Praxis Column

Harris Steinberg: promise of the waterfront

mgolas — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 06:50:31 -0500

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Jan. 26Philadelphia InquirerFulfilling promise of the waterfront

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January 26, 2007

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Engage in waterfront value sessions

mgolas — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 13:54:05 -0500

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Engage in next week's waterfront value sessions Daily News, InquirerDec. 8

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December 8, 2006

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Planning Philadelphia’s future

mgolas — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 11:27:13 -0500

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FROM THE DIRECTOR'S DESK, Jan. 15

By Harris Steinberg
Executive Director of PennPraxis

Planning in Philadelphia is a time-honored affair.

William Penn’s and Thomas Holme’s iconic 1683 Portraiture of the city of Philadelphia in the Province of Pennsylvania in America depicted the ideal city stretched compactly between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. Without grand boulevards and imperial vistas such as in Rome, London or Paris, or the dense medieval street-armature of early Boston, the Philadelphia plan was quietly organized around a series of simple interlocking squares that were intended to be forever free and public.

Embedded in our collective city-building DNA is the notion that planning is a public good.

While Philadelphia has often stood as an exemplar of sound American urban design and planning – think of the creation of Fairmount Park, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the reclamation of Society Hill to name just a few – we haven’t always heeded the call of our genetic coding. The near-nuclear devastation wrought by the creation of I-95 along the Delaware River is representative of the shameful consequences of large-scale, dehumanizing, post-World War II planning impulses.

Ours is an era of greatly diminished public investment in cities. And as a result, we have come to rely on a wide variety of public-private partnerships such as special services districts, tax abatement development incentive programs and tax increment financing to provide both the infrastructure and services typically provided by municipalities in the past.

And city planning in Philadelphia has lost its way in this fractured, private development-driven wilderness.

In our desperate attempt to attract private development – any development - we’ve allowed the cancerous practice of spot zoning to eat away at the physical fabric of the city – with both City Council and the Zoning Board of Adjustment making blindfolded planning decisions on a parcel-by-parcel basis without regard to the greater good. We’ve allowed developers to pit neighborhood groups against neighborhood groups vying for community benefit agreements in return for granting approval for projects that the local communities are largely ill equipped to comment upon.

We’ve created a Wild West atmosphere in which only the zoning lawyers win. What’s left is a hodge-podge of individual projects without any clear sense of a greater whole. And we’re all bearing the costs of the lack of planning.

We need to ask ourselves what kind of city we want to live in. We need to ask ourselves what role the city should play in creating and maintaining a quality public realm. And we need to ask about the proper role that the development community should play in creating and maintaining public spaces in Philadelphia.

It’s time to reestablish a relationship between sound planning and economic development.

After all, Penn’s concept for Pennsylvania was both a real estate deal and a Holy Experiment. Penn’s plan for Philadelphia clearly delineated between development parcels and public space – public space in which all of the rights and privileges of citizenship can be enjoyed. And Penn, the businessman, understood the relationship between quality city planning and return on investment. One has only to look at the property values around Rittenhouse Square to see how prescient the Proprietor was.

As we move forward with the creation of a civic vision for the Central Delaware, these issues will come into greater focus and sharp relief.

We have the opportunity on the Central Delaware to work together to create a vision that is smart, generous, sound and pleasing. Our goal is to set a table as big as possible so that everyone from the port to the neighbors and from the development community to the politicians can have their voices heard and contribute to the vision that will emerge. Together, we must squarely face issues of traffic and infrastructure, storm water management, public access and recreation, the working port, affordable housing and a host of other issues that have surfaced in the Central Delaware planning process to date.

We have the chance to imagine a new way of doing things in Philadelphia through a public process that is both citizen-driven and open and transparent. We have the chance to look broadly and understand the collective impact of our actions and plan accordingly. Like Penn, who enticed investors with quality of life as codified in a plan, we, too, can marry our values to a plan.

It’s high time that we take planning seriously again. We’re spending large sums of public and private funds and suffering the unfortunate and unintended consequences of traffic gridlock, flooded basements, visual blight and more due to the lack of adequate forethought.

