About

Here you'll find an overview of my work in landscape architecture, urbanism, and teaching. I focus on contextual and ecology-informed design, inclusive green places in cities, and novel and restored ecosystems at multiple scales. I've collaborated with action research colleagues and local communities.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Environmental resource management
• Environmental science
• Regional science
• Geography
• Environmental planning

Selected publications

• Spatial Indices for Convivial Greenstreets

  Sustainability · 2023

  • Computer Science
  • Geography
  • Environmental resource management

  Streetside gardening is an informal, resident-initiated activity undertaken in dense urban areas worldwide. Yardless urban areas with a high incidence of informal streetside gardening are called Convivial Greenstreets (CG). Site investigations in European and several U.S. cities over the last decade suggest that social, ecological, and local climate benefits may be found where CG are most intense. The aim of this research is to fill a gap in the research literature by better understanding the spatial distribution of CG and the potential benefits associated with them. Using inner-core neighborhoods in Delft, The Netherlands, and Philadelphia, USA, as test cases, we devised a Convivial Greenstreet Intensity (CGI) index to provide a consistent method for mapping and comparing levels of streetside gardening activity across neighborhoods and cities. We show that CG spatial patterning and quantification of informal gardening intensity using in situ documentation and integrated GIS and Google Earth analyses are feasible and should prove useful as a basis for further research. With the development of a reliable method for measuring and mapping informal streetside gardening activity with a focus on visually accessible biomass, we hope that opportunities for investigating links between convivial greenstreets and urban microclimatic and physical and mental health will be facilitated.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Interweaving Computational and Tacit Knowledge to Design Nature-Based Play Networks in Underserved Communities

  Land · 2022-02-27 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Children are often the most disadvantaged cohort during miserable situations of natural disaster, economic crisis, and environmental degradation. Meanwhile, children’s play is increasingly controlled, costly, and standardized with engineered structures and surfaces rather than infused with natural processes and organic materials. Access to nature-based playscapes in underserved neighborhoods is extremely limited, impacted by disparities of race, class, and gender. In these contexts, neglected vacant lots and streets and related interstitial spaces can be redesigned as playscapes that support active, engaged, meaningful, and socially interactive play. Our study addresses the ample opportunity to re-engage kids and city nature in underserved neighborhoods in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. Methodologically, we balance systemic GIS spatial data approaches with informal and experiential—or tacit—site-based analyses. This mixed-methods approach helps identify local patterns of insecurity, children’s circulation, and natural resource possibilities. Finally, a play network with eight playscape themes is revealed as an emergent pattern that we termed green play infrastructure. These themes provide examples of activities and opportunities for future programs that fit their surrounding context. The mixed-methods approach fills a gap in children’s play literature and illustrates how green play infrastructure can serve as a key strategy in improving children’s lives in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sustainable | Sustaining City Streets

  2021-06-24

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  <p class="MDPI31text" style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0cm;" align="left">Streets are an integral part of every city on Earth. They channel the people, vehicles, and materials that help make urban life what it is. They are conduits for the oft-taken-for-granted infrastructures that carry fresh water, energy, and information, and that remove excess stormwater and waste. The very air that we breathe&mdash;fresh or foul&mdash;flows through our street canyons. That streets are the arteries of the city is, indeed, an apt metaphor. But city streets also function as a front yard, linear ecosystem, market, performance stage, and civic forum, among other duties. In their various forms, streets are places of interaction and exchange, from the everyday to the extraordinary. <p class="MDPI31text" style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0cm;" align="left">&nbsp; <p class="MDPI31text" style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0cm;" align="left">As the editors affirm, the more we scrutinize, share, and activate sustainable approaches to streets, the greater the likelihood that our streets will help sustain life in cities and, by extension, the planet. While diverse in subject, the papers in this volume are unified in seeing the city street as the complex, impactful, and pliable urban phenomenon that it is. Topics range from greenstreets to transit networks to pedestrian safety and walkability. Anyone seeking interdisciplinary perspectives on what makes for good city streets and street networks should find this book of interest. <p class="MDPI31text" style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0cm;" align="left">&nbsp;

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On Sustainable|Sustaining City Streets

  Sustainability · 2021-02-10 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  City streets have long been the subject and context for research [...]

