City and Regional Planning

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

From the Foreword:

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 in Suzhou, China A 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.