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2026-2027 McHarg Fellow Announced
The McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design is thrilled to announce the appointment of our 2026-2027 McHarg Fellow, Shurui Zhang.
Shurui is a landscape architect and researcher based in Queens, New York. Her work follows plants and people as they move together, exploring how migration, care, and labor shape landscapes across scales, from the land to the body. Her current research project, "Where Are You From From? Asian Vegetables and Chinese Diasporic Foodways," traces Asian produce from farms across the American Northeast to Chinese restaurants in New York City, examining the logistics, agricultural landscapes, and cultural relationships that sustain diasporic food networks.
Shurui is co-authoring a forthcoming book, Solarpunk Landscape: Towards Radical Sustainability, which explores alternative environmental narratives and the role of landscape architecture in imagining actionable ways to live in a more-than-human world. Previously, she was a Virginia Sea Grant Fellow working on the Virginia Coastal Resilience Master Plan and worked as an Urban Designer at WXY. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design in Fall 2025. She holds a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a dual Master of Landscape Architecture / Master of Architecture from the University of Virginia.
Shurui will follow our extraordinary 2025-2026 Fellow, Tami Banh. Join us in celebrating Tami's research and teaching on Thursday, April 23rd at 6:30pm in the Kleinman Energy Forum as she presents the work of her fellowship year, "Shared Waters, Divided Landscapes," with a public lecture and exhibition.
We’re looking forward to the year ahead as Shurui joins the Weitzman community!
McHarg Fellowship
The McHarg Fellowship is a teaching and research award given by the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology to an emerging voice in landscape architecture. The purpose of the Fellowship is to create a unique opportunity for an emerging professional and/or academic who would benefit most from support to conduct research, to teach, and to be mentored by faculty during the term of the Fellowship. The Fellowship is awarded competitively on an annual basis and the selected fellow is expected to be in residence at Penn full-time for one academic year.
Reclaiming the Rain: Film Screening and Panel Discussion
Wednesday, March 25, 2026, 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Stormwater poses challenges to most cities, but what if rain could be treated as a valuable resource instead of a problem?
The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology of the Weitzman School of Design, and the Water Center at Penn present a screening of the documentary “Reclaiming the Rain: Philadelphia’s Green Initiative for Stormwater Management and City Revitalization” (30 minutes, directed by Dakin Henderson), which charts the City of Philadelphia’s bold attempt to capture billions of gallons of stormwater with green infrastructure through the Green City, Clean Waters initiative. Following the screening, there will be a panel discussion with policymakers and other experts that explores the challenges that come with implementing major change in cities, the next steps for green infrastructure, and the future vision for Philadelphia.
Panelists:
- Fritz Steiner, Dean and Paley Professor, University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design (moderator)
- Anne Whiston Spirn, Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Howard Neukrug, Executive Director, The Water Center at Penn
- Michael Nutter, former Mayor of Philadelphia
- Marc Cammarata, Deputy Commissioner, Planning, Philadelphia Water Department
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
4:30-6:30pm
Kleinman Energy Forum
Fisher Fine Arts Library, Fourth Floor
University of Pennsylvania
220 S 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
220 S 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Adventive America: Follow the Plants
Adventive America: Follow the Plants
Thursday, January 29, 2026 - Friday, January 30, 2026
An interdisciplinary symposium organized by Catherine Seavitt, Meyerson Professor and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, Adventive America places the forthcoming 250th anniversary of the United States into a broader international context by examining plants and their agency in nation-building. This nontraditional lens explores collectors, collections, and global botanical exchanges between the United States, Indigenous nations, Britain, Spain, Japan, and China, from the early American republic to the present day. Whether shipped in transatlantic Bartram’s boxes in the eighteenth century, showcased at the 1876 Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, emergent in the weedy ballast grounds along the Delaware River, or exchanged as part of the traditional seed-saving practices of Indigenous peoples or immigrant communities, plants from around the globe serve as proxies for our own international migrations and as carriers of cultural meaning in our landscapes. “Following the plants” reveals fraught layers of transnational and ethnobotanical relations and upends false binaries of what it means to be native or alien, exotic or adventive, in the ongoing construction of nationhood.
Anne Whiston Spirn Lecture: Janet Echelman "Radical Softness"
Join the McHarg Center's second annual Anne Whiston Spirn lecture by artist Janet Echelman, who will present her recently published compendium Radical Softness: The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman.
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
6:30 pm
Kleinman Energy Forum, Fisher Fine Arts Library, 4th Floor, 220 South 34th Street, Philadelphia
Free and open to the public