phillyskyline.com | THE POSSIBLE CITY

by Nathaniel Popkin
September 21, 2007

Imagine just how many Philadelphias there are, how many ideas, renderings, concepts, capstones, thesis projects, studio designs, abstract scribbles, master plans, renewal plans, redevelopment plans, green plans, sustainability strategies, waterfront designs, how many dreams and ideas have been projected at scale across a plotted map of this city -- and therefore just how many possible cities there are. Louis Kahn alone probably could have filled the entire 1:1 scale 135 square miles with Availabilities, Rooms, Courts, Forums, Civic Centers, and Inspirations neatly drawn and never built, only to exist as a tacked-up nether-world, a colossal, ever-growing what might-have-been with a steady population and plastic bags that don't swirl ceaselessly in the wind. I imagine that for many architects and planners, these possible cities blur the line between reality and the imagination. Anthologies of Kahn's work are replete with the unbuilt, elaborate exercises in dreaming that seem almost indistinguishable from the things of permanence that were erected in due order.

It may be that all cities require people to dream, but in Philadelphia imagining a new city is the singular act of citizenship. We're all of us ever-wondering what might be. We dream so intensely because we see the glowing possibility. It's just right there. The potential is marvelous, the possible only limited by our own imagination.

This feeling has much to do with the historical moment. Old cities like ours have completed the cycle: growth, industrialization, immigration, decentralization, deindustrialization, sprawl, and suburbanization. The U.S. is today all but completely suburban: merely 6% of Americans live in densely-populated cities. Meanwhile, the world of cities is changing more rapidly than even the glaciers are melting. Mike Davis introduces his seminal Planet of Slums, "In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population of more than one million; today there are 400, and by 2015 there will be at least 550." What's a Philadelphia in a world of Hefei, Xintai, Jamshedpur, Asansol, Karaj, and Taegu?

Precisely because we've come to this end of archetype the answer is anything we want it to be. There has been a tangible shift in expectation. The anti-casino movement has given us a new buzz-word: transparency. The necessity to address global warming has given us another: sustainability, this one packed with the fertile loam of a million new utopias. And, wonder of wonders, the certain election of Michael Nutter has us believing that something might come of it.

It's important to recognize that the act of dreaming isn't the act of building; nor, even under the best circumstances, do the vast majority of dreams come to reality. But it is worth remembering that for every Mary Brown, long-time West Philadelphia neighborhood organizer whose sensible hopes for 52nd Street were ultimately plowed under by the brutal disorder of poverty and inadequate public investment, there is Shane Claiborne, the visionary I wrote about in last week's City Paper, whose singular sprit has infected the blocks around Kensington and Allegheny. (Ed. note: we'll revisit Shane and the K & A situation here next week.) For every Foxwoods there is Cedar Park, the pizza slice of public space just east of 52nd Street that was lovingly rebuilt last year after the completion of a well-honed process of community design.

In his 1961 classic The City in History, Louis Mumford included a wonderful essay within a larger chapter on medieval cities, "Venice Versus Utopia." In it, Mumford pits the accumulated and yet singular genius of Venice against the fictional Utopia of Thomas More. By placing these two city forms in direct contrast, we are given a new paradigm of contemporary Philadelphia. Venice, Mumford says, "was no static design, embodying the needs of a single generation, arbitrarily ruling out the possibilities of growth, re-adaptation, change: rather, here was continuity in change, and unity emerging from complex order." Piazza San Marco, in particular, is "the product of cumulative urban purposes, modified by circumstance, function, and time: organic products that no human genius could produce in a few months over a drafting board." This is -- perhaps without certain aspects of genius and unity -- an apt description of our city today. (It's certainly the Philadelphia I describe in Song of the City.)

All this compares rather instructively with the Utopia of 1516 -- the place that was in so many ways the intended model for Philadelphia. What strikes Mumford about Amaurote (Amaurote is one of 54 identical cities on the island of Utopia) is the uniform spatial design, allowing for the optimal personal connection to a garden, the raising of food, and the great outdoors, and democracy -- of government as well as work: all the elements of rational planning that came to infect William Penn and which we still struggle with today. "Every house has both a street door and a garden door; indeed their zeal for gardening 'is increased not merely by the pleasure afforded them, but by keen competition between streets, which shall have the best kept gardens.'" Does this not sound like the aspiration of Philadelphia Green?

"But who would exchange Venice for the dreary regimentation of and uniformity of Amaurote?" Mumford asks. "And yet who would exchange the civic decencies of Amaurote for the secretive tyranny, the festering suspicions and hatreds, the assassinations of character, the felonious assaults and murders that underlay the prosperous trade and the festive art of Venice?"

Is this not the question we are faced with today? How much relative weight should we give to the gradual, "bottom-up," incremental change we've become so used to -- and dependent on, with neighborhood groups not only doing the planning but providing services. How much of the heavy-hand of City Hall do we want, or need?

Harris Steinberg, whose PennPraxis is completing the plan for the Delaware waterfront, says that the day has returned for Philadelphia to use its power of eminent domain, in order to re-install the grid between Front Street and the river. That means declaring that it's time for the incremental, mostly private, and wholly uncoordinated -- the Venice in this typology -- to give way to clear ideas, much of which are based on the principals asserted by the utopian William Penn. The Praxis plan creates a uniform grid and a pattern of greenspace. It hopes to reassert the Philadelphian's connection to her river while creating regular, valuable parcels for development. In other words, Steinberg urges a single strike for Utopia in order to seed a new, as yet unformed Venice.

