This Friday, the University of Pennsylvania will hold Designing a Green New Deal, a day-long symposium aimed at articulating a design perspective for "a still-abstract set of proposals for decarbonizing the economy, eliminating poverty, creating green, working-class jobs, and retrofitting communities for the coming effects of climate change." 

The day-long event features a series of panel discussions made up of some of the leading voices in the climate, sustainability, labor, and design communities, including Peggy Deamer of The Architecture Lobby, landscape architect Kate Orff of SCAPE, and Billy Fleming, director of UPenn's Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism + Ecology.

A description for the event, which will be livestreamed below, says, "Domestically, a Green New Deal would constitute a generational investment in planning and design, reshaping the social and physical landscape of the U.S. in ways matched only by the Industrial Revolution, New Deal, and postwar suburban boom. But the debates around fleshing out the Green New Deal vision have been relatively silent on its enormous implications for the built environment. And there is too little dialogue between Green New Deal proponents and the planning and design professions."

Designing a Green New Deal (09.13.2019) from Weitzman School of Design on Vimeo.

The event will serve as a launch pad for a series of broader Green New Deal-focused discussions and research endeavors at UPenn, including a series of design studios focused on the subject. 

Designing a Green New Deal is organized by Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, Type Media Center, and UPenn's Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism + Ecology. The McHarg Center is housed within UPenn's Weitzman School of Design. The event is sponsored by a collection of activist, academic, and cultural groups, including the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, The Architecture Lobby, UPenn Populations Studies Center, PennPraxis, and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.