After all, it’s only Philadelphia’s future that is at stake.

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Harris Steinberg: "We have the opportunity on the Central Delaware to work together to create a vision that is smart, generous, sound and pleasing."<br />

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January 15, 2007

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Civic engagement ensures lasting legacy

mgolas — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 17:02:21 -0500

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By Harris Steinberg
Executive Director, Penn Praxis

   Purposefully situated by William Penn and his surveyor Thomas Holme between two great rivers in 1682, Philadelphia rose to international prominence on the waters that flowed past her shores. For over 250 years, the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers were the economic, transportation, industrial, social and cultural lifelines of the city. Indeed, as a major point of entry in colonial times, Philadelphia’s Delaware River docks and wharves connected the city to the ports of the burgeoning British Empire through which streamed goods and services along with the diversity of peoples and ideas that would propel Philadelphia to national distinction.
    After the Civil War, Philadelphia’s rivers fueled her rise as a great industrial power (recall that as early as the 1820s Manayunk was known as the Manchester of America) as anthracite coal from Scranton delivered via the Schuylkill fired the industries that would serve the rest of the country.
    Simultaneously, Philadelphia pioneered the practice of public waterfront design and planning. Fredrik Graff’s seminal Fairmount Water Works at the Schuylkill Dam, designed in 1812 to protect the citizens of Philadelphia from a series of yellow fever epidemics, was the first municipal waterworks in the United States. Graff’s design, studied worldwide in its time, is a stunning fusion of then-state-of-the-art engineering and Greek Revival design. It remains today one of Philadelphia’s signature sites as citizens flock to the Water Works, as they did in Graff’s day, to seek refuge from the crowded metropolis, to be cooled by river breezes and to take pleasure in the elegant and urbane riverside setting. Graff’s masterwork set the stage for the creation of Fairmount Park, founded in 1855 and expanded in 1856 to protect the city’s water supply from industrial pollution; serving as a beloved and prescient symbol of civic design excellence.
     The image of the shores of the upper Schuylkill River as it wends scenically through Fairmount Park stands in marked contrast to the fate of the remainder of Philadelphia’s 38-miles of shoreline. The Schuylkill’s banks below the dam and the entirety of the Delaware saw heavy industrial, shipping, defense and transportation uses develop as the city’s population swelled to accommodate the country’s rising demand for the goods and products she produced. As the “Workplace to the World”, Philadelphia’s rivers played a signal role in her ascendancy as one of America’s great industrial centers. For 80 years from the end of the Civil War through the end of World War II, Philadelphia and the industries and neighborhoods that lined the riverbanks provided the country with everything from ships to hats and locomotives to refined petroleum.
    With the eventual decline in Philadelphia’s industrial fortunes after World War II and the ascendancy of the trucking industry in efficiently moving goods throughout the region and the country, Philadelphia’s waterfronts and shipyards languished. Her once thriving industries moved to places with access to cheap labor and new highways, leaving her shorelines girdled by toxic brownfields, the remains of defunct rail lines, the Schuylkill Expressway and Interstate 95. The river banks that William Penn had once envisioned as free, open and public had become the dying fringes of a once vital city.
     The fate of the banks of the Delaware River has been studied for nearly 60 years. In 1947, Philadelphia planner Edmund Bacon, along with architect Oskar Stonorov, conceived the then-revolutionary idea for the public reclamation of the central Delaware riverfront at the foot of Market Street – an idea that would eventually come to be called Penn’s Landing. Stretching from Market Street south to Lombard, the Philadelphia City Planning Commission’s 1963 vision for Penn’s Landing in their Plan for Center City included public esplanades and boat slips; a vision that would haltingly guide subsequent development attempts over the next forty years and serve as an international model for the changing face of urban waterfronts.
     Bacon’s and Stonorov’s vision for Penn’s Landing was part of a series of sweeping urban proposals that would literally reshape post-industrial Philadelphia (including Society Hill, Penn Center and Independence Mall) and place Philadelphia at the vanguard of post-WW II American design and planning. Yet, it was a vision that would never fully materialize. Plagued, in part, by the 385-foot wide chasm created by Interstate 95 and Columbus Boulevard, Penn’s Landing, under the guidance of the quasi-public Penn’s Landing Corporation became a symbol of a stagnant development-driven waterfront planning model.
    In late 2002, the Simon Property Group of Indianapolis withdrew their proposal to the Penn’s Landing Corporation for an indoor entertainment center and 400-car parking garage at the water’s edge leaving city officials anxious to court new developers. Against the backdrop of repeated unsuccessful attempts to fully develop Penn’s Landing’s 39 original acres (14 attempts over 25 years by some accounts), Penn Praxis, of the School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania, partnered with the editorial board of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Penn’s Center for School Study Councils and the Design Advocacy Group of Philadelphia, to design and produce a series of public forums to focus attention on the future of Penn’s Landing. The 2003 Penn’s Landing Forums sought to educate the citizens of Philadelphia as to what was possible in waterfront planning and design, create principles that would guide development and put forth design images based upon those principles.
     The Penn’s Landing Forums were successful. They mitigated the typical politics that influence Philadelphia development and raised public awareness about achieving world-class excellence on the waterfront. Three pubic forums were attended by over 700 citizens of Philadelphia over 50 days in the winter of 2003. Informed by expert presentations by PennDesign Dean Gary Hack, AICP, noted author and Penn professor Witold Rybczynski, noted landscape architect James Corner and renowned architect and planner Denise Scott Brown, RIBA, citizens worked with facilitators to create common ground planning principles for the site. These principles were tested in a daylong charrette attended by leading Philadelphia design professionals and students.
