Hi,
I’m Peter, a city planner and urban landscape designer focused on creating ecologically self-sufficient and socially resilient communities. I am motivated by innovative approaches towards urbanism, exploring regenerative models of urban design in supporting sustainable infrastructural processes, carbon drawdown, and community care.
My work centers on building inclusive cities that can adapt to socio-ecological disturbances while strengthening community connections and place-making. In that, I am passionate about the role of biophilic/biomorphic design and human-centered design in supporting greater well-being for both human and non-human life.
I am inspired to contribute to urban transformation through practice in interdisciplinary design, drawing on my background in urban studies + planning, multimedia, and research methods.
My experience includes public, nonprofit, and private sector work across cities including Memphis, TN, Pittsburgh, PA, NYC, and Ithaca, NY.
statement of purpose:
My professional and research interests focus on the intersection of regional planning, multi-scalar infrastructure, and urban ecological design to create low-carbon, inclusive cities with increased resilience to climate threats. We view built and natural environments as enmeshed and there is a need to mediate these thresholds by integrating regenerative practices—i.e. smart urban agriculture, infrastructural ecologies, biophilic design principles, neurourbanism, and deeper listening, etc. - that will foster healthier, more productive, and happier urban places.
Post-industrial cities, grappling with climate challenges and the legacy of 20th-century planning, offer opportunities to reconnect fragmented socioeconomic and ecological networks. Meanwhile, rapidly urbanizing cities face unique pressures, including resource scarcity, requiring “leapfrog” solutions that bypass the traditional carbon-intensive infrastructures of city making. I am especially interested in planning for ecological urbanism that not only addresses climate but also deepens social access to the city and integrates marginalized communities.
My graduate thesis, Grand Paris: Envisioning the First Post-Kyoto Metropolis, critically examined former French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2008 urban design competition, evaluating the social, infrastructural, and ecological proposals of two participating design teams.
A cool legacy of city planning exists within my family. My grandfather taught city planning at Cornell and his grandfather, Daniel Burnham, was a Chicago based architect and planner whose work includes the 1909 Plan of Chicago.
I look forward to expanding my own contributions to the fields of urbanism, ecology, and design through the intersection of professional practice within interdisciplinary design and planning / research and writing, and / multimedia design , particularly as it relates to imagining inventive models of urban living. Models that involve a holistic approach to human and non-human well-being and a commitment to honor the integrity of all people along our short ride within this vastly entangled globe.