Transforming the Urban Landscape
University of Pennsylvania, 1996-1998
The challenge was to develop strategic plans for vacant land that addressed regional water quality and local community development and to explore how a new middle-school curriculum organized around “The Urban Watershed” could integrate learning, community development, and water resource management.
Overview
Specific projects varied from year to year, but each course started with a short sketch problem. Once Mill Creek flowed through West Philadelphia. Now it is buried in a sewer, invisible to most people, but it continues to shape landscape and life. How can the buried river be revealed and rainwater celebrated so people feel and know the importance of these urban waters?
Students then explored how stormwater detention in the Mill Creek watershed could reduce water flow in sewers after rainstorms, what would such detention areas would look like and how they could be integrated with environmental education.
Sulzberger Middle School was located along the buried floodplain of Mill Creek. University students met once a week with middle school students and designed an approach to environmental education where the whole neighborhood was the classroom with the school at the center.
The course drew from the resources of the West Philadelphia Landscape Project and from historical documentation generated by a spring course, Power of Place, which also collaborated with Sulzberger.
Fall 1996
Revealing and Restoring Urban Waters
Students designed two outdoor "classrooms": an urban grove/street tree nursery and a series of water features that combined play, ponds, and stormwater detention. Both projects were to be living laboratories planted and maintained by middle school students as part of their curriculum.
Visit the class website
See designs for the street tree nursery
See designs for the water garden/detention basin
Fall 1997
Mill Creek Mini Golf
Students designed a miniature golf course on vacant land in the Mill Creek neighborhood where the nine holes told stories about the natural and cultural history of the neighborhood and where water hazards functioned as stormwater detention basins.
Visit the class website
See designs for Mill Creek Mini Golf
Fall 1998
Landscape of Learning
Students designed a small water garden/outdoor classroom for Aspen Farms Community Garden, which was built in summer 1999, then proposed a larger project on vacant land near the school.
The large wetland/water garden was to be a laboratory and outdoor classroom for Sulzberger and also a detention basin to collect and cleanse stormwater runoff. as part of their proposal, students designed an environmental curriculum for outdoor study.
Visit the class website