      Ten pages of editorial and commentary were published in The Philadelphia Inquirer over the course of the forums, including a three-page spread in a Sunday editorial section of The Inquirer on the results of the charrette. The project directly influenced Philadelphia Mayor John Street’s withdrawal of his support for poorly-conceived, politically-driven development proposals and his subsequent calling for the creation of a “river city;” an idea drawn from the language of the forums.
     Development pressures had been steadily mounting along the Delaware River in the areas abutting Center City. While much fine-grained residential rehabilitation had been taking place in areas such as Old City, Northern Liberties, Queen Village and Bella Vista for quite some time, development was now pushing the edges of Center City north into traditionally working class Fishtown and south towards Pennsport below Washington Avenue. The city’s 1998 10-year property tax abatement was expanded in 2000 to include new residential construction. This program, in conjunction with historically-low interest rates, helped drive a post-9/11 condominium boom in Center City and along the Delaware Riverfront.
     Subsequently, the Pennsylvania State Legislature passed the Pennsylvania Race Horse Development and Gaming Act in July 2004, legislation enabling the issuance of 14 licenses for slots parlors in the commonwealth - with two reserved for 5,000-slot stand alone parlors in Philadelphia. With siting of the proposed casinos determined by the state-appointed Gaming Control Board, the fate of Delaware riverfront development was once more a topic of city-wide concern. As it turned out, four developers proposed casinos along the Delaware from Fishtown to Pennsport in response to the December 2005 Gaming Control Board proposal deadline.
     Against this backdrop of the combined potential threats of two 5,000-slot casinos and unchecked condominium development, local civic organizations became increasingly alarmed at the pace and quality of development along the central Delaware. In May 2006, Governor Ed Rendell and state senator Vincent Fumo (D-Philadelphia) proposed a moratorium on riparian rights along the Delaware to help stem the crush of condominium development. This move was followed by Philadelphia Councilman Frank DiCicco calling for the establishment of a new non-profit entity to guide the planning and development of the central Delaware. While it was clear that planning was sorely needed for this stretch of the river, the public outcry cast the idea as yet another Philadelphia backroom deal and quelled public discussion.
    It should be noted that plans for the North Delaware from Penn Treaty Park to the Poquessing Creek at the northern border of Bensalem and a plan for the former Philadelphia Naval Shipyard are in place and being carried out to varying degrees of success. With tremendous development pressures bearing down on the central stretch of the waterfront, it is clear that the central Delaware riverfront from Penn Treat Park south to Pennsport lacks a vision to guide physical development and provide amenities for the public realm.
     Seeking a neutral party to convene a city-wide planning process for the central Delaware, Philadelphia Councilman Frank DiCicco’s office, whose First Councilmanic District includes much of the historic Riverwards, approached Penn Praxis in July 2006 about leading a planning process for the central Delaware. Praxis responded with a proposal that builds upon the success of the Penn’s Landing Forums (along with subsequent large-scale planning civic engagement projects such as the 2005 Franklin Conference on School Design with the Philadelphia Inquirer and the 2005-2006 Slots and the City project with the Philadelphia Daily News) as it aims to restore public trust around the design, planning and implementation of a waterfront plan for the central Delaware.
    Drawing on the public’s confidence in its ability to lead city-wide conversations around thorny development issues, Praxis will organize outreach to the civic associations abutting the project area, produce a series of public events that will both educate the citizens of Philadelphia as to what is possible in waterfront planning and design and engage the forum participants in the creation of citizen-derived, values-based planning principles to guide the creation of a vision for the waterfront. Working with an internationally-acclaimed design team drawn from both the faculty of the School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania and local design talent, Praxis will help create a design vision for the waterfront that is founded on the values put forth in the civic dialogue. The drawings, models and videos of the plan will be presented at public display. The process will culminate with the creation of an implementing entity and strategy designed to protect the public’s role in the creation of the plan.
    Philadelphia’s waterfronts are at a crossroads. While cities around the world from Boston to Vancouver to Barcelona have successfully reclaimed their waterfronts (re-imagining the essence of the 21st century post-industrial city), official Philadelphia has largely chosen to ignore centralized planning as a way to balance private development and the public good along its rapidly changing waterfronts. Rather, it has allowed the marketplace, aided by an antiquated zoning code, to define the public realm. As such, it has left the heavy lifting of waterfront planning and implementation to resource-stretched non-profit entities such as the Schuylkill River Development Corporation and the North Delaware Riverfront Taskforce. It is a sad irony that a city that once stood at the vanguard of municipal waterfront design and planning should find itself in this position today.
     The proposed Civic Engagement Process, Design Vision and Infrastructure Plan for the Central Delaware is a unique opportunity to redress this situation. By publicly engaging the citizens of the city of Philadelphia in the creation of a world-class design vision for the central Delaware and creating an implementation body designed to protect the public’s role in the design and planning process, Philadelphia will have the opportunity to balance the goals of economic development with the public good. In heeding the lessons of Fredrick Graff’s prophetic municipal vision at the Fairmount Water Works, Philadelphia will once again reclaim its rightful place at the world’s municipal design table while leaving a lasting legacy of design excellence for future generations.

