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.
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.
Focused on the 25 miles at the very center of the nation’s most heavily-travelled passenger railroad, the CrossRail Studio proposed a dynamic mobility vision intended to drive economic success for America’s largest urban area and the economic hub of the Northeast megaregion. NY-NJ CrossRail proposes to transform the New York metropolitan area by integrating its fragmented rail system and uncoordinated capital programs into a unified region-wide — and region-shaping — system.
Around the country oil and gas boomtowns are facing extraordinary development pressures and social change that are transforming formerly rural or agricultural-based settlement patterns. The studio used the Bakken Region of the Western North Dakota as a case study for how communities can plan for the economic cycles of boomtowns and create strong diverse economies once the boom is over. The 19 counties in Western North Dakota were the subject of a HUD-funded Sustainable Communities Planning Grant, which served as the basis for the studio understanding and further research i
In collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Community Development Studies and Education Department, this plan sets forth a vision for a more equitable, diverse, and sustainable economic future for Atlantic City that gives special consideration to the needs of low and moderate-income families. This focus on low and moderate-income families is paramount, as Atlantic City’s future has become increasingly uncertain.
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.
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.
Cartagena 2040: Rethinking the Role of Tourism in a Dynamic and Growing City is a plan put forth by ten graduate students in the City & Regional Planning program at the University of Pennsylvania. This plan was created through the Resilient Waterfronts studio in the fall semester of 2015 with the guidance of Ferdinando Micale, a principal at Wallace, Roberts, and Todd, a design firm in Philadelphia.
As world population grows, and more people move to cities and suburbs, they place greater stress on the operating system of our whole planet. But urbanization and increasing densities also present our best opportunity for improving sustainability, by transforming urban development into desirable, lower-carbon, compact and walkable communities and business centers.
Working with Sao Paulo Urbanismo and the University of Sao Paulo, this second year studio set out to design an innovation district in the Mooca-Vila Carioca Urban Operations Consortium. The studio examined case studies of innovation districts around the world. It then combined these takeaways with an anaylsis of the social, economic and environmental aspects of Brazil, Sao Paulo and Mooca-Vila in order to create visions for the site. For each vision, five different "What Ifs" were developed in order to identify specific measures neeed to implement the innovation district.