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In the Spring of 2023, a cohort of nine students from city planning and landscape architecture were guided by professors Rebecca Popowsky and Frederick Steiner through a joint city planning and landscape architecture design studio that focused on climate-driven changes on the transportation corridor between Philadelphia and Baltimore. Though this corridor was within the Northeast, one the most well-studied megaregions in the United States, none of the Penn’s previous megaregion studios had focused on the area. With the support of the multi-institutional research initiative, Cooperative Mobility for Competitive Megaregions (CM2), we contributed research on the future of transportation and landscape infrastructure networks in this understudied corridor.
Through the lenses of Power, Practice and Place, we explored rail, road, and water connections between Philadelphia and Baltimore: their vulnerability due to flooding and sea level rise and the ecological, social and spatial implications of that vulnerability. We were also tasked to co-design structures that address the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration within the university, with hope that the process would illuminate the potential for analogous collaborative models in professional practice. Research methods borrowed from journalism and ethnography that Professor Popowsky had developed over the past three years in her seminar Unruly Practices were integral to the creation of the studio syllabus.
Divided into five sections -- the Map, the Story, the Charrette, the Trip and the Project -- this book is an attempt to share what we experienced in the studio through various fragments of works in progress.