News

The University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design and the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology hosted a Special Session of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design in Philadelphia, PA from August 12-14, 2026.

At this collaborative workshop, mayors engaged with design leaders to find solutions to the most critical planning and design challenges facing their cities. Sessions are organized around case study projects: each mayor selects a project or challenge from their city that the mayor is actively working to address. At the session, mayors introduce their projects with a 15-minute presentation, and the attending mayors and design leaders identify important issues, offer suggestions, and discuss potential solutions. The interchange sparks lively debates, generates new ideas, and inspires creative thinking. Between these discussions, a Resource Team of design leaders from around the country also delivers presentations on their areas of expertise.

The McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology is delighted to welcome Kotchakorn Voraakhom to deliver the Anne Whiston Spirn Lecture, presented annually to showcase a practitioner or scholar in the field of landscape architecture whose work expands the disciplinary boundaries of research and practice. Housed in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, The McHarg Center was launched in 2019 as a transdisciplinary platform for collaborative research supporting the future of life on Earth. The lecture honors Anne Whiston Spirn (MLA’74), a Penn alumna who led the Department of Landscape Architecture as chair from 1986–1994 and whose work inspires deeper engagements with people and planet.

In celebration of the publication of Penn’s Sylvania: The Campus as Landscape, The McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology welcomes the book's co-editors and two of its contributors for an exclusive preview. Speakers include Weitzman Dean and Paley Professor Fritz Steiner; Ignacio Bunster-Ossa; Catherine Seavitt, the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism and chair of landscape architecture; and Susan Weiler.

Inspired by William Penn’s vision of Philadelphia as a “greene country towne,” Penn’s Sylvania traces the evolution of one of the nation’s most distinctive urban campuses. Available in September from the University of Pennsylvania Press, the book reflects on how landscapes shape learning and human experience. Through essays, photography, and interdisciplinary perspectives, it portrays the Penn campus not simply as a backdrop for education, but as a carefully shaped environment that influences how people think, interact, and grow.

The program will be followed by a reception.

Congratulations to Tami Banh, the 2025-26 McHarg Fellow, who presented her Fellowship research this spring. Tami's Fellowship year culminated in a research seminar, called Shared Waters, Divided Landscapes. She presented her public lecture and gallery exhibition of the same name during Earth Week, April 23-25, 2026. A recording of the public lecture is available here, and you can see more of Tami's blog and research here.

Tami’s Shared Waters, Divided Landscapes is an ongoing design research project tracing the Mekong River as a living ecological system, a rich cultural landscape, and a contested political terrain. Flowing 4,630 kilometers through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, the Mekong carries sediment, fish, rituals, labor, myths, and memories across vast territories for millennia. These days its shared waters are increasingly divided by dams, embankments, sluice gates, development corridors, and fragmented systems of governance.

Through fieldwork, interviews, archival research, photography, writing, and drawing, this project examines how large-scale infrastructure has transformed the river’s flood pulse, fisheries, sediment flows, and landscapes. It looks closely at everyday practices of negotiation: community-managed conservation zones, spontaneous unplanned riverbank gardens along recently built embankments, Khmer temple ponds and distributed water storage system on the coastal dune belt of the delta, and cross-border fishing agreements where the Mekong acts as the border between Thailand and Laos.

The accompanying exhibition pulls together sketches, videos, and models created during fieldwork. Imagined as a walkable river environment, large-scale ink maps of the Mekong’s branching water network are hung from the ceiling taking visitors from Northern Laos to the Vietnamese Delta. Between them are sketches and field-assembled models made up of soil, plant matter, ash, stone, and fragments of everyday life. 

The project argues for seeing the Mekong as a shifting assemblage of human and more-than-human whose futures must be continually negotiated. It asks how we might move beyond totalizing visions of control toward more attentive, decentralized, and culturally grounded forms of stewardship.