APA Student Design Competition
A team of three classmates and I created a visioning plan for a long-vacant site in Philadelphia, PA.
Competing against teams from across the country, we were selected as one of three finalists to present our vision at the 2023 National Planning Conference, finishing as first runners up.
The gallery below highlights my contributions, but you can click the thumbnail on the right to access the full plan.
Our plan provides a vision for redeveloping the Logan Triangle, a long-vacant 40-acre site in Philadelphia’s Upper North district. Soon after the site’s section of the Wingohocking Creek was filled in for housing development, structures began sinking and the area was gradually abandoned until the last home was demolished in 2001.
The Triangle site has since been an infamous planning problem in Philadelphia and presents a number of obstacles in developing a comprehensive vision. Our group developed a comprehensive range of strategies to account for soil issues, stormwater management, housing affordability, and displacement concerns.
I contributed heavily to the language of the vision statement here, which encapsulates the plan’s vision to heal both the environmental and social damage caused by historic development practices.
We envisioned a three-element design that would be compatible with the soil limitations, address issues faced by residents of the surrounding neighborhood, promote affordable housing and active transportation, and provide relief to Philadelphia’s overburdened stormwater maintenance system.
This page also highlights the importance of our direction-setting framework, which I led the team in nailing down.
I also led the team’s efforts in ensuring our plan’s consistency with Philadelphia’s existing planning efforts. I read dozens of planning documents from various city agencies and distilled their relevance to our vision on this page.
It was very important to us that our plan value the planning work that had already taken place across the city by not trying to answer settled questions. Additionally, my research allowed us to improve the design by incorporating connectivity to already planned improvements, such as the future bike trail along the site’s eastern edge.
Another responsibility of mine was to ensure our plan’s alignment with the various APA policy guides, primarily those concerning Healthy Communities, Housing, and Equity.
We took the task of incorporating the profession’s current best practices very seriously, and I was particularly happy with the way this page conveys this guidance in a way that is accessible and useful to both the general public and planning professionals.
Finally, I took the lead in planning for the envisioned housing and commercial development on the site. I helped ensure our plan would include a multi-pronged strategy to improve public health, planning to both encourage active transportation and create access to fresh food options.