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Convivial Greenstreets: A Concept for Climate-Responsive Urban Design

  Sustainability · 2020-05-07 · 26 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  This paper presents a conceptual framework for using “convivial greenstreets” (CG) as a resource for climate adaptation. When applied consistently, CG can become an emerging green practice with a positive impact on urban adaptation to climate change: CG may provide localized climate amelioration in ways that support social engagement outdoors. However, as spontaneous phenomena, CG should neither become an academic nor an aesthetic prescriptive tool. How then can CG be used as an active resource for urban adaptation to climate change while avoiding these two potential pitfalls? To explore this question, we present the concept of CG and the ways it can be situated in theoretical urbanism and analogous urban morphologies. We profile the CG inventory corpus and conceptualization that has taken place to date and expand them through a climate-responsive urban design lens. We then discuss how CG and climate-responsive urban design can be brought together while preventing the academization and aestheticizing of the former. This discussion is illustrated with a group of visualizations. We conclude by submitting that climate-responsive urban design and extensive and robust CG practices can co-operate to promote more resilient communities and urban climates. Finally, the conceptual framework herein sets an agenda for future research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Vision for Urban Micromobility

  Advances in intelligent systems and computing · 2020-11-03 · 9 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Exploring the Excited Skin: Gigapixel Imaging of Soil Profiles and Landscape Contexts

  Figshare · 2018-06-30

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Soil profile pits are a primary in situ tool in understanding soil genesis and structure. When considered in the context of the landforms that underlie them, and when seen as a small revelation of the ‘excited skin’ that gives rise to plant communities and land uses, profiles can deepen our appreciation of soil’s critical importance in landscape-level processes and sustainability. This paper discusses how gigapixel imaging can assist in visualizing soil profiles and their details online, remote from the site, for both pedagogical and research purposes. It also demonstrates how the GigaPan.org system can serve as a convenient and accessible clearinghouse for linked soil, geological, plant community, and spatial landscape data.

  OA PDFDOI

• FOOD PRODUCTION ON A LIVING WALL: PILOT STUDY

  Journal of Green Building · 2017-01-01 · 21 citations

  articleSenior author

  ABSTRACT Living walls and other vertical green infrastructure on building surfaces provide regulating, supporting, and cultural ecosystem services in the built environment. Green walls can also generate food as a provisioning ecosystem service. This article discusses a pilot study monitoring the productivity of a 7.5 m 2 outdoor living wall system planted with produce crops during the 2015 summer growing season in State College, Pennsylvania, USA. Irradiance, water usage, and soil moisture data were also collected to assess context and performance of the living wall system during the growing season.

  PublisherDOI

• Learning and Envisioning under Climatic Uncertainty: An African Experience

  Environment and Planning A Economy and Space · 2014-01-01 · 48 citations

  articleCorresponding

  Learning about and embracing change and uncertainty are essential for responding to climate change. Creativity, critical reflection, and cogenerative inquiry can enhance adaptive capacity, or the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to adverse future impacts. However, precisely how learning about change and its driving forces occurs and how experiences are combined with envisioned yet indefinite prospects of the future are poorly understood. We present two linked methodological tools—an assessment of drivers of change and participatory scenario building—used in a climate change adaptation project in Ghana and Tanzania (ALCCAR). We discuss opportunities and challenges of such iterative learning. Our findings suggest that joint exploration, diverse storylines, and deliberation help to expand community-based adaptation repertoires and to strike a balance between hopelessness and a tendency to idealize potential future realities.

  PublisherDOI

• &lt;em&gt;Convivial Greenstreets&lt;/em&gt; as Force and Context for Urban Sustainability

  2014-10-31 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper introduces the concept of convivial greenstreets and explores their potential contributions to sustainability and inclusive place making in the city. It begins with a focus on private-sector gardens and 'green' paraphernalia along the confines of the western European city street. I observe that particular kinds and intensities of gardens/gardening seem to be serving as both context for, and generator of, conviviality—a crucial trait of local civil society that seeks to advance a sustainability agenda. Next, through an interplay of observed phenomenon and broad reading of social science and planning literatures, I build a working definition that ties together notions of street-side gardening, interacting agents (e.g. resident-gardeners, merchant-gardeners, passersby, etc.), forms of conviviality, and spatial and physical contexts. With this in hand, an initial typology is constructed, with type examples drawn from my photo-inventory corpus. I discuss how streets that pass the intertwined tests of 'green-ness' and open-armed conviviality seem to express a range of positive forces, from idiosyncratic place attachment and personal expression to shared cultural pluralism and ecological activism as counterpoints to globalization. To prompt further social science inquiry I suggest that, beyond the provision of ecosystem services, convivial greenstreets may provide spatial and ontological contexts within which sustainability capital can accrue within the evolving city neighborhood. Lastly, several recommendations are offered as to how convivial greenstreets may be nurtured by policy makers and urban designers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Travis Flohr

  Pennsylvania State University

  2 shared

• Thomas Knüvener

  2 shared

• Petra Tschakert

  1 shared

• Hong Wu

  Hainan University

  1 shared

• Patrick J. Drohan

  1 shared

• Don T. Luymes

  Pennsylvania State University

  1 shared

• Stuart Echols

  1 shared

• Shengwei Tan

  Pennsylvania State University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Penn State granted Tamminga Distinguished Professor Emeritus…