News + Events
News + Events
Thanks in large part to the foundation Ian McHarg built, PennDesign’s Landscape Architecture Department has led the field for decades. Here’s a glimpse at how it’s staying relevant as the importance for the profession grows.
For the last few years as we've built up the McHarg Center's research agenda, we have focused on the global issue of urban sprawl in regions where it is on a collision course with high-value, biodiverse landscapes. We don't just mean cute and cuddly animals, but entire ecoregions which are threatened by rapid development. This research is now focusing on a set of 33 cities...
Dean and Co-Executive Director Frederick Steiner pens an end-of-year note for the Center:
"From northern California to the Carolinas, it’s been another harrowing year in climate news. But there have been bright spots, like the deal reached by diplomats at the UN summit in Poland to rescue the Paris Agreement. No less than the policy makers, those of us in design and allied professions have a...
But today, facing down a merciless climate timeline, when “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” are called for, a New Deal scope of ambition is what we need. The GND can’t just be a bill or two. It needs to be the framework for politics for the next few decades.
Richard Weller co-authors a report on biodiversity with The Nature Conservancy, Matthijs Bouw participates in 'The Hackable City', and Design With Nature Now begins to take shape.
Like its 1930s counterpart, the “Green New Deal” isn’t a specific set of programs so much as an umbrella under which various policies might fit, ranging from technocratic to transformative. The sheer scale of change needed to deal effectively with climate change is massive, as the scientific consensus is making increasingly clear, requiring an economy-wide mobilization of the sort that the United...
This month, we opened registration for Design With Nature Now, received a transformative gift from the Wilks Family Foundation, published our work in CityLab, and welcome hundreds of alumni and friends to Philly for ASLA.
To put it bluntly, there is nothing remotely comparable about the nature of the risk in the Netherlands and the nature of the risk in the United States.
"People tend to discount the activist legacy of McHarg. He's often framed as a technocrat, but there's a long, consistent thread of advocacy and activism in his work."
It’s not enough that Portland, Oregon, or Berkeley, California, get to zero carbon emissions by 2050. Or the entire state of California, for that matter. Or even the entire United States. The entire world must eliminate (or offset)carbon pollution by 2050.