THE PROJECT

Table Of Contents

Structures and Areas of Collaboration

Megaregion Futures in Seven Generations by Nicole Cheng, Ben Regozin, Zoe Kerrich, Simps Bhebhe, Cece McCrary

City Gorgeous by Simps Bhebhe

Quagmires by Cece McCrary

Disturbance Regimes by Zoe Kerrich

Resilience Proving Ground by Ben Regozin

Hover Middle Branch by Julius Venuti

Cherry Island Wetland Park by Alex Cartwright, Cece McCrary, Yining Wang

A Manifesto for Place: Transportation and Ecology along the Philadelphia-Baltimore Megaregion by Riddhi Batra

Megaregion Futures in Seven Generations

by Nicole Cheng, Ben Regozin, Zoe Kerrich, Simps Bhebhe, Cece McCrary

This project began by focusing on regional energy infrastructure and a time horizon of seven generations. Mapping visualized spatial relationships within energy infrastructure and a timeline documented energy history seven generations into the past. The rest of the studio was invited to add events to the collective timeline and add to a collective map of research sites. What emerged from these studies was two-fold: an interest in the power of drawing and an immense sense of possibility for the future.

I first experimented with drawing as a method of collaboration during the three-quarter review. A 15-minute drawing exercise which prompted participants to make mental maps of energy infrastructure across scales— from their homes to neighborhoods and finally the larger Megaregion. From this, I developed the idea for a series of participatory drawing exercises to engage ideas of energy seven generations into the future. The result was five participatory drawing exercises with one focusing directly on understanding and reimagining regional energy infrastructure. The types of skills engaged with each student were unique to the questions and skills both found exciting to share with each other. Each collaboration emphasized the ability to think together through drawing, regardless of the person’s confidence in expressing their ideas in this way.

Multiple copies of each exercise were presented in a 30-minute drawing session at the final studio review where guest critics became students of the studio. Three students performed as teachers for the duration of the workshop to guide the new students on the drawing exercises. Gathered around two tables, people collaborated on the drawing exercises and were in constant conversation. At the end of the session, drawing participants proactively asked for space to share their thoughts on the exercises and the drawings were pinned up alongside their respective projects.

City Gorgeous

by Simps Bhebhe

Planning Process Questions

Who do we think has nothing to do with this plan? How can we make it relevant to them?

How can this planning intervention be used to activate societal collaboration?

Discussion Questions for Planners

What planning instruments do we have that can help repair past harm?

What would need to change and/ or be created to help planners make more inclusive and equitycentered plans?

Planning Process Questions

What would be different about our planning processes if we started with the most vulnerable in our society?

How are we prioritizing planning agendas? What ways does this priority generate equity?

Discussion Questions for Planners

What amenities are in your neighborhood that you could not imagine living without?

If community building became a central aspiration for all members of society, what do you think would be different about the planning practice?

Planning Process Questions

Who is the most important participant(s) in the planning process? Is this participant(s) at the focus the best way to foster equity?

Will this intervention perpetuate the status-quo or will it generate more diversity?

Discussion Questions for Planners

What do you think we would we see in society if our officials actually represented the demographics of its community at large.

How is the current status-quo of governance creating the society you want to live in and/or how is the current status-quo not doing that?

Planning Process Questions

Would this planning intervention meet your satisfaction if it were happening in your community? Why? If not, why should it be satisfactory for this neighborhood?

Is this planning intervention as a whole, ticking off a task or is it drawing us closer to a world you want to live in?

Discussion Questions for Planners

Assuming people are resistant to change, what can planners do to help community members be more adaptable to change?

When plans are not driven by logic but the powers of external stakeholders - how should planners respond?

Planning Process Questions

Does your planning intervention take into account the values of the community you are planning for? If so how and which ones?

What ways does your plan make people of different ethnicities/religions/socioeconomic backgrounds feel welcome? Is that founded solely on your opinion?

Discussion Questions for Planners

What does genuine community engagement involve? How can stereotyping be limited?

What type of characteristics in the built environment creates psychological safety and what makes you feel welcomed in a space?

Planning Process Questions

Can you name and identify the values driving and guiding your planning intervention?

What have we learned about people in our community in this planning process? How is this learning reflected in our plan?

Discussion Questions for Planners

In a context where a community has been subject to prejudice planning practices. What do you think planners and communities need to know upfront?

