Event

GLOBAL CITIES:  SUSTAINBILITY, PENN AND PHILADELPHIA
Friday, April 15, 2011
 
Session I:  Sustainability of Cities
Location: 3417 Walnut Street, Houston Hall, Benjamin Franklin Room
Time: 11 am - 1 pm

Keynote: “Sustainability for Cities: New Name, Old Topic”
Laurie Olin
Practice Professor, Department Landscape Architecture, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania

Cities, their nature and health, are topics that Laurie Olin has been thinking about over the course of his career as a landscape architect. Olin says, “Cities embody and engender civilization. Cities sustain us and we sustain them to the degree that we understand them. Cities, like ourselves, are part of Nature, not somehow separate, and they ultimately behave according to ecological principles. Hence they have no stable state and compel us to sustain them in multitudinous ways. Working in cities in various stages of their own historic development and in different parts of the world, my office has had the privilege and challenge of considering the needs and differences of people as we helped to produce plans and designs for public parks, squares, housing, institutions, urban districts, waterfronts, and campuses. The challenge we have faced time and again has been to find ways to leave a place or city richer than we found it, not diminished. At this moment in the early decades of the 21st century one of the central problems of nearly all urban design is the confrontation of increased scale and numbers (of everything). The question of building just and healthy cities when nearly every project threatens to remove or overwhelm aspects of the existing environment is universal while the answers are often individual and local.”

Responding Panel Discussion featuring:
Mohammad al -Asad
Founding Director of Center for the Study of the Built Environment, Amman, Jordan; Steering Committee Member, Aga Khan Award for Architecture

Lothar Haselberger
Morris Russell Williams and Josephine Chidsey Williams Professor in Roman Architecture, School of Art s and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania

Witold Rybczynski  
Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism, School of Design; Professor of Real Estate, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania


Session II:  If All the World Were Philadelphia...Revisited
Location: 3417 Walnut Street, Houston Hall, Benjamin Franklin Room
Time: 5 – 6:30 pm
 
Please join the University of Pennsylvania’s Office of the Provost, School of Design, and Institute for Urban Research, for a discussion of Philadelphia’s changing urban landscape and the resulting challenges and opportunities for urban planning and development. As all cities experience from time to time, changes in economics and demographics open the door to re-imagine and re-build. Panelists will discuss how such trends have catalyzed plans and initiatives such as the Central Delaware waterfront revitalization, vacant land management reforms, long range and comprehensive citywide plans, and innovative anchor institution lead development.

Gary Hack
Professor of City & Regional Planning, Dean Emeritus, PennDesign, University of Pennsylvania

Anthony Sorrentino
Executive Director of Public Affairs, Office of the Executive Vice President, University of Pennsylvania

Thomas J. Sugrue
David Boise Professor of History and Sociology, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania

*supported by the University of Pennsylvania’s  Provosts’s Fund for International Projects, School of Arts and Sciences, School of Design, Institute for Urban Research, Center for Ancient Studies, Middle East Center, Center for East Asian Research,  South Asia Center, African Studies Center,  History of Art Department, History Department, the PENN Museum; and by Bryn Mawr College.