PERSPECTIVES 02

The McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology this month published Perspectives 02, a series of student-led interviews exploring the underpinnings of faculty research. The center launched the series last year in an effort to share its research with a broader audience, and to strengthen connections between different strands of research, teaching, and design practice within the Weitzman School of Design. The interviews allow student research assistants to investigate the motivations behind the projects they contribute to, and to see how their own work gets incorporated into them, engendering “a sense of responsibility toward the type of knowledge that we’re making and how we’re making it,” as one recent graduate says. Reflecting both the diversity of faculty interests and the wealth of opportunities for student research, Perspectives illustrates the McHarg Center’s centrality to the Department of Landscape Architecture. 

Liz VanDerwerken (MLA/MCP’27) has spent nearly four years at the Weitzman School earning a dual master’s degree in landscape architecture and city and regional planning. For three of those years she has worked with Catherine Seavitt, professor and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, as a McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology research assistant. Part of VanDerwerken’s charge was to dig through archival materials related to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, pulling out references to plants that were included in the exposition and the ways their points of origin were described. That work became part of Adventive America, a two-day McHarg Center symposium at Weitzman in January during the 2026 U.S. semiquincentennial exploring the global botanical exchanges that developed in the nation’s early years.

In the summer of 2025, in the midst of that research, VanDerwerken sat down to interview Seavitt about the project. It was a chance to interrogate the motivations and underpinnings of Seavitt’s research and to think about the work from a broader perspective. The interview was published with the first set of Perspectives, the McHarg Center’s digital periodical, last fall.

“With landscape architecture, a big part of the discipline is communicating in different ways to different audiences, whether it’s the public, clients, local governments, engineers,” VanDerwerken says. “This conversational piece about research was another way to make the research legible to a new audience. I could send it to my family and say, ‘This is what I’m  working on.’” 

Last month, the McHarg Center published the second set of Perspectives with four new interviews between faculty and student research assistants. The publication platform was developed as part of an effort to share faculty and student research more broadly, but also to strengthen connections between different strands of research, teaching, and design practice within the center and the school. The interview format allows students a chance to ask questions about the work they’re helping to produce, while avoiding the jargony and sometimes opaque presentation of a white paper. Seavitt says she hopes students see the publication as their own, and the work of the McHarg Center itself as “the foundation of the department.”

“It’s one thing to say we have a faculty research center that is unparalleled in any other department of landscape architecture across North America. But framing it as an incredible resource still doesn’t tell you what exactly happens,” Seavitt says. “Perspectives kind of pulls back the curtain a bit, so people can understand more clearly what actually takes place, revealing the broad range of the department’s vanguard research.” 

Student research assistants and the current McHarg Center Fellow, Shurui Zhang, described their ongoing research projects in a launch event for Perspectives 02 at Meyerson Hall in September. The event was intended to introduce new landscape architecture students to the McHarg Center, which was launched in 2019, fifty years after the publication of Ian McHarg’s Design With Nature, and to share opportunities for paid research assistantships.

Chesney Floyd, a 2026 graduate of the Master of Landscape Architecture program,, spent several years working with Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Nicholas Pevzner on research into multi-benefit transmission corridors — exploring ways to layer environmental, recreational, economic and cultural amenities into areas currently dedicated to energy infrastructure. Floyd helped organize a workshop exploring the concept in August 2025, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office, and co-authored a collaborative paper published by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. When he sat down to interview Pevzner for Perspectives 02, Floyd opened by asking how the project connected to Pevzner’s other work on energy infrastructure and wildfire management; the conversation quickly turned to ethical questions about the role of design in managing natural ecosystems.

“It’s really fun to be invited in as a student to ask meta-level questions about how we’re approaching our work. For a graduate student that is huge,” Floyd says. “It’s an opportunity to see your professor’s work and put it into a larger context, where you’re actually asked to form your own opinions about, ‘How would I approach this?’ That’s so valuable because it generates a sense of responsibility toward the type of knowledge that we’re making and how we’re making it.”

It’s important too, says Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Christopher Marcinkoski, to give students a chance “to see how their research is translated into products and practice and let them ask questions about it.” Marcinkoski participated in a Perspectives 01 interview with McHarg Center research assistant Lillia Schmidt (MLA’25), who helped him develop a “public space funding primer” describing the myriad ways that communities fund public projects as part of Marcinkoski’s research on Constructing the American Public Realm. 

There’s some indication that the published interviews are helping to broaden the reach of the McHarg Center’s research. Leah Kahler, a Tulane University research assistant professor and 2024–2025 McHarg Fellow, says she’s gotten invitations to collaborate and speak with scholars from other disciplines and other countries citing her Perspectives interview. The interviews have helped build familiarity and camaraderie within the Department of Landscape Architecture as well.

“I’ve been teaching here at Penn for a decade — working with many of our faculty for a decade,” says Rebecca Popowsky, a lecturer who was appointed the Wilks Family Director of the McHarg Center last year. “I don’t think I had that clear of a perspective of what’s going on until this series.”

Popowsky and Seavitt, who developed and refined the concept for Perspectives in conversation with each other, say there will be a third volume of the journal next spring, featuring interviews with additional affiliated faculty members. After that, the content could go in other directions. But the foundational intent, to encourage curiosity-driven conversations about pathbreaking research, won’t change.

“I think that research is as important a part of landscape architecture as design at this point … My hope is that the McHarg Center has a place in the department that reflects that,” Popowsky says. “There should be constant conversation between the research that’s happening in the center and the design research in our department’s studios and classrooms.”