Jeffrey Barg

Jeffrey Barg is an urban planner at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Full Bio

Jeffrey Barg is an urban planner at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, and received his master's in city planning from the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. He previously worked for seven years as an alt-weekly journalist at Philadelphia Weekly, and wrote the award-winning nationally syndicated column "The Angry Grammarian." When not urban designing, he enjoys biking, playing guitar and banjo, and board-gaming for blood. He earned his undergraduate degree in American history from the University of Pennsylvania, and he thinks Philadelphia is better than your city.

Drawing Blanks: Urban Design and the Power of the Pen

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

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 <strike>doffing our tops for beads and booze</strike> 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.

“Who Am I?” And Other Very Practical Questions

From the first day of the semester, I could tell my Urban Design Methods course was going to be different from the others I've taken in planning school so far. “Call me at home. I’m up till midnight,” the professor told us. I’m not up till midnight. He asks us questions like, “What is your design identity?” “What three adjectives describe you as a designer?” “Who are you?” It makes grad school feel kind of like therapy. Really, really expensive therapy.

New Jersey: It’s Like Ohio, But Even More So

The second semester in planning school at Penn is defined by a major project in which students are broken into groups, given a problem region, and tasked with, in the space of three months, coming up with a plan comparable to what professionals do in 12 to 18 months. Over those three months, the students get intimate with their designated locale, exploring every nook, cranny and underused land parcel. Helloooooooooo, Cherry Hill, New Jersey. There’s an old John Gorka song called “I’m From New Jersey.” It goes, “I’m from New Jersey/ It’s like Ohio/ But even more so/ Imagine that.” I’d bet good green cash he was driving down Route 70 when he wrote that.

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

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.