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.
In the Spring of 2014, the Regional Plan Association (RPA) sponsored a graduate planning studio to investigate the opportunity to re-purpose an underutilized right-of-way- the Bay Ridge Line and New York Connecting Railroad-as a mixed-use passenger and freight transit route through Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
The nine-county metropolitan area for which the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC) plans, is regarded as an economic and cultural hub in the Mid-Atlantic region.
PanoramaPanorama is the annual academic publication of the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. A student-run publication, it surveys contemporary planning issues and reflects the interests and mindset of the graduate master of city planning students at the university. Please click on a links below to view past issues. Past issues are also available in hard copy. Please contact Kate Daniel at katf@design.upenn.edu for requests.
Development Opportunities for Fort Worth
Studio 2011
2011 Studio
The Schuylkill Yards, a 96-acre railyard serving
Philadelphia's 30th Street Station, is located in a prime
area for development. This studio examined the site's context in the neighborhood, city, and region, and provided recommendations for how to better connect and incorporate the Schuylkill Yards intothe surrounding urban fabric. These recommendations include design strategies, governance structures, green infrastructure creation, and community benefits
Design
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.
Housing planners around the world are looking for new policy, design, and delivery models for social housing–loosely defined as subsidized housing for low-income households. This multi-continent super-studio will look at the potential for rethinking and re-linking social housing policy, programs, and designs in Brazil (Sao Paulo: Professor Rose), China (Beijing: Professor Al), and Canada (Toronto: Mr.
In the northeastern United States, many cities feel that they are on the losing end of a stratified society, having suffered decades of job losses and out-migration with ever-declining industry. But at the same time, citizens and leaders in these cities are doing the hard work of revitalization. Their visions, planning, and building are starting to attract new people, activity, and investment. What this studio set out to understand is whether revitalization- with all the public and private resources that it captures- can be a vehicle for reducing inequities for the broader
TOD typologies for a diverse city.
Studio 2011
Across the country, urban school districts have closed and continue to close significant percentages of their public schools. As a part of this trend, Philadelphia has gone through two rounds of mass-closings in the last two school years. On top of schools closed in previous years that remain unused, this will leave the School Distirct of Philadelphia with 32 vacant buildings at the end of the 2013