“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.
This PPEI Working Paper uses recent data from the American Community Survey to update previous into the extent of residential segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas.
Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning Vincent Reina is accepting submissions for The New Affordability Crisis, a symposium co-organized by PennDesign and Oxford.
Zhongjie Lin, associate professor of city and regional planning, is working on a new book entitled Constructing Utopias: China’s Emerging New Town Movement, that examines the reciprocal relationship between city building and social transformation in Asia’s largest economy through the lens of urbanism and utopianism.
Professor and Chair of City and Regional Planning Lisa Servon was awarded a grant by the New York Community Trust to study the intersection of financial justice and mass incarceration. Servon’s project aims to understand how the following trends intersect and affect the people who are directly involved in the criminal justice system as accused criminals, incarcerated people, or formerly incarcerated people, as well as their families and communities
The Master of Urban Spatial Analytics (MUSA) program at PennDesign teaches at the intersection of data science and public policy. As part of the program, graduate students from the Department of City and Regional Planning and MUSA participated in the first annual MUSA/Smart Cities Practicum.
Over the Spring 2018 semester, students developed public realm projects to imporve low- and moderate- income neighborhoods in Queretaro, Mexico. They began the project by analyzing the city of Querataro to identify neighborhood typologies. During a week-long site visit, students presented initial project ideas for six key neighborhoods to their clients at teh Municipality of Queratoro's Secretary of Mobility. Fundamentally, this studio is aimed at addressing inequality.
MCP 2018 students, Gabrielle Nelson and Joanna Joye, served as Managing Editors on this report which evolved out of John Kromer's Politics of Housing & Urban Development class.
This report describes some of the most significant costs and benefits associated with two categories of Philadelphia housing programs: the ten-year tax abatement, which provides an incentive for housing development and improvement; and low-cost housing interventions that prevent homelessness and enable owner-occupants to remain in healthy and safe homes.
Graduate City Planning students at the University of Pennsylvania have conducted a comparative study of gentrification in five growing U.S. cities, and developed an interactive online toolkit to help guide the process of equitable neighborhood development.
Can we fix gentrification by building more housing? Does gentrification cause homelessness? Why should we care about gentrification if neighborhood change is a natural process?
Elevated transportation structures are a common sight throughout Philadelphia. Cutting through industrial areas, commercial districts, and neighborhoods, they effectively serve the purpose of moving people and goods from one location to another. This single-minded focus results in an elevated system that largely ignores the surrounding communities. Whether this neglect helps or hinders the community is less important than the fact that the opportunities presented by these elevated structures is being wasted. With green stormwater infrastructure, these elevated transp
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.
This PPEI working paper by Professor of City and Regional Planning John D. Landis uses recent data from the American Community Survey to look at how African-Americans, Latinos, and women fare when compared to Whites and men in each of the nation’s 374 metropolitan areas on ten equity and opportunity categories.
Associate Professor Zhongjie Lin’s most recent project reexamines the theory of the Compact City using advanced GIS tools for quantitative research of compact urban form in China.
Assistant Professor Erick Guerra recently released a report that analyzes, maps, and develops a series of indicators to identify which parts of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area are affordable to lower-income residents, when accounting for the costs of housing and transportation.
Building off of a research project for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Assistant Professor Erick Guerra is examinining land use, transportation infrastructure, and commute patterns across Mexico’s 100 largest cities.
In June of 2018, Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning Vincent Reina received a University Research Foundation grant to study the impact and effectiveness of the Los Angeles Housing Choice Voucher program, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Southern California.
Welcome to the 26th edition of Panorama, PennDesign’s City and Regional Planning student journal. As a student-run publication, we strive to represent the very best work of the School of Design. This year is no exception. The work included in the 2018 edition of Panorama explore international and domestic planning
In Making Plans: How to Engage with Landscape, Design, and the Urban Environment (University of Texas Press, 2018), Dean Frederick Steiner offers a primer on the planning process through a lively, first-hand account of developing plans for the city of Austin and the University of Texas campus.
Slums: How Informal Real Estate Markets Work (University of Pennsylvania, 2016) shows that unauthorized settlements in rapidly growing cities are not divorced from market forces; rather, they must be understood as complex environments where state policies and market actors still do play a role.