1961: Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs, Mumford's tome appeared, and also, amazingly, Jane Jacobs' classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs' book is still the urban planner's bible; nearly every value we ascribe to our city's resurgent urbanism was articulated there -- so effectively and with so much foresight that the lives of a thousand citi-philes with writerly ambition have been forestalled. Why? Nothing else to say. We all speak Jacobs' language. Inga Saffron does -- her recent critique of the Broad Street façade of the Convention Center is case in point. Here in Bella Vista, neighbors who come to duke it out in front of the Town Watch's zoning committee are fighting all over again for or against mixing uses, diversity of building types and heights, the role of the sidewalk, density of people, and the subjugation of everything to the automobile. When someone stands up at one of these meetings (sometimes it is me) and says, "We know what makes cities great," and someone else rises and says, "But this is a residential neighborhood and we don't want the noise," they are taking part in a discussion perfectly framed forty-six years ago. It hasn't gotten boring yet.

But rancor emerges in neighborhood debate -- the clashes of dreams, no? -- because we citizens are expected to dream and decide all at once. This is policy nowadays, the perfectly rational response to the disastrous age of rational planning. The Philadelphia architect-activist Al Levy says, "Very early in my career as an architect it became obvious to me that the real decisions about what our homes and our neighborhoods were like had to be made by the people who lived in them and by our communities. I had worked with many community groups around the city eager to improve their environment and it was very clear that most of the people involved in these groups thought that it was the professionals, the architects and planners, who made these decisions."

Al, who is one of the unsung heroes of this resilient city, is right: people ought to determine the future of their neighborhoods. Does that mean City Hall should retreat, answer only to the wishes of neighbors? What happens when there are clashing dreams?

My friend Rich Schragger, who is a professor of local government at Virginia Law School, says that the lesson of Jacobs doesn't come from 1961, but 1970 and 1984 when in The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations she declares that cities, almost alone, are the economic engines of the world. World trade is city-to-city trade, nothing else in the history of civilization compares. Schragger says that means American cities need to reassert their power in the marketplace, doing so in part by exploiting the gray area of law that exists in our federal system. In other words, Philadelphia mustn't simply retreat behind the noise of community-based debate, but rather set policy that is responsive to -- but isn't necessarily beholden to -- neighborhood wishes. A new zoning policy that takes some control away from residents and district councilmen in order to apply 1961 Jacobsian principals is case in point.

My intention these next few months is to very informally use Mumford's and Jacobs' framework to help us think through some of the critical questions of city planning that face Philadelphia today. I'll talk with some of the most visionary members of the community -- artists, architects, community activists, planners, historians, experts in local government, gardeners no doubt, and so many others living and dead -- as I posit the Possible City. I'm going to cover the territory -- from integrating physical and mental healthcare into the landscape of planning to revisiting Louis Kahn's enduring idea of the Availabilities. I'll rethink transportation, personal identity, and pageantry while lending credence to concepts like legibility -- with the hope that certain things can and ought to be done to make it easier to see and understand the city. I'll try to figure out if internal economic networks, such as the Sustainable Business Network, can provide economic stability and serve as a model for the Possible City.

It's worth noting this week's announcement by the city of San Francisco that it will guarantee healthcare to all citizens. This, according to Schragger, is just the way cities ought to assert their power. With that as our template, I'll imagine ways Philadelphia can be a stronger corporate body, capable of acting beyond the current limits imposed by Pennsylvania that now throttle local initiative. (Gun laws are one obvious case-in-point.)

A related exercise, certainly, will be to think about how much we wish to defer to the man with the high hat. Penn stands over the city (now more than ever since Comcast Center placed him on the top girder); he and Franklin don't recede in our presence. We still live in the city of their design. Their influence extends well-beyond the physical plan -- Brotherly Love taunts us. So we're going to have to come to terms with both foreign immigration and social and economic justice. Of particular concern here is how to slow the too-often rapid downward spiral of certain neighborhoods and blocks -- all the Hurley Streets, as described by Jeff Deeney recently in the Philadelphia Weekly.

To imagine the Possible City, I will place special emphasis on the intersection of the physical and metaphysical city, the space where people, geology, history, religion, ideas, poetry, architecture, and art come together. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? The trouble won't be roaming from the waterfront to the Navy Yard, Wayne Junction to Passyunk Square, the Logan Triangle to Oxford Circle but rather deciding whose dreams make the most sense. The dreaming is easy.

Not long ago I sat outside the Duchamp room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with Jeff McMahon, the cerebral Philadelphia painter whose conceptual work explores the relationship between artist and viewer. We're sitting on the long bench, in the silence of the midday morning. I ask him to explain to me Duchamp but the conversation turns quickly to Dalí. "Yeah," he says, "I have a problem with that kind of work. You paint your dreams you're just getting off too easy. It's like you're doing half the work." The rest -- interpretation, drawing connections, questioning ideas, testing hypothesis -- is the hard work of conceptual art. It's also the first step in moving from dream to possibility.

That, precisely, is what I hope to do in these next few months right here on Philly Skyline. I hope you'll help me -- by sending ideas, comments, critique, advice, and the names of visionaries. Reach me at nathaniel.popkin@gmail.com.