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November 14, 2006

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A Q&A with PennPraxis Director Harris Steinberg

Robert Leming — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 10:58:18 -0500

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A Q&A with PennPraxis Director Harris Steinberg

By Matt Blanchard
For PlanPhilly

In October 2006, Philadelphia Mayor John Street issued an executive order authorizing urban planning consortium PennPraxis to spearhead a democratic effort to create a lasting public design legacy along seven miles of the Delaware River’s central waterfront.

At the tip of that spear is Praxis executive director Harris Steinberg, a native-born Philadelphian and a passionate advocate for thoughtful use of city space. In the following interview, Steinberg explains what the public can expect from this unique planning effort, and why he’s determined to mobilize the imaginations of every Philadelphian toward a common vision for our waterfront.

As the plan takes shape, Steinberg promises a blockbuster public exhibition that can inspire politicians, developers and the people to do what’s right with our riverfront. And he’s not joking when he says Delaware Avenue could become “one of the greatest boulevards in the world.”

Steinberg earned an undergraduate degree in History from Penn in 1978 and returned in 1982 for a graduate degree in Architecture. He has been the executive director of PennPraxis since its inception in 2001.

Question: What exactly is PennPraxis and what does it bring to this effort that no one else can?

Answer: PennPraxis is the clinical arm of the school of design here at Penn. We are in business – just like clinical arms of the dental school, law, medicine – to create opportunities for faculty and students to do real world problem solving. We’ve worked on projects around the world, around the nation, and across the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, historic preservation and city and regional planning.