When trust is a barrier to community participation where should planners start?

Quagmires by Cece McCrary

Quagmire is a word with two meanings —one is a soft, boggy area of land that gives way underfoot, such as a wetland, or an awkward, complex, or hazardous situation. The term quagmire is therefore an appropriate descriptor of the state of both a vital and characteristic landscape of the Baltimore-Philadelphia megaregion: marshes. Home to thousands of different species of plants and animals, this landscape faces an existential threat in the megaregion if the natural rate of marsh regeneration does not keep pace with project sea level rise. Quagmires asks the question: how will we value and protect these landscapes moving forward?

Regional Landscapes

The Northeast region of the United States is bookended by expansive, contrasting landscape features. To the west of the Baltimore-Philadelphia megaregion rests the Appalachian Mountains, which are considered one of the oldest mountain ranges on Earth. The range is said to be 480 million years old— older than trees, older than the first footsteps on land1 .

I have a very personal connection with the mountains. Myself, my cousins, my aunts, my mom, and my grandma spent our summers growing up going to a summer camp that’s on the southern tip of the mountain range. Three generations can tell the same stories of that place-- we all swore our feet brushed the top of the fabled snapping turtle in the lake, we each fell asleep to the sound of bullfrogs at night. And that’s only three generations worth of experiences-- how many other families have shared a connection through this landscape, on a mountain range that’s older than trees?

Coming down from the mountains, moving east, is an area that has a rich and extensive agricultural past and present. This is reflected in the land cover map presented earlier. The creation of this particular landscape required extensive deforestation— from when the first European colonies were established to the late 1800s, the Northeast saw the razing of nearly two thirds of its forests. Subsequently, this massive deforestation event led to substantial sediment loads that helped shape the scope of the tidal marshes we see today2.

1 Dietrich, Emily. “6 Striking Facts about the Appalachian Mountain Range.” Medium, November 8, 2021. https://copyfrog.medium.com/6-striking-facts-aboutthe-appalachian-mountain-range-aacad14978ab.

Marshes Today, Marshes Tomorrow

Today, tidal marshes make up roughly 280,000 acres in the Chesapeake Bay3 and 165,000 acres in the Delaware Bay4 —both of which abut the Baltimore-Philadelphia megaregion. There are dozens of different organizations that have worked toward restoring, maintaining, and protecting these ecosystems—from state agencies like the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, to national entities such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to non-profits like the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. As efforts within these landscapes continue, the threat of climate change looms.

Marshes are inherently dynamic systems, regenerating decade after decade, shifting as the result of both erosion and sediment accumulation. However, it is uncertain as to whether the rate of accretion can keep up with the rate of sea-level rise. Furthermore, there is little consensus as to how much of these ecosystems are threatened. Some studies point to 20% to 90% loss of marshes in the Mid-Atlantic, while other studies argue that the rate of regeneration will keep up with rising waters5. Regardless of the uncertainty, there is one strategy that is recognized as both viable and necessary: in order to outpace sea-level rise, marshes will need to be able to shift inland and upslope, which requires protected and unimpeded migration corridors. Ultimately, these findings have resulted in a reflection on what drives land conservation, the inherent rights of nature, and regional collaboration.

Concluding Thoughts

Regional land conservation has largely been an anthropogenic undertaking. The Appalachian Mountains, for example, are preserved for the famed Appalachian Trail. Quagmires, boggy areas that give way underfoot, do not provide such utility. And while wetlands in general provide humans with numerous ecosystem services, this still leads to an entirely anthropogenic

“Rapid wetland expansion during European settlement and its implication for marsh survival under modern sediment delivery rates.” Geology 2011;; 39 (5): 507–510. doi: https://doi.org/10.1130/G31789.1 decision-making process of what land should be saved and what can be paved. We have been planning at a landscape scale in this region for hundreds of years—starting with the first axe swing. If our actions helped make these landscapes that so many species rely upon today for survival, then how much are we responsible for its preservation? Can we decide to protect landscape simply because it exists?

3 “Wetlands.” Chesapeake Bay Foundation, 2023. https://www.chesapeakebay.net/issues/whats-at-risk/wetlands.

4 Smith, Joseph. “Characterizing Delaware Bay Tidal Marshes.” Joseph Smith, PhD, 2020. https://www.smithjam.com/characterizing-delaware-bay-tidal-marshes/.

