News

All four recordings of Designing For, By, and With: Indigenous Voices of the Land are now available for streaming courtesy of Cal Poly Pomona. Video links can be found in the Weitzman event page schedule for each talk. 

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.