Urban Planning | Penn Today

Rethinking resilience in the face of climate change

Hurricane Ida brought record-breaking rainfall and flooding, and stronger, more destructive storms will inevitably come. Being better prepared will require reconsidering how to protect people and their homes.

Protecting and celebrating civil rights heritage and Black histories

Launched last fall, Penn’s Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights sites is fostering new and ongoing partnerships while preserving the legacy of civil rights in the U.S.

Why $46 billion couldn’t prevent an eviction crisis

Vincent Reina of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design spoke about the challenges faced by officials, landlords, and tenants in distributing and accessing federal housing aid amid the pandemic. “We asked state and local governments to do something they’d never done before,” said Reina. “They had to design large programs with complex systems in real time, then modify them in real time—and at the same time, we’re expecting these programs to resolve longstanding problems in the housing market.”

a 1960s car parked in front of the motel sunset in los angeles

A visual archive of an iconic American boulevard

A trio of undergraduate students worked this summer with Professor Francesca Ammon to catalog and organize photographs for the digital humanities project ‘Sunset over Sunset.’

Urban renewal, community activism, and green spaces in Historic Germantown

As part of a Summer Humanities Internship, rising junior Leo Wagner conducted research on community responses to infrastructure projects in the mid-20th century and how the member sites are currently using their green spaces.

One way the US could have prevented the fight over the eviction moratorium

Vincent Reina of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design said the U.S. lacks a standardized system for contacting landlords, which complicates rent-relief programs. “There have been calls over time for some national effort around trying to create better national and local owner registry systems, and if there was ever a time this was clearly needed, it is now,” he said.

This urban planner created a new metric to find a city’s most frightening intersections

Megan Ryerson of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design is using biometric data to identify dangerous zones for urban cyclists. The data “can be used to measure safety rather than waiting for someone to die,” she said.

Philadelphia home repair grants linked to decreased neighborhood crime, Penn study finds

Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine, School of Arts & Sciences, and Stuart Weitzman School of Design found that the crime rate on a given block was reduced by nearly 22% when the city of Philadelphia funded repairs for even a single house. “The social fabric of a neighborhood is very connected to the physical environment,” said the medical school’s Eugenia South.

megan ryerson cycling down a city bike lane

A new metric for designing safer streets

Penn researchers demonstrate how biometric data can help city planners more proactively design and evaluate the safety of urban infrastructure for bicyclists and pedestrians.

Americans face looming rent crisis

When the CDC’s eviction moratorium is lifted, 11 million Americans will face housing instability.

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