5 Popkin, Gabriel. “Marshes on the Move.” Science, June 18, 2021.https:// www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.372.6548.1254.

The tackle box pictured on the cover of this section represents many concepts related to this idea. Planners often refer to utilize a “tool box” of strategies to carry out their work. In his book A Sound County Almanac, Aldo Leopold once said: “Man’s invention of tools has enabled him to make changes of unprecedented violence, rapidity, and scope.” The tackle box is the antithesis of this idea. Fishermen fill tackle boxes with baits and lures, items that mimic nature to catch fish. By filling this tackle box with natural materials found at the marshes in our study area, I hope to demonstrate the need to reevaluate the strategies we use in regard to regional landscape planning to reflect the need to both work with nature and recognize the abundance within it as well. A recurring theme in our studio has been the rejection of the idea that ecosystems are blank canvasses on which we place our infrastructure—taking away the land’s agency. By placing a mirror at the top of the tackle box, buried within stand and organic matter, I hope to demonstrate the agency of the marshes. Even as you peer at the marshes, they are looking back at you, too. Our actions are reflected in these landscapes, our reflections intertwined.

My research has guided my interaction with and contribution to my classmates and their projects throughout the duration of the studio. This has manifested in various ways, depending on the project itself, but at the forefront has been to advocate for protection of these migration corridors to make way for these dynamic ecosystems in the face of rising seas.

Creatures Of The Marsh

Disturbance Regimes

by Zoe Kerrich

If we begin by taking Gottman’s1 view of the Northeast Megaregion as an economic hinge – hinging either across the Atlantic Ocean or trans-continentally -- throughout the growth of the Megaregion, then we can experience the degraded, contaminated, and abandoned lands that scatter throughout its urban regions as the cost of growth, the cost of “doing business.” Efforts to re-use sites that are now contaminated generally fall into two categories: brownfield and superfund remediation. Superfund sites receive federal funding and strategy, and are sites deemed as highly hazardous to human health and the environment. Brownfields, everything else. The landscapes of the Northeast Megaregion, and specifically the areas between and in Philadelphia and Baltimore, are littered with these sites. The once Steel Belt, now Rust Belt, includes these two cities, unlike the other major Northeast Megaregion cities of Boston, New York, and D.C.

Remediation aims to restore landscapes to a usable state – suitable for re-use, safe for humans and the environment. Remediation requires the removal, storage, and management of contaminated materials. The contamination must be contained somewhere, somehow. For Superfund sites, EPA evaluates the effectiveness of implemented remediation strategies every five years. For the Koppers Superfund Site in Newport, Delaware, 10 review cycles from now will likely see the site inundated with four feet of sea level rise. In fifteen review cycles, almost certainly. When EPA remediates sites, solutions generally fall into one of two categories; removal or storage. At Koppers, EPA intends to build a landfill of contaminated materials, capped above with a geotechnical nonpermeable layer, capped below by a naturally-occurring lowpermeability layer of clay. Walls for the landfill will extend at least 10 feet below the upper limit of the clay layer. Will this hold up with sea level rise? What if EPA decides to instead remove the material, ship it to a landfill designated as suitable for accepting hazardous waste? The material (the soil, the left behind creosoteimbued railroad ties) would likely be shipped to a landfill in West Baltimore, in an industrial area next to a majority Black, poor neighborhood. Is that restoration? To make the contamination “some else”’s problem?

Butler2 pushes us to ask, whose life is (normatively) “grievable?” Do we grieve the loss of health experienced by neighborhoods exposed to contamination? If we frame communities as “contaminated” and “uncontaminated,” where do we see state power? And from Shotwell 3: Who are your ethical entanglements with – who are you responsible for?

1 Gottmann, Jean. 1964. Megalopolis:The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. The MIT Press.

2 Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso Books.

These industrial, degraded, contaminated, abandoned lands have worked so hard to contribute to the Northeast Megaregion – do we care for them? These “working landscapes” that we’ve worked “to the bone” – what does reciprocal care look like for these landscapes, that have provided so much, already? The Koppers Superfund site is contaminated because railroad ties and telephone poles were once produced here – imbued with creosote to last longer and resist degradation, as these wood products connected human communities through transportation and electricity networks. Koppers is present on your block, at 30th St. Station, with you as take Septa regional rail or Amtrak along the Northeast Corridor. And where are the coal fields and forests that the creosote of Koppers came from? Those landscapes are at Koppers, just as Koppers is present in preserved wood products that connect us.