We’ve been working over the past five years now, in places as close to home as Penn’s campus, looking at new ways of storing bicycles on campus, or working with the Village of Arts and Humanities on a plan for shared prosperity in North Philadelphia. We have done work in Pittsburgh on the conservation of cathedral windows, urban planning work in Granada, Spain, Singapore and Taiwan. PennPraxis is a multi-disciplinary global practice attached to one the best design schools in the country, if not the world. The objective is to harness the resources of the academy and put them to good use on real world problems outside the walls of the academy.

My own particular interest at Praxis is civic engagement, and that’s what this project is about. That’s why we are unique in the city, and that’s why we were asked to do this project.

Q: Can you talk about that concept in more detail?

A: Civic engagement is figuring out ways that we as a society and we as a university and the newspapers can convene large public conversations around thorny development issues. So we’ve worked with the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial page editor Chris Satullo to convene a public debate over Penn’s Landing. We’ve also worked with columnist Sandra Shea at the Philadelphia Daily News for a project on the impact of casinos in Philadelphia. These are large development issues; big money, big politics.

Q: So what form will this waterfront plan actually take? It might be obvious to professionals like you, but most people think in terms of buildings, parks, pathways, not plans. They think in terms of the elements – not the plan.

A: Planning takes big strokes and little strokes. You’ve got to have both. I like to imagine that Delaware Avenue becomes one of the greatest boulevards in the world. Just using the term “boulevard” elevates it from an industrial port route to something that has a civic character, that is ceremonial, that is a great public space. We should be able to line Delaware Boulevard with shops and cafes and galleries and housing, that face elegant open spaces, where we can go out on the river in boats.

And it doesn’t have to be a class issue, because really it’s about everyone having access. Just think of New York City, 5th Avenue. My parents grew up in Brooklyn. But using the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue was one of the greatest joys in the world, because it was the everyman’s palace. I think that’s ultimately what we want to create, a public realm along the water that is so Philadelphian that all of us feel comfortable there. It’s with that sort of imagery that we need to paint our future.

Q: Knowing that the planning process has only just begun, I’m wondering how specific you can be about the elements that might be part of any new Philadelphia waterfront. Boat marinas? Parks? A continuous riverfront path?

A: All of those sound great. I can’t really say. My responsibility is to the voice of the people, who will ultimately tell us that. Ideas that I’ve heard include all of those. There is, of course, private land on the waterfront. There are parts that are inaccessible, that the Port Authority controls or that Homeland Security controls. We’re going to have to knit together some sort of public realm that has a quality that is uplifting, and demonstrates that quality of life matters here. But exactly what that will look like, I couldn’t tell you.

Q: When we talk about vision for the waterfront, are there other cities you look to for inspiration?

A: New York, of course, is one of them. They have some great success stories, and they probably have some cautionary tales as well. Other cities are Barcelona, Vancouver, Boston, Rotterdam, Melbourne, and Liverpool. There are definitely models to look at. And part of our work will be only bringing the best practices from around the globe to the people of Philadelphia through public forums and our website.

But this has to be Philadelphia. One of the greatest lines that came out of the Penn’s Landing public forum was “Inner Harbor Envy,” referring to Baltimore’s waterfront. For decades, we labored under “If only we could bring an Inner Harbor to Philadelphia.” Well damn it, we’re Philadelphia. I don’t give a hoot about Baltimore. It’s a nice little place, but we’ve got to make this Philadelphia. We have the resources, the talent, the drive, and the right alignment of political and civic will to do something that’s us. We invented waterfront designs and planning in 1812 at the Waterworks. Fairmount Park was the first of its kind. The Wissahickon was the first of its kind. We have the ability to do this right in our DNA.

Q: When will we start to see some ideas get generated?

A: We’re starting with “value sessions,” where citizens come together and talk about personally what’s important to them about the waterfront, and then collectively as a neighborhood, and then as a city. Ideas will certainly emerge there. And we’ve heard some of these things already.

