Education

Mapping Transportation and Health in the United States

What is the relationship between car travel and health outcomes in the United States? Ariel Godwin and Anne Price challenge the claim that more time in the car decreases your health by looking at the impacts of education, income, and employment rates.
16 January 2012 - 10:00am

Top Educated Cities in California Mostly in Bay Area

With 79.7 percent of its residents with a bachelor's degree or higher, Palo Alto, home to tech giants Facebook and Hewlett-Packard, is the most educated city in California, reports Joanna Lin for California Watch.
16 November 2011 - 9:00am
California Watch

Does Architecture Increase Educational Attainment?

As the British Government shelves the project to build and rebuild schools across the nation, Rowan Moore, architecture critic at The Observer and Rick Jones, teacher and journalist consider the effect building design has on learning.
24 July 2010 - 7:00am
The Guardian

Planning History: A Few of the Late 19th and 20th Century Places you Should Know

Sat, 07/03/2010 - 09:42

Earlier blogs have explored books and journals for finding out about the basics of planning history. In this blog I add to this by listing a just few of the places it is important to recognize as a planner. It is of course difficult to make such lists but students ask for them with some frequency. Of course, places are one thing and planning processes quite another--and in planning process is very important. Upcoming blogs will deal with plans and processes. 

I Am Not a Monkey, and Other Lessons From Planning School

Sun, 05/16/2010 - 17:57

Tomorrow morning, I'll don a long black robe, a funny-looking hat and an atrocious brown hood to cap off an adventuresome journey through planning school. Almost two years ago, I decided to leave a healthy career in journalism to enter a field that, by contrast, might still have careers a decade from now. It's been 21 months of angst, overwork, undersleep, and hours-long battles with American FactFinder. And it's been completely, totally worth it.

Here are a few of the best lessons learned from two hard-fought years of planning education.

Sustainable Communities…What’s Missing?

Mon, 05/10/2010 - 18:18

As planners, we try to live the urban lifestyle, minimize our carbon footprint, and even grow our own vegetables.  I once saw a colleague wearing a button which read “Riding transit is sexy.” Lose the car, bike or walk to work. Hey, if you’re adventurous, you can even take the bus. But this is easier said than done. I’ve lived in New Haven, Boston, Philadelphia, and now Miami. And as every year passes, I find it more and more challenging to cling to my planning ideals.

 

Chicago Bike Plan

Chicago's comprehensive bike plan includes accommodating bike in the streets, bike parking, incorporating bikes into transit trips, education and marketing, and law enforcement in an effort to promote safe biking as a viable transportation alternative.
5 March 2010 - 1:46pm

Sustainability Through Schools

Efforts to desegregate schools in the 1970s weakened neighborhood ties. Now, a return to school assignments based on where children live could make communities stronger.
22 February 2010 - 10:00am
Crosscut.com

Ferris Bueller: My Kind of City Planner

Tue, 01/05/2010 - 09:49
“Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter: -isms in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism; he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon: ‘I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.’ A good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the walrus. I'd still have to bum rides off of people.”
—Ferris Bueller

Class Conscience: When Is Clean-Slate Planning Okay?

Mon, 11/09/2009 - 05:44
My classmate was up in front of everyone, flapping and flailing, pleading his case and getting shot down at every turn. It was a bit like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

It was also kind of like looking in the mirror.

I’m just more than halfway through a planning school studio project working on the beautiful (no, really) Lower Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. They’ve teamed up about 15 planner/urban designers with about 45 landscape architects, who, as I mentioned last time, are reasonably bonkers. That was about a month and a half ago; since then, I’ve begun to think maybe I’m the one needing a room with padded walls.

18-Year-Old Appointed to Planning Commission

Megan Lavalley may be the youngest planning commissioner ever, appointed to serve in Manchester, Vermont beginning Oct. 22nd.
14 October 2009 - 2:00pm
The Manchester Journal

Pittsburgh Preps for its Debut on the World Stage

Why the decision to host the next G-20 summit in Steel City is a good one.
8 September 2009 - 7:00am
Forbes.com

United States of Bankruptcy

Budget issues are causing major issues for a handful of states. Neal Peirce argues these budget woes are a sign that states are making the wrong investments and that they idea of a state may be out of date.
12 July 2009 - 5:00am
Citiwire

Community Colleges Set Green Workforce Training Mission

Already a national leader in green building and looking to expand its leadership, the Los Angeles Community College District is launching several collaborative efforts to train a new, green workforce.
28 June 2009 - 11:00am
The Planning Report

Drawing Blanks: Urban Design and the Power of the Pen

Wed, 04/15/2009 - 17:50

With just two weeks to go in my second semester, I like to think that I know just about everything about being a planning student by now. But when 100+ prospective students came to our campus open house last week, an easy question stumped me:

“What about drawing?”

At first I thought she was asking if she needed to have an art background coming into school. A thousand times, no. But instead she was looking to learn how to draw as a planner, which is a much trickier proposition.

When The Planners Go Marching In

Thu, 03/12/2009 - 11:55

There’s just one problem with academia. Sometimes it can be so … academic.

In the interest of getting out into the world, I’m writing this post from Nawlins (nee New Orleans), where 16 other Penn planners and I are spending our weeklong spring break doffing our tops for beads and booze doing pro bono city planning work. For most of us, it’s been nothing short of a paradigm shift—and the week ain’t over yet.

Anybody For Some Duck Duck Goose?: Planning School, Semester Two Begins

Sun, 01/18/2009 - 07:37

On Friday, in the first week of my second semester of planning graduate school, we did the hokey-pokey. We put our right foot in, put our right foot out, put our right foot in, and then we shook it all about. We turned ourselves around. That was what it was all about.

The demonstration was all about pointing out common ground and how people were rooted in order to approach problem solving and conflict resolution. It sounds a little squishy, I know. But it got the point across, and more important, it introduced the dance to one international student who had never heard of the hokey-pokey.

Becoming a Calvinist: First Semester Wrap-Up

Sun, 12/21/2008 - 12:13

Four months, thousands of pages and $60 worth of printing later, my first semester of planning school is over.

Really? That’s it?

Not that I was understimulated. Plenty of big assignments kept me up later than my girlfriend would’ve liked. But in the working world, four months isn’t that long—it’s a big project, a new initiative. In grad school, apparently, it’s reason enough to take a month off.

So without any further ado, a few highlights and lowlights from the first semester. Not too many lowlights, though. A few of my professors read this blog.

Grad School: Like a Conference, but With Less Sex

Mon, 12/01/2008 - 19:51

Most of the time it’s not that hard to kind of forget that I’m a grad student. It often feels like a long, ongoing conference, but without nametags: We hear speakers (sometimes known as professors), have long lunch breaks, do exercises, then retire to the bar at night to talk about all of it.

More similarities: None of our classrooms would be mistaken for hotel conference centers, but a bunch of them are windowless and characterless. People are cordial, but also kind of angling for a job. Everybody’s friendly, and sometimes, people hook up.

Then reality comes crashing down like a pile of books: oh yeah. Exams. We have to take those.

Urban Design After The Age of Depression

Fri, 11/14/2008 - 07:44

Hey, have you heard we’re all screwed?

Last week Penn hosted the “Reimagining Cities: Urban Design After the Age of Oil” conference. If you were there, or if you read the liveblog of the event, you saw speaker after speaker tell of the doom and gloom facing the planet. Climate change! Carbon emissions! Decaying infrastructure! Nine billion people! In the words of the classical philosopher Shawn Carter, we got 99 problems, but a bitch ain’t one.

Frankly, it’s all a little depressing.

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