Erick Guerra, Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning, and Christopher Marcinkoski, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, have been awarded competitive grants from the University Research Foundation (URF) for the 2016 - 2017 Academic Year.
“Despite being a dense city with a walkable core, Philadelphia has significant progress to make in improving traffic safety,” says Guerra. “Although technology has failed to improve pedestrian safety substantially, researchers and policy makers have developed a growing body of knowledge about factors that influence pedestrian safety.”
He is proposing to look at data from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) in Philadelphia and four surrounding counties to deepen our understanding of the relative importance of the built environment, police enforcement, and social factors in predicting pedestrian injuries and fatalities.
Africa is home to some 1.2 billion people and growing, yet the dominant models of urbanization driving development there are imported and imposed on populations with little regard for context. “Despite the urgent demand for urbanistic upgrades throughout much of Africa,” Marcinkoski explains, “the myriad proposals for new towns and infrastructures currently in vogue are rarely oriented toward people in need.”
In his widely lauded book The City That Never Was, Marcinkoski has documented the severe social, environmental, and political consequences of speculative urbanization in places like Spain, Ireland, and China during the first decades of the 21st century. Building on that research, the URF project will inform a catalog to help mitigate the potential consequences of the phenomenon in Africa.
The URF offers limited support on a competitive basis for investigative research projects and scholarly conferences. It provides up to $50,000 in project support to junior faculty undertaking pilot projects to launch their investigative careers and established faculty developing preliminary data on novel or pioneering ideas to support extramural applications.
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