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
Cities across the globe have been designed with a primary goal of moving people around quickly—and the costs are becoming ever more apparent. The consequences are measured in smoggy air basins, sprawling suburbs, a failure to stem traffic congestion, and 1.25 million traffic fatalities each year. It is clear that change is needed. Instead of planning primarily for mobility, our cities should recalibrate planning and design to focus on the safety, health, and access of people in them.
Welcome to Panorama, PennDesign’s City and Regional Planning journal. Panorama is a student-run publication, collecting the best of students’ work from around the School of Design. You’ll notice that the articles this year range in size, scope, and location. This is purposeful. We believe that Panorama should reflect the work of PennDesign students from around the world, and the cities that influence our daily lives.
Reservoir Hill is a historic, residential neighborhood in centralwest Baltimore. It was initially developed as a gateway to Druid Hill Park, an important and large park in Baltimore. Over time, the neighborhood’s historic estates developed into smaller rowhomes and apartment complexes giving the neighborhood a unique fabric. Although Reservoir Hill lost neighborhood retail during the 1960 riots in Baltimore and a large portion of its population as well, there has been recent effort in reinvigorating its commerce and rehabbing the historic homes.
In the 1990s, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) prohibited airport sponsors (local authorities managing airports) from diverting airport revenue to general municipal budgets and allowed the busiest airports to create air service incentive programs (ASIPs) to induce airlines to launch new air service. These incentive programs have not been evaluated, although planners need information on their long-term effectiveness.
Canal Redevelopment and the Public Realm: An Advanced Urban Design Studio inSuzhou, ChinaA 2015 study by China’s Environment Ministry rated sixty percent of the country’s underground water, and one-third of its surface water, unfit for human contact. This is an especially big problem for cities that rely on canals for their cultural identity, such as Suzhou, known as the “Venice of the East.” The city’s canals date back a thousand years and rank among China’s top domestic tourist destinations, on par with the Great Wall.
Mumbai, a dense, vibrant, and complex metropolitan region of 21 million inhabitants serves as the financial, commercial, and entertainment capital of the country. The city aspires to emerge as a major global city in the 21st Century, but continues to face a variety of economic, social, infrastructural, and environmental concerns. Mumbai’s economic drivers and employment generators are shifting, economic inequality is growing, and its demand for affordable housing far exceeds its supply.
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.
Course/Studio: CPLN-600
Instructors: John D. Landis, City and Regional Planning, PennDesign; Danae Mobley, City of Philadelphia Water Department; Adam Tecza, Group Melvin Design
Rebooting New England sets forth a strategy to rebuild the economy of New England’s cities, which have been bypassed economically and physically for decades. This strategy is underpinned by a modern high-performance rail network between New York and Boston that would link all of Southern New England’s major cities with these two global cities and with each other. This would serve to integrate the labor and housing markets of the entire New York - New England megaregion into what could become the world’s largest innovation economy.
Queretaro is a flourishing city of nearly 1 million people in central Mexico, located 220km from the capital, Mexico City, within the economically burgeoning Bajio region. A culturally important historic center, Queretaro benefits from a year-round temperate climate, a strong and growing industrial economy, and political leadership invested in increasing multimodal access to all parts of the city for all of its residents through the implementation of progressive bicycle infrastructure planning.
Executive Summary: A responsible Plan for Renewal
THE COST OF URBAN RENEWAL
Crime and violence have defined the neighborhood of Voto Nacional for decades. In the heart of Bogotá, this once thriving neighborhood has experienced rapid economic decline. Once vibrant street life has been supplanted by violent illicit activities and concentrated poverty. This crime and violence radiates from a set of blocks, called El Bronx, located in the very center of Voto Nacional.
Megaregions are large networks of metropolitan regions that share environmental systems, topography, infrastructure, and economic implications. Cooperative Mobility for Competitive Megaregions (CM-2) is a five-year project to conduct mobility research, provide education and workforce development, and deliver technology transfer for mobility enhancement and economic competitiveness in U.S megaregions. The project is funded by a highly competitive grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to “address critical transportation challenges facing our nation.”
From the editors:PANORAMA is a student-run journal that is meant to capture a snapshot of Penn's student work. This year, PANORAMA's mission has shifted from reflecting the viewpoints of only City and Regional Planning students to those of any student interested in urbanism, community building, history, theory, and practice of planning and design, as well as climate and disaster resiliency, et cetera, et cetera.
LA+LB 2050 is an ambitious, timely, and systematic plan to enhance the resilience of the Los Angeles and Long Beach waterfront over the next 35 years. This plan recognizes a need for robust resilience planning in the Los Angeles and Long Beach communities along the San Pedro Bay. As the home of the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach, the LA/LB waterfront is a critical economic engine for both the state and the nation. The communities neighboring the ports, however, are characterized by vast social, economic, and environmental disparities.