Island Enterprise

A team of five graduate students was awarded first place in the annual Better Philadelphia Challenge for their proposal to improve food security in Pennsylvania’s Delaware River Valley over the next century. Landscape architecture students Li-Yu Pan, Chen Sun and Lishutong Zhang collaborated with regional planning students Akshali Gandhi and Robert Hanifin on the Delaware Valley FOODWORX proposal to transform Petty Island—an uninhabited 292-acre island in the Delaware River—into a lynchpin of food, economic and ecological security for the greater Philadelphia area. Their proposal included infrastructure for alternative transport including ferry, kayak and tramway, a center for urban agriculture development and education, a farmers’ market, a seed bank, and a towering sky farm (pictured above), a futuristic prototype for sustainable, vertical farming in an urban setting.