Jeffrey Barg

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

Member for
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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.

Becoming a Calvinist: First Semester Wrap-Up

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

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

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 <a href="http://americancity.org/afteroil/">liveblog</a> 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.

Championship City

The following post will likely result in the revocation of my Philadelphia residency. It’s heretical to say, especially on a day when the city is on fire (not literally; okay, <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/gallery/World_Series_Damage.html?index=3">mostly</a> not literally) with excitement. But the city planner in me almost wishes the Phillies hadn’t won last night. Of course I wanted them to win the World Series. Twenty-five years is a long time for any city—let alone a four-sport city—to wait for a championship, and it’s definitely Philadelphia’s time. I’m thrilled to pieces they pulled it out.

A Vote for the City

The answer is: “Because people today would rather not work and instead just sit at home collecting welfare checks.” And the question? If you guessed, “What should you not say in a room full of city planning students?”, congratulations! You win. We would have also accepted, “FDR began a ton of new federal programs during the New Deal. As long as we have a $700 billion financial bailout, what programs would you enact or not enact as part of a New Deal today?” Thanks for playing. We have some lovely parting gifts for you.