The Upper Marlboro Community Center offers a wide range of services for the surrounding community, but is currently totally isolated from the multimodal network. No dedicated bike or pedestrian routes connects it to surrounding communities. Despite the lack of pedestrian infrastructure, community members still walk to and from the Community Center, along the edge of […]
Read More… from Upper Marlboro Community Center Trail Implementation Plan
Our PALS project team worked with Prince George’s County Animal Control to identify potential sites for a second animal shelter. After reading a 2016 feasibility study and meeting with Chief Rodney Taylor and other stakeholders, our team developed a hierarchy of site selection criteria. These included zoning, parcel size, transit access, and more. We then […]
Read More… from Selecting A Second Site for Prince George’s County Animal Shelter
Prince George’s County is eager to activate and capitalize on some of its greatest assets, i.e. its Metro stations, by attracting dense transit-oriented development projects to the county. However, this poses a serious risk of displacement to many of the station areas’ existing residents and has the potential to limit accessibility for potential future low-to-moderate […]
The goal is to serve DoE’s mission to improve water quality and satisfy the Federal Mandate to meet the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) requirement of reducing nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment in Prince George’s watersheds by 2025. The requirement is set by the EPA. Currently design teams select […]
Read More… from Watershed Restoration Prioritization Project
Background: A wealth of research has shown that communities of color and low-income populations have been disproportionately burdened by environmental hazards and locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) including incinerators, power plants, landfills, and other pollution- intensive facilities. Unfortunately, the State of Maryland has made little progress in constructing tools to assess and address environmental injustice […]
Fairmount Park Apartments is the first rental apartment building in the Town of Fairmount Heights, Maryland, adjacent to Washington, D.C. It is a sustainable and community-oriented mixed-use development on 4.4 acres, of 171 units, 102 market-rate units and 69 affordable units aimed at 60 percent of AMI. It will include 7,000-square feet of ground floor […]
Safe Routes to School (SR2S) is a program that promotes student health by encouraging an active mode of transportation. “The Safe Routes to School National Partnership’s mission is to advance safe walking and bicycling to and from schools, and in daily life, to improve the health and well-being of America’s children and to foster the […]
As a continuation of the Fall 2017 PALS project, Spring 2018 semester students from the community planning and engineering programs used advanced computer mapping tools (geographic information system, or GIS) to provide Prince George’s County with potential sites to build a second animal shelter. The team attempted to find land that the county already owned, […]
This project’s goal was to construct innovative ways to promote composting through the Prince George’s County Composting Pilot Program, working with the County’s project manager Denice Curry. Throughout this semester, we split the investigations into four different Design Projects. In these Design Projects, we cultivated our interviewing skills, learning how to note details and analyze […]
Read More… from Prince George’s County Food Scraps Composting Pilot Program