Post Industrial DIY: Book Talk & Panel Discussion

A pioneering Detroit automobile factory. A legendary iron mill at the edge of Pittsburgh. A campus of concrete grain elevators in Buffalo. Two monumental train stations, one in Buffalo, the other in Detroit. These once-noble sites have since fallen from their towering grace. As local elected leaders did everything they could to destroy what was left of these places, citizens saw beauty and utility in these industrial ruins and felt compelled to act.

The Penn Institute for Urban Research and the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism & Ecology invite you to a book talk and panel discussion on Post Industrial DIY: Recovering American Belt Icons, which chronicles grassroots efforts to recover, rebuild, and enjoy these architecturally iconic but economically obsolete places in the American Rust Belt.

Join the author Daniel Campo, Associate Professor of City & Regional Planning at Morgan State University and Weitzman alumnus in discussion with Eugénie Birch, Lawrence C. Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research & Education; Co-Director, Penn Institute for Urban Research; Catherine Seavitt, Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture; and Fritz Steiner, Dean and Paley Professor.

Speakers

Daniel Campo is an urbanist and Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Graduate Built Environment Studies in the School of Architecture and Planning at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. He also serves as the Director of Morgan’s Graduate Program in City and Regional Planning. He is the author of Postindustrial DIY: Recovering American Rustbelt Icons (Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2023) and The Accidental Playground: Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned (Fordham University Press, 2013). Possessing diverse research interests, he has also written articles about urban design and development, public space studies, urban parks, historic preservation, history of the built environment, downtown revitalization, waterfront studies and public art. The recipient of several awards and distinctions, he earned a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship (2010-11) and was recognized as Morgan State University’s most outstanding scholar in 2015. The significance of his research has also been noted by the New York Times, New Yorker, Planning Magazine, Citylab, Next City, Urban Omnibus and multiple National Public Radio affiliate stations. He holds a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Urban Planning from Hunter College and was previously a planner for the New York City Department of City Planning.

Eugenie L. Birch is the Lawrence C. Nussdorf Chair of Urban Research and Education and Co-Director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research. She teaches courses in global urbanization and the doctoral seminar and serves as chair, Graduate Group in City and Regional Planning, co-director, Penn Institute for Urban Research, co-editor, City in the 21st Century Series, University of Penn Press and co-editor, SSRN Urban Research e-journal. 

Professor Birch has been active in the field’s professional and civic organizations in the United States and abroad. She is president, General Assembly of Partners (GAP), the engagement platform for the implementation of the UN’s New Urban Agenda and associated global agreements, co-chair, Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) Thematic Group on Cities, and an Associate Editor, Journal of the American Planning Association. In the past, she has been president, Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning; president, Society of American City and Regional Planning History; president, International Planning History Society; and co-editor, Journal of the American Planning Association. She has been a member of the Planning Accreditation Board, having served as its chair from 2004-2006. She has been a member of the editorial boards of Planning Theory and Practice, Journal of Planning History, Journal of Planning Education and Research and Planning Perspectives. In the early 1990s, she was a member of the New York City Planning Commission, and in 2002, she served on the jury to select the designers for the World Trade Center site. She has chaired the Board of Trustees of the Municipal Art Society of New York and is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the Regional Plan Association of New York.

Frederick Steiner (MRP’77, MA’86, PhD’86) is dean and Paley Professor of the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Previously, he served as dean of the School of Architecture and Henry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin for 15 years. He previously taught at Penn and the following institutions: Arizona State University, Washington State University, the University of Colorado at Denver. He was a visiting professor of landscape architecture at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Dean Steiner was a Fulbright-Hays scholar at Wageningen University, The Netherlands and a Rome Prize Fellow in Historic Preservation at the American Academy in Rome. During 2013-2014, he was the William A. Bernoudy Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. He is a Fellow of both the American Society of Landscape Architects and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, and a Scholar at the Penn Institute for Urban Research. Dean Steiner helped establish the Sustainable SITES Initiative, the first program of its kind to offer a systematic, comprehensive rating system designed to define sustainable land development and management, and holds the SITES Professional (SITES AP) credential.

Dean Steiner earned a Master of Community Planning and a BS in Design from the University of Cincinnati, and his PhD and MA in city and regional planning and a Master of Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania. Dean Steiner received an honorary MPhil in Human Ecology from the College of the Atlantic, and in 2023, the University of Cincinnati honored him with the UC College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning Outstanding Alumni Award.

Catherine Seavitt is professor and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, where she holds the Martin and Margy Meyerson Chair of Urbanism. She is also co-executive director of The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania and creative director of LA+ Journal. 

Seavitt’s scholarship and design work examines the entanglement of public space and public health through the lens of ecology, policy, and novel plant science. She studies urban landscapes, post-industrial sites, toxicity, and inventive plant knowledge, with a focus on actionable responses to the climate crisis and decarbonization. She is interested in the possibilities of a multispecies and multiscalar approach to ecological knowledge and design, and the potential of incorporating indeterminate, collective, and nonbinary thinking in support of social, environmental, and multispecies justice.

A registered architect and landscape architect, Seavitt is a graduate of the Cooper Union and Princeton University, a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and Graham Foundation grants for research in Brazil. She serves as a member of the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Environmental Advisory Board. Seavitt previously served as Professor and Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture Program at the City College of New York.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.