The landscapes of and from Koppers are not just products or entanglements from industry. We can focus on human activity, networks, and production. And we can see the American eel that lies in Hershey Run, the creek that runs along the eastern edge of the Koppers site, that EPA will re-route to facilitate placement of the contaminant landfill. These eels (and all eels) begin life in the Atlantic ocean, in the Sargasso sea, at the confluence of four major ocean currents. And these eels (and all eels) will return to the Sargasso sea to reproduce, returning to the salt of the ocean after a lifetime in freshwater rivers, streams, and creeks.

The Koppers site is difficult for humans to access – across Amtrak’s railroad tracks, with no direct roads. Hanif Abdurraqib and Fred Moten describe the experience of music, of art, and of language as building a stairway to get us closer to something beyond this place4. Here, we ask – can we, removed from or present at

3 Shotwell, Alexis. 2016. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

4 “Building a Stairway to Get Us Closer to Something Beyond This Place.” n.d. Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. Accessed April 10, 2023. https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/hanif-abdurraqib-fred-moten-building-a-stairwayto-get-us-closer-to-something-beyond-this-place.

Koppers, build a stairway to get us closer to the places and places that Koppers has been and will be? Can we generate care for this working landscape, which has worked so hard? Koppers is not the only working and abandoned landscape of the Northeast Megaregion, but what if we just start here.

Resilience Proving Ground

by Ben Regozin

The Resilience Proving Ground is a speculative futuring project that, by looking back at over a century of military weapons testing on a site between the size of Baltimore and Philadelphia, proposes a century long timeline which would both make visible the former land use as well as the strategies to mend it.

This story is told through multimedia output. An oral history train car tells the story of the site to passengers on the Amtrak between the Edgewood and Aberdeen stations. As the narrative is spoken, a video is projected onto a model of the site fading between what that ride looks like now, different velocity tests of water, oil, and sound as well as personally shot footage where these tests occur in life.

In the narrative, the site remains a proving ground, but instead of in service to weapons, chemical, and radiation testing, it would be utilized to test remediation, adaptation, and new infrastructure strategies, hopefully leading to developments that could be used across the world. The project proposes serious action to a threat to the country as well as reflection on our government’s own responsibility and history of military force.

Hover Middle Branch is a two-part scenario that encompasses the social, economic, and environmental processes that are essential to sustainably developing communities along the Baltimore and Philadelphia transportation corridor, an underexamined stretch of the Northeast Megalopolis. The scenario was born out of “sampling” two existing plans.

The first part of this proposal samples the phenomenal work done by the South Baltimore Gateway Partnership in creation of the Reimagine Middle Branch Plan. This scenario does not intend to replace, discount, or undermine the work done by and for the Middle Branch community, rather it seeks to consider a novel alternative that places the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River at the forefront of megaregional planning and development between Philadelphia and Baltimore.

The second part of this proposal samples the final site plan powered by Stonewall Capital for the firm’s ONE Westport development on the Westport waterfront site. A great amount of involvement and effort from designers, the Middle Branch community, and the developers of the site was placed into this site plan. That said, this plan is not compatible with the transit scenario presented in this project and has been adjusted to suit the megaregional transit component that drives this scenario plan. Thank you to every perspective and partner that created the vision that Hover Middle Branch builds upon.

Part 1: Reimagining Water Transit

This scenario builds on the third chapter of Reimagine Middle Branch, entitled Transform Barriers into Connections . The first part of this scenario considers the recommendations for water transit in the Middle Branch, which is to “Collaborate with MTA & DOT (Charm City Circulator) to improve transit to goods and services, local employers such as Port and industrial firms nearby, and regionally, including water transit” (Volume 1: Design Vision, pg. 101). It also considers the map that indicates potential water transit boarding locations and routes in the Middle Branch(Volume 1: Design Vision, pg. 75). To develop an intervention that addresses the recommendation for water transit, this part of the scenario instead suggests implementing a hover craft service that stops between the Baltimore Peninsula development in Port Covington and the ONE Westport waterfront development in Westport. This route could be extended to serve both Fort McHenry and the downtown core via Canton Waterfront Park.

MEGAREGIONAL EARNINGS IMPACT

MEGAREGIONAL JOBS CREATED (IN-DIRECT)