2019 PennDesign LARP 704 Studio

Cross-disciplinaries Landscape + Urban Design Studio | Bogota, Colombia

This studio is a case study which seeks to formulate alternative urbanization scenarios and explore new design tools that will guide urban growth whilst simultaneously fostering habitat conservation and restoration in a symbiotic manner.

The Bogotá Studio is part of a larger research initiative in the landscape department at Penn. Richard Weller’s ‘Atlas for the End of the World’ has audited land use in the world’s biodiversity hotspots and identified the conflict zones between urban growth and biodiversity in these hotspots. The Atlas has identified that over 90 per cent of the major cities in the world hotspots are rapidly expanding in direct conflict with endangered species, and doing so in a relatively unplanned manner. In association with the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology the research is now focused on a set of 33 of the biggest of these cities, more or less one in each hotspot. In June 2019 the landscape department will host delegates from these cities along with representatives from the UN and major conservation NGOs to discuss how destructive sprawl into biodiverse landscapes can be mitigated.2 Bogota, within the Tropical Andes hotspot has been selected as a case study in this research project and is supported by the University of Pennsylvania’s Global Engagement Fund.