School of Design students recently traveled to Senegal to work on a city planning project.
Credit: Grace ChenStuart Weitzman School of Design students traveled to Senegal for eight days as part of their studio class curriculum.
In fall 2024, groups of landscape architecture students as well as city and regional planning students were able to take courses that centered on planning and designing the Dakar Greenbelt in Senegal. Students then went on an eight-day trip to Senegal to collaborate with locals, professors, and other academics from various fields.
Rob Levinthal, a city and regional planning Ph.D. candidate at the School of Design, was part of the team that developed the idea for a greenbelt around Dakar. Levinthal conducts research on large-scale nature-based solutions, or what he prefers to call “MEGA-ECO projects.” He recently hosted a symposium with professor emeritus Richard Weller that highlights their research agenda of MEGA-ECO projects.
In collaboration with other Penn faculty members such as David Gouverneur, Ellen Neises, and Lawrence C. Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research & Education Eugénie Birch, Levinthal worked to integrate the Greenbelt initiative into Penn’s academic curriculum. Penn Global supplemented the program with a $150,000 grant in 2022, which — combined with another grant from PennPraxis — allowed the team to take the trip to Senegal in fall with 25 students, two professors, and various outside contributors and collaborators from different fields.
The two groups of students worked in tandem, with landscape architecture master’s students working on green interventions that could be implemented throughout the city, while the city and regional planning masters students worked towards ideas for controlling rapid sprawl and making sure that the development happens in a way that provides amenities to the people that live there.
Levinthal recently returned to Senegal, where he presented the students’ work to partners in Senegal, including national and subnational figures. The students proposed interventions for green infrastructure within the city, such as things that can help mitigate flooding and drought but also provide co-benefits for people and other species.
“I’ve always been interested in large-scale projects, and that’s why I came here in the first place,” Levinthal said to The Daily Pennsylvanian. “Having access to all of these resources opened up the possibilities and it’s been so amazing.”
Sylvanus Narh Duamor, a master’s student in city planning, is an international student from Ghana. He found the project personally meaningful, noting similarities between Ghana and Senegal in both culture and urban planning challenges, particularly in efforts to preserve natural resources and manage urban expansion.
Duamor told Penn Today that the site visits helped the team create targeted “context-specific proposals” that could inform future urban planning efforts in the city and region.
The team is working with other green belts, such as one in Sao Paulo. Levinthal’s hope for the green belt is to have it eventually be completely a Senegalese initiative.
The team is also in the running for a $1.5 million grant from the Kunming Biodiversity Fund.
“It always has to be in the hands of the people, and the people have to want it to work,” Levinthal said. “We’re really trying and working to reach all these areas because we want to make the green belt site specific and be the best it could be.”
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