Urban Planning

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from Design 4 Landscape Studio with Prof. Matthew Tucker

With shrinking cities and the increased presence of abandoned lots throughout the urban framework, vacant lots present unique opportunities to enrich neighborhoods and provide ecological advantages and no longer be discarded spaces. Neighborhood spaces such as community gardens and nurseries can benefit both people and the pollinators. They offer job opportunities, educational tools, and provide greater access to both produce and plants within a smaller neighborhood scale. 

This project proposes a network of community gardens and nurseries as distributional and educational centers which serve as “jumping off” points for smaller subsequent green spaces as a woven network throughout neighborhoods, created and enabled by access to community gardens and nurseries. 
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Using the Kingsessing neighborhood as a case study, Chester Ave is an opportunity for a green corridor in a highly trafficked, impervious area and a four-house-width lot is examined for potential proposals led by different community groups. Additionally, neighborhood visibility is articulated through public installations and gardening practice in the public sphere. 

Julie Pasion
B. Architecture '22
​Visual Communication Design Minor
Listening to Goodie Bag by Still Woozy

I would like to become a licensed architect working in Philadelphia. I would like to work with communities for impactful neighborhood design, on adaptive reuse projects, green infrastructure systems in the urban ecology and further developing my graphics for story-telling.
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What makes you passionate about
​this topic?
​Growing up seeing abandoned houses and vacant lots throughout Baltimore city, I’ve been struck by the feeling of emptiness within populated urban areas. Similarly to Philadelphia and other cities throughout the country, these empty spaces reflect the precarity of people who have been marginalized and forgotten. Often resulting from demolition or removal of former industrial areas, abandoned lots - while not inherently permanent -  can go decades without intervention and become part of the neighborhood identity. Reclaiming these spaces for public use through community gardens and recreational and educational areas is an opportunity to bring visibility to the people in these neighborhoods and emphasize the importance of place and cultural belonging. Vacant lots are often in areas of high stress index and of black and brown communities and by seizing the opportunity to reclaim and use space in an institutionally discriminatory society, it  is a way of claiming identity and the value of these neighborhoods. Enabling and encouraging residents to have agency in their own neighborhoods is an act of resistance and shows residents that no act is too small to be meaningful. Community greenspaces in urban areas additionally promote pollinator habitat and biodiversity and can provide much more accessible connection to nature than state parks or wildlife reserves.

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Standard Set Up

Street Fair Set Up

Social Clusters Set Up

How do you think your approch to graphic representation of architecture effects the understanding of the project?

The goal in using this approach is to represent more than what a building would look like. It's about each piece being a stand alone work of art. Each composition representing space in relation to emotion, human scale and the experiential qualities of light and color. It's about story-telling in a deeper way than saying 'this is what wood looks like' etc. The approach is about capturing the essence of the design in its most comprehensive way, appealing to the imaginative aspect of narrative-making. I think the audience understands that. I've heard remarks that the approach is "minimalist" but I'd say that it is maximalist in its intention and crafting. A graphic does not have to be rendering in a 3D software for 36 hours in order for it to be successful.

Outdoor Classroom

Community Garden

Nursery Growing Area

Recreation

"Reclaiming these spaces...  brings visibility to the people in these neighborhoods and emphasize the importance of place and cultural belonging."

This poster design was created for Introduction to Graphic Design and designed to advocate and educate for the importance of individual scale to the neighborhood's larger networks: habitat,  pollinators and waterways. Using scans of hand-picked wildflowers from my own lawn, I designed custom lettering and used the type as an image to direct the viewer's attention to the primary message, calling community members to action to protect their neighborhood by eliminating the use of pesticides. 

landscape architecture

Fourth Year

community

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