Experts discuss water in urban environments

From showers to watersheds to gardens, water plays an important role in city design and urban lifestyle.

That was the message from Wednesday night’s panel discussion in Houston Hall on the topic of water.

“The Permeable City: Designing for Water” was organized by the Penn Institute for Urban Research in partnership with the Mayors’ Institute on City Design and sponsored by the Provost’s Office as part of the Year of Water initiative.

MICD is a national organization dedicated to training mayors to be chief urban designers of their cities by consulting with engineers, designers and experts in the fields of urban planning and sustainability.

The Permeable City was the opening night presentation to the closed-door MICD conference to take place in the next two days.

The event featured four experts in the field, all Penn alumni or faculty, who gave short presentations on various aspects of water. Moderated by Marilyn Jordan Taylor, dean of the School of Design, the four-person panel featured lively debate and questions from the audience, which included eight mayors from the Northeast area.

Eugenie Birch, co-director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research, chose the four experts in order to have a wide variety of topics dealing with water and also to display Penn’s rich resources.

“These people represent phenomenal leadership,” Birch said, “and together they create a spectrum of practitioners to thinkers, local to global and academic to fieldwork.”

“We firmly believe that the intelligence of design, as we teach it here at the University of Pennsylvania … can change the lives of people in cities,” Taylor said.

PennDesign professor Gary Hack spoke about tapping into the embedded energy in water, especially sewage.

Hack was followed by Penn alumnus and Policy Adviser for Water in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability Aaron Koch. Koch showed how New York City is transforming former industrial land into park land to bring people to the water, a valuable resource.

PennDesign professor Anuradha Mathur presented another view of water: in floods and storms.

Finally, Howard Neukrug, director of the Office of Watersheds in the Philadelphia Water Department, declared his goal of making Philadelphia the greenest city in America.

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