Mission
The Urban Heritage Project’s cultural landscape work addresses issues at the intersection of built heritage, cultural landscape, and societal change through multi-disciplinary research and practice.
Background
The Urban Heritage Project is an initiative of the Department of Historic Preservation/PennPraxis at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Since 2012, a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania has been leading documentation projects for cultural landscapes, on behalf of the National Park Service and other partners.
In spring 2012, an interdisciplinary Weitzman School studio taught by Randy Mason participated in the Parks for the People design competition, a collaboration between the National Park Service and the Van Alen Institute. The competition invited student and faculty teams from around the country to reimagine America's most spectacular public places—its national parks. Using design as a catalyst, teams were encouraged to creatively rethink their site's connections to people and their role as revered natural, social, and cultural destinations. The team from Penn was one of nine finalists, honored for its competition entry that reimagined the historic cultural landscapes of the Civil War Defenses of Washington in Washington, D.C.
In the 10+ years since that competition, we have continued to work with NPS and other public-sector and NGO clients to document, interpret, and create plans for public landscapes. Our purpose is always to understand deeply the evolution of these historic landscapes and to connect them to the lives, needs, and desires of contemporary communities. Adapting cultural-landscape and preservation-planning models, we regard our work as research that explores new, more engaged modes of cultural landscape preservation and design practice.
Partners
National Park Service
National Capital Area Office (Region 1)
North Atlantic-Appalachian Region
National Heritage Areas Program