolling Program would achieve its primary outcome of achieving a legislated revenue target of $1 billion per year.
This PennPlanning Equity Initiative working paper explores the most extreme form of income segregation: the case in which most of a community’s poor residents are concentrated in just one or a few neighborhoods. It uses recent data from the American Community Survey to catalog the extent of spatially-concentrated poverty among U.S. metropolitan areas.
Rhode Island’s relationship with water has long been a defining portion of the state’s identity. However, the towns, industries, and communities that were formed around the advantages of being close to the Narragansett Bay are now threatened by the results of climate change including sea level rise, storm surge, and coastal erosion. The state’s progressive policies on sea level rise and climate change put it at the forefront of research, data analysis, and policies that address climate change.
With funding from the Fels Policy Initiative, Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning Vincent Reina is working with an interdisciplinary team of scholars to study the impact and mitigation of lead in Philadelphia’s aging housing stock.
Under the leadership of Associate Professor Megan Ryerson, the Center for Safe Mobility at Penn is pioneering a fundamental shift in how roadway safety is understood and evaluated by developing new ways to measure safety with proactive, user-based metrics.
"This studio sought to create a process that imagines the resilient redevelopment of the Luis LLorens Torres housing project in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Located between Old San Juan and the airport, LLorens Torres is the largest public housing project in the United States.
This working paper picks up on the U.S Supreme Court’s 2015 landmark decision in Texas Dept. of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., which found that, whatever their intent, federal housing programs which generate disparate racial impacts violate the U.S.