For a lot of people, having a working shipping port is an incredibly important part of the economy and their identity, and they don’t want it touched. Others value access to the water for recreation. Others value commercial development. There are things starting to surface. People are just beginning to kind of feel their way in to it. But the potential for this to be something different, something special, is really there.
There are four basic elements in a plan like this one. There’s water access, the character of Delaware Boulevard, the connections from the water back to the neighborhoods, and then there’s the quality of the buildings. What do they look like? Does anything go? Should a 900-foot tower be next to a 6-story building?

Within those four elements there are subsets: The natural systems are one. It turns out that scores of little creeks that have been buried in culverts run through the neighborhoods, some of which might be able to be restored, or their marshlands recreated. Another issue is sustainable development, because green development these days is a big interest. All these things are pieces in the superstructure of this plan. There’s also public art, which affects what I call the character of the boulevard.

It all starts with the “public realm”. That’s the public spaces. Developers don’t quite get what public realm is. When you go to King of Prussia Mall, that’s not public, that space is controlled by the developer. We don’t want the developers to control the public realm. We want the public to control the public realm.

So the public realm must be defined first. In that respect, William Penn’s plan for Philadelphia is our mantra. It had five public squares, forever public, no one touches them, and all development went on around them. That’s what we’re going to do here. We have to figure out: what are our public squares down there? And what character will they have? The quality and character of the squares down there will enhance the value of the land around them.

Developers should not feel threatened by the creation of a quality public realm. We’d love to get broad based buy-in to this – it’s good for everybody. We’re not trying to shove anything down anybody’s throat. If somebody doesn’t want to play, we go around them. This is not Robert Moses coming in with bulldozers, and saying this is going to be a park. But it is coming to some common set of principles, and building an armature around these principles that can structure future development on the waterfront.

Q: You have said the planning process will culminate in a blockbuster public exhibition of ideas for our waterfront. You’re hoping half a million people will attend. Is there any precedent for such an exhibition in Philadelphia?

A: Yes there is. Sixty yeas ago Edmund Bacon, the legendary director of the Planning Commission, put together an exhibition called the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, which covered 2 floors of Gimbel’s department store. It showed the transformation of Center City Philadelphia. From a choked industrial 19th century, Bacon was creating the 20th century city, with models – at the time they were high tech -- that flipped up to show a gleaming Penn Center, Society Hill, Independence Mall. The exhibition drew 385,000 people. Today we’re setting the bar higher. I‘d like to drive about 500,000 people through our exhibition.

Even earlier, when the Ben Franklin Bridge was being built, the models of the towers that hold the bridge span were on display in the City Hall courtyard. Models of the Parkway were on display in City Hall. Things of a great civic nature need that kind of popular display and buy-in. There is precedent for it in Philadelphia.

Q: But a skeptic might point out that even the best plans get ignored. What gives you the confidence that this plan, once completed, will be carried out?

A: There’s no guarantee. Our strategy is to engage as broad a public as possible: citizens, government officials, developers, academics – ultimately to create a civic will that makes it easy for policy makers to wrap their hands around it and say: “This is the will of the people.”

We don’t represent any vested interest here. As a university-based office, whose ultimate goal is excellence and quality of life in the city of Philadelphia, what we bring to the table is a degree of neutrality, and a reputation as an honest broker. We’re completely paid for by foundation funding. The city is not paying us. The city has authorized us to do our work, but we’re not paid by them or beholden to them. In fact, our funding requires that this be an open, transparent process accountable to the public.

So our audience is the people of Philadelphia. Our charge is to work with an advisory group set up by the mayor, but our client is the people of Philadelphia. All of our effort will go to broadcasting this as far and wide as possible, to include as many people as possible.

Our exhibition, with models and videos, will be the work of the people. We hope to make it on the scale of the PMA’s Cezanne exhibition, so that it truly is a popular ratification of an ideal and can serve as a roadmap for multiple generations to come. This ideal can change and evolve, but ultimately we want to say: “This is what we as a people want.”

Matt Blanchard graduated Penn Urban Studies in 1997. A former reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, he now teaches writing at the University of the Arts. Matt will be a regular contributor to PlanPhilly.