Leo Wagner hopes to further his professional experience in urban transportation through an internship with the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Sustainability (oTIS). Leo worked on the “Complete Streets” team at oTIS for his Urban Studies Fieldwork placement in Spring 2022. There he gained firsthand experience with urban transportation planning and policy in a professional context, and gained a sense of how “broad, visionary goals articulated in citywide master plans move through the planning process before impacting individual roadway corridor studies to create a safer, more equitable, more sustainable Philadelphia.”
As a Gordon Fellow this summer, Leo will have a chance to develop a comparative view of transportation planning areas by working across departments of oTIS, including the CONNECT Transit and Policy Program, the High Quality Bike Program, and Vision Zero Data and Corridor Planning. He also hopes to hone his research and writing skills, particularly to learn to communicate to a variety of audiences focused on improving urban transportation in Philadelphia.
Teo Reimbold will spend this summer working with Kensington Corridor Trust (KCT), a community development organization in Eastern North Philadelphia. One of Teo’s primary interests as an urban studies student is how community development organizations function -- their strategies to promote development and engage community. KCT’s mission -- to revitalize a commercial corridor (Kensington Avenue) while maintaining long-term affordability for residents -- serves Teo’s scholarly, professional, and activist goals. He hopes to learn more about community development while helping people who are often ignored by development efforts.
Teo will be involved in the range of KCT’s work, including assisting with the development of its governance model. KCT is a neighborhood land trust, a departure from current models of community land trusts, so it is still working on formalizing its own structure. He will also have the opportunity to work on data analysis projects focused on strategizing property acquisitions and on connecting local businesses and residents with the trust and its resources. Teo noted in his application: “ I will get to contribute to an organization whose entire purpose is to revitalize an area without gentrifying it or displacing current residents. It is exactly that kind of mission that made me interested in urban studies… truly improving the quality of urban life requires helping the disadvantaged, not pushing them to the periphery.”
Thomas Statchen will work at Esperanza Health Center in North Philadelphia, where he did his spring Fieldwork internship. Thomas is planning a career in medicine, while pursuing his long-standing passion for working on the large-scale challenges that cities confront -- affordable housing, gentrification, and environmental problems. Thomas sees community health centers, like Esperanza’s, as places where the dual focus on health and community context plays out daily, providing evidence of the critical role of the social determinants of health (SDOH) on community well-being. He notes that community health centers often lack the capacity to do more than treat the symptoms of societal challenges like diabetes and heart diseases and struggle to address their underlying causes: inequitable access to housing, poverty, education quality, social cohesion, and the built environment.
As a Gordon Fellow, Thomas will work on increasing the Center’s capacity to impact underlying causes as he helps with programming for a new, well-resourced Community Health and Wellness Center Esperanza is building at the corner of Kensington and Allegheny. Complete with a gym, classrooms, and flex space, it is designed to be a space for community-led, preventive health programming focused on the social determinants of health. Located in a neighborhood challenged by vacant buildings, high poverty, underemployment, illegal drug markets, and homelessness, this space aims to be a welcoming community asset, open to all. Thomas will assist in writing grant proposals, helping with community meetings, and developing programming focused on creating an after school safe space, block parties throughout the summer, and the activation of vacant lots owned by the health center.
This work will likely become the primary focus of his senior thesis in URBS and will also inform his trajectory as he applies to medical school and as a physician equipped to carry on health-focused urbanism throughout his career.