Reimagining the Slatelands

The materials that built America were refined from the land of the Lehigh Valley, a region north of Philadelphia. Today, the cement and slate quarries, which earned the region its nickname, the Slate Belt, are abandoned. Like the area’s shuttered coal mines, they remain as reminders of the struggle to generate new ideas for community and economic development amid rural deindustrialization. 

In Professor Ellen Neises’s Slate Belt Futures studios, Landscape Architecture students have made significant contributions to the early stages of the region’s revitalization, developing an ongoing partnership with the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission 

“I think we’re all aware that we can’t just be designing for the cities, and only worrying about quality of life there,” says Neises (MLA’02) who is also the executive director of PennPraxis. 

PennDesign students have introduced concepts of nature-based placemaking and imagined arrays of creative possibilities that have energized residents and decision makers in an area hungry for new ideas: quarries as fertile zones for recreation, tourism, and economic redevelopment, not blighted areas to be fenced and filled; shifts in farming culture and practice to favor new, high-value crops; and alternative transportation that meets the needs of these unique communities.