Ok, everyone. Hop on board The Next Mayor time machine. Let's take a trip to the year 2030. We exit the time machine along the Delaware River in South Philadelphia. Where once you wouldn't have been able to stand in this spot without crossing a large expanse of blacktop, dodging Wal-Mart customers and a guy pushing an absurdly long line of shopping carts, and finally hopping a fence to an overgrown, trash strewn scrap of land, now you simple walk down to the end of Morris or Watkins Street, passing row homes an small shops along the way.
Looking west, away from the river for a moment, and down the street, you juuust get glimpse of shiney, quiet and apparently very popular light rail train running down the center of what appears to be a wide, well-landscaped boulevard. It looks like Columbus Boulevard, but where's all the trash and broken glass? As you turn back to the river you notice you're standing on a wide path bordered by grass and flowers on the land side and bulkhead along the river side. Bikers, joggers and rollerbladers (along with some mode of recreational transportation you've never seen before but resembles a rowing machine on wheels - this is the future afterall) are gliding along the path in both directions. As you move along the path you come to an expanse of green space surrounded by low rise condos and townhomes and featuring a well-manicured baseball field. People lie about on the grass listening to music and reading or are up and about tossing a frisbee.
When you turn around and head back north you come to what's gotta be Penn's Landing. Not too much has changed. It's a lot greener. There seems to be a better connection with the river, though you can't quite put your finger on what's different until it hits you.
There's just so many people here.
Where did they all come from? No one used to come down this way in 2007, unless they were walking off a meal at the Moshulu or getting in a stroll before going back to their room at the Sheraton.
Somehow, the time machine has dropped you off in the near future after several years of good decision making, proper planning and an influx of people from all over the country have created a dense, vibrant, clean, fun and multi-use riverfront, as far as the eye can see.
And from talking to some folks you find out it's like this all the way up to the North Delaware waterfront. They say that they think it's because some mayoral candidate toured that area back in 2007 and made it one of his missions to make what he heard on that trip into a reality.
What could possibly have inspired this little trip down fantasy lane? How about the power of urban planning.
Yes, folks, as first scene (by me) on YPP, PlanPhilly.com reported on the outcome of months of work by a special planning committee that had been appointed by Mayor Street to study the possibilities for the Central Delaware Waterfront (.pdf of the plan is here but it helps to read the article or watch the video embedded in the article).
The most beautiful thing about it is the simple notion that if you take this wonderful and simple street grid that William Penn inspired and push it out to the river, you can get all the other pieces in place for a uniquely Philadelphian vision of the river that could attract new residents and innovative business from all over the world.
If planners, policymakers, developers and those frontier-loving types who are willing to take the risk of being the first ones out there can all get together and act on this plan, while making sure it works for everyone by including housing for all income levels, the city could build entire new neighborhoods. It would then reap the benefits of economic activity, construction jobs, tax revenues, vitality, "coolness," and all that comes with it. This would almost HAVE to attract the new economy jobs and businesses that would finally replace the manufacturers that left so long ago. Maybe many of those businesses locate to the very factories abandoned by those manufacturers or set up shop in the old Philadelphia Navy Yard (remember, we're still in fantasyland... anything goes).
As the article make clear, it takes more than a plan:
Two starkly different visions for the entire corridor have emerged. And with 1,000 acres of prime development land along the Delaware hanging in the balance, these two visions are bound to collide.
Developers have proposed at least 23 high-rise buildings to line the riverfront, most between 20 and 40 stories tall with massive parking garages. Advertised as “luxury” communities, critics call this wall of proposed construction “Miami Beach on the Delaware.”
...
The Praxis vision would take the two largest chunks of riverfront land and create two new neighborhoods, one in South Philadelphia and another stretching along Northern Liberties, Fishtown and Port Richmond. The existing landscape of huge sites, such as the waterfront WalMart, would be broken up with a web of new streets. This denser urban fabric could then sprout a cityscape of human-scaled homes, shops and parks, drawing the vitality of Philadelphia’s existing neighborhoods down to the river’s edge. It’s not Miami Beach, but rather Rittenhouse Square, that Praxis envisions on the river.
Which vision will win out? That depends on how hard civic leaders are willing to fight the prevailing political reality and make the Praxis plan into law.
Ok, folks, back in the time machine. We have to get back to 2007 so we can watch and see how this plays out. Who knows? Maybe it's one of us who helps to make that 2030 vision into a reality.
Comments (68)
Is it too late for this vision to materialize? Is there the forsight and political will to make it happen? What's up with the casinos? It's good to see a light at the end of the tunnel, but there are so many questions that must be answered first...
Posted by RS | July 25, 2007 5:38 PM
Unwrapping the future is a bit more complicated than that, lest we lose sight of the meaning of the phrase, "Pride cometh before a fall." For I'm still waiting for those images from back in the '50s to come to fruition, such as when major cities such as this would have gigantic glass domes over them...to which I can only say thank God that never happened! I would've liked to have seen the monorails though.
But as for the vision of Plan Philly and Penn Praxis, it's ashame Leni Reifenshtahl isn't still around to make the film showing what this future you describe, San, will all look like, as 23 years from now no doubt it would be another classic of expert filmmaking.
But between now and 2030 there's going to be a lot of things that are going to be happening, the whole "life is what happens to you as you're making your plans" thing John Lennon cited. And just to bring up another phrase, there's the one, "Be careful what you wish for, you might get it."
Humanity is now to the point that it's much more keenly aware of the environment than it once was, and acting accordingly, and that's a good thing. But we've really fallen behind when it comes to the importance of human rights, and that's the other side of the equation that cannot be ignored, but very much is so right now. Thanks to a few key assassinations, we have missed out on something very important when it comes to that, and we continue to. And when we come up against the future, the future is going to be asking, "Where is that part?" And I'm afraid we're not going to be having very good answers.
Carving out an actual future is a lot more complicated than simply sweeping certain matters under the rug. For no matter how far we plunge ahead into the future, the past is always with us, one way or another. For example, what befell the Native Americans who lived here before us, that's still with us. It's still around in the form of certain important elements now missing. To give an analogy, you're driving in your car, and unbeknownst to you the engine of your car falls out just after you pass over the crest of a hill while at the same time you have miles of a downhill stretch of road ahead of you as you head on from there. So given that, you have no idea that something very important is missing, until many hours later into the future you finally reach the bottom of that hill. And as your car begins to approach the next hill it is there that it comes to a complete halt, unable to propel any farther. Meaning that that event that happened hours before -- the engine falling out -- is still with you. But alas, you can't go back to retrieve the engine, for to do so requires going back uphill in that direction, and what are you going to go back up that hill with?
And that pretty much is where Philadelphia is right now. It's on a roll, all right. No one's denying that. But it's on a roll without an engine. And there's mighty steep hills ahead.
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