Adrian Casas, Chloe Richards, Xingyan Shi, and Ashley Zuo designed a public art for social and environmental advocacy project for Philadelphia called Tidal Art installation in the future Mifflin Wetland Park. The design makes flood projections visible: rising and falling sculpture heights mirror projected sea level rise and water dynamics.
The meeting starts calmly enough. Flanked by a city planner and a mayor, the city’s chief of public relations presents a plan to facilitate the circulation of buses, taxis and pedestrians while improving the quality of open spaces. Looking on is a crowd that could potentially make or break this carefully calibrated plan.
The setting is not a city hall but a lecture hall, where students have assembled for the final meeting of the long-running course Case Studies and Design Explorations, which is taught by Associate Professor of Practice David Gouverneur. Each student has been assigned a role in the mock community meeting, based on a real-life case study of the San Felix neighborhood in Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela. Why is there no comprehensive tourism plan, and what are you doing to prevent rising housing costs for longtime residents? The designs for the new street vendor stalls are nice, but where will the vendors store their merchandise overnight now, and who will compensate them for sales lost during construction? What exactly are the terms of the sale of municipal land? As the mayor raises his voice to be heard, boos break out and accusations fly: “Silencing the community!” “He’s in cahoots with the developer!” Inevitably, a mayoral challenger breaks onto the scene, promising increased public participation—and of course lower taxes. In the end, the city leadership votes to defer a final vote on the project so that the city can incorporate the feedback into the final plan.
The exercise is the culmination of a semester in which students explored over 120 cases from all over the world, all rooted in the power of design and place making. For Gouverneur, the sheer quantity of the real-world examples is key.
“It’s about being sensitive to the diversity of the places that we’re tackling.”
“The idea is for students to appreciate how city planning and landscape architecture projects are responsive to the nuances of place and culture,” he says. “There’s not a silver bullet. No, it’s about being sensitive to the diversity of the places that we’re tackling.”
Fanesa de la Rosa is a first-year Master of City Planning student who, before coming to Penn, worked for an affordable housing developer and business improvement district. She says the community engagement process modeled that day rang true to her experience.
“There are going to be factors that you can never control. We thought about all these scenarios at a high level, but when we’re thinking closer on the ground, what are the dynamics that are happening? Who are the people that could keep that going, or ruin the project?”
The course is offered by the Department of City and Regional Planning, but also attracts a number of students from landscape architecture and architecture. The students’ core academic work consists of weekly design exercises, which ask them to study urban forms, blending analysis and research with design.
Students built a model that was a composite of four different cities—Savannah, Georgia; Florence, Italy; Mecca, Saudia Arabia; and the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan—to understand urban planning issues across cultures and sites. The Plaza Gallery in Meyerson Hall was also the site of their mock community meeting. (Photo David Gouverneur)
At some point in March, Meyerson Hall’s Plaza Gallery becomes a tapestry of the breakneck-speed design work generated in the first nine weeks. The floor is covered with a mosaic of urban fragments, where groups worked to integrate iconic structures from distinct cities—Savannah, Florence, Meccah, the ancient city of Teotihuacan—into a cohesive plan, accounting for natural features, infrastructure, and layers of history.
“People can’t believe that it’s not a studio, because there’s so much design work up on the wall,” says Gouverneur. “The class trains the student to quickly detect what a place is, what the essence is, write a narrative, a design proposal, and present it verbally and graphically in a compelling way.”
As a planner pursuing the Department’s Housing, Community, and Economic Development concentration, de la Rosa went into this class knowing that design wasn’t her forte, but says she enjoyed the chance to use the tools of design to get her message across. At the same time, each week she was in groups with architects and landscape architects who saw things in a completely different way.
“I was always worried about the people: Who are we impacting, how is that being managed? And [the designers] were like, ‘Okay, but if we actually do this, these are the other challenges that we have to deal with.’”
Chloe Richards is a dual Master of Architecture and Master of City Planning student who is usually the only person in her classes operating at the intersection of planning and design. She says she appreciated how the collaboration empowered different perspectives on design work.
“People who aren’t designers—in the sense that they don’t make art or don’t use computer design programs—I think they sometimes feel like they’re not allowed to have an opinion on design. The majority of people walking down the street are not architects or designers, but they can still have an opinion on the buildings or the sidewalk. I think sometimes people are afraid to voice that if they don’t have the training. But if they’re users, their opinion is still valid.”
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