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.
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.
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.
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.