Expanded Horizion trip to Philly.....and Camden

So last week my class went on a five day field trip to Philadelphia, and a little excursion to Camden.  The purpose of our trip was two fold: 1) was to see some of Philadelphia's planning offices and companies and 2) was to bond with my fellow class mates.  Both were accomplished.

Philly is a cool city.  Planning wise it is very simple with the downtown and most of the surrounding city planned in a grid like pattern.  William Penn originally planned the city on a grid format and it has kept its general shape.  Overall, the population has declined steadily over the past 20 years or so going from 2.5million to 1.5million.  What has occurred through this population loss if many abandoned homes and areas, with high crime and poverty.  The weird part about their population loss and abandonment of homes and areas in the outer parts of the city is the core of the cite has grown.  I forget the numbers, but the core city has seen a boom in growth, and you can see a lot of condos and apartments being built or going up for sale.  This seems like a good thing, especially because the core city is where a city should try to attract people.  I think the problem with many cities, especially in today's urban sprawl, is too many people move out to the core of the city to gain amenities like lawns, cars (and driveways), garages etc... But then what ends up happening as has happened in Philly, is people either move out and cant fill their homes, or the economy tanks and more people do not want to move further away from the city but closer to the city so they can spend less on travel.  Now Philly is having this boom in their downtown area and it is creating some problems, especially congestion problems.  Some other interesting aspects of Philly was its waterfront.  Route I-95 that runs from Maine to Florida, runs along the Delaware river and basically blocks off most of the water front from the view of the public.  It is too bad because they said they have been trying to attract people through the water front and they are having little success.

Furthermore, two firms that I visited, HNTB Transportation and Post Green, were really cool companies.  HNTB is mainly an infrastructure engineering company that has developed some of the most famous bridges in America.  Additionally they are the ones who are working on the High Speed Rail program.  They were the real deal and sounded like an awesome company.  I thought they would be hard to top but Post Green was pretty awesome.  Post Green is an architecture firm that has been building sustainable houses for as little money as possible.  Their claim to fame is the 100k house.  This means that they uses 100-120 thousands dollars or less to pay for the materials to build the house.  Additionally, the houses are LEED Platinum and are basically as green as it can get.  They do not look aesthetically pleasing to the people who live in the area, but they seem popular with many young people and they certainly have the right ideas as to how a house should be built.

Aside from all the planning stuff i did on the trip, there was a social component, and a rather large one.  Or at least we made it a large one ha.  Anyway basically every night we had free we went out .  We had many stories that i will not share on a public forum, but the basic conclusion we all became a lot closer and had a great time.  O and some of us went to Camden, at 11pm at night.  Not the best idea we have ever had, but some of my friends really wanted to go, so we took a cab over the BF bridge and before we knew it we were wondering the streets of downtown Camden.  Not much going on in Camden, and after asking a police officer where the closest bar was, we were advised to leave because we were a "red flag."  Yeah, again not the smartest idea we had, but it was a good story for the rest of the trip.

Overall great time and good first month of the program.  I cant wait for the rest of the year.