Planning for Open Space

Urban Impact, August 2003

Many of Philadelphia’s inner city communities are filled with abandoned land, created from decades of loss in population and industry. Yet as the city remakes these struggling neighborhoods, this land will be valuable—for new housing and investment opportunities, and also for the open green spaces that will make them attractive and desirable places in which to live and work.

Well-maintained open space—like parks, public plazas, recreation fields, gardens, streetscapes, and greenways—sends a powerful signal to residents and also to potential investors of a community’s desirability, strength, and stability. People and the businesses that serve them are much more likely to remain in or relocate to a community filled with green spaces than one pockmarked by abandoned debris-filled lots and the undercurrents of blight. Ideally, well-planned and well-managed open space, which these neighborhoods often sorely lack, would be integrated with redevelopment plans that meet the quality of life requirements of current and future residents and businesses.

The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s (PHS) Philadelphia Green advocates for well planned and maintained parks and open spaces as critical elements in rebuilding neighborhoods for the Philadelphia of the 21st century. Planning for these open spaces is a key element of the Green City Strategy, adopted by the city administration’s Neighborhood Transformation Initiative. This strategy promotes a comprehensive approach for upgrading and expanding the city’s green infrastructure to create a more attractive and livable city.

In the last several years, Philadelphia Green has worked with two community-based organizations, Asociación de Puertorriqueños en Marcha (APM), and the New Kensington Community Development Corporation, that operate in areas symptomatic of the city’s vacant land problem. Both have realized that the liabilities associated with this land could be turned into assets that complement their redevelopment plans. Philadelphia Green helped them to address vacant land problems, create interim and long-term open spaces, and incorporate open space into their broader revitalization efforts. As a next step, comprehensive plans were recently completed for these communities. Importantly, these plans allow for permanent open space—not just relying on land “leftover” from future housing and commercial development, but integrating this resource into the long-range visions for these neighborhoods.

This issue of Urban Impact looks at the merits of planning for open space in these communities and the importance of its inclusion within a broader range of revitalization strategies.

A Holistic Approach

Since 1996, Philadelphia Green has worked with Asociación de Puertorriqueños en Marcha (APM), a community-based organization that oversees housing and other development projects in lower North Philadelphia. Philadelphia Green helped APM incorporate managed green open space into its new housing complexes and commercial shopping center, and convert abandoned, trashed lots into managed “clean and green” spaces landscaped with grass and trees and edged with wood-fencing. Philadelphia Green also worked with community residents to create gardens, landscaped blocks, and small sitting parks. The result has not only been an overall aesthetic improvement to the community’s appearance, but also an increased perception of safety and a heightened sense of community.

In 1999, APM developed its Quality of Life plan, with the help of neighborhood residents, local businesses, and political and community leaders. The plan highlighted four key objectives: create a neighborhood identity; establish a neighborhood marketplace; enhance the quality of life; and make the streets safer. APM has since implemented many projects within the framework of the Quality of Life plan.

To build on this success and maximize the impact of the accomplishments to date, APM, PHS, and the Pennsylvania Environmental Council collaborated in 2002 to create a Neighborhood Revitalization Plan. Undertaken by the urban planning and design firm of Wallace, Roberts & Todd, the study encompasses APM’s development area—between the SEPTA corridor on the west, American Street on the east, York on the north, and Oxford to the south. “This plan ties all of APM’s development work together and charts a course for the community’s future,” notes Maitreyi Roy of Philadelphia Green.

Rooted in environmentally sensitive design principles, the plan reevaluates the role of open space in the neighborhood within a framework of revitalization strategies, which includes a mix of residential and commercial use that supports economic diversity, with development to be located near key transit locations and parks. The plan also redefines traffic circulation patterns and pedestrian pathways.

With the area’s extreme amount of vacancy (about 50%), there is an enormous amount of vacant land, yet not a lot of useable, safe open space. “In this plan, we address the vacant land issue, while exploring ways to create community open space with recreational benefits,” says Scott Page, project director for Wallace, Roberts & Todd.

The plan focuses primarily on physical plans for neighborhood revitalization and also considers important social and economic strategies. “We’re hoping that the plan inspires conversation about open space and infrastructure issues within the context of a comprehensive revitalization effort,” says APM’s Rose Gray, adding that “there isn’t the need to rebuild Philadelphia at the same density as the past.”

A Plan in Action

Already, improvement efforts charted out in APM’s Neighborhood Revitalization Plan are beginning to be realized. Along 3rd Street from Berks north to York, the plan proposes a linear park and stormwater management system that would buffer new and existing industrial uses from the residential neighborhood. This past spring, in support of this concept, 10 sites along 3rd street have been “stabilized”—cleared first of debris and then planted with grass, trees, and wood fencing. This represents a critical first step to any future work, like the concept of a more formal park along this stretch.

For Berks Street, a gateway from Temple University to the APM area, the plan recommends making this transportation corridor a two-way thoroughfare from 10th to Front Streets, with a mix of uses. As a preliminary step, a series of large land parcels along the street have been stabilized. This project was supported by a mix of sources—the American Street Empowerment Zone, the Office of Housing and Community Development, and the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative—reflecting the shared priorities of these entities. The result? What was once an unpromising entryway traveling east from Temple is now an inviting greenway.

Planning New Kensington

A similar neighborhood-wide planning process was undertaken for the New Kensington Community Development Corporation (CDC), whose development area comprises portions of the Fishtown, Port Richmond, and Kensington neighborhoods. This area contains communities that have seen marked growth, as well as others that are in transition. Like many parts of the city, it has suffered a loss of population and industrial uses, along with an increase in vacant housing and land. “It impacted people on a spiritual level—not only was there the physical effect of abandoned land, but the community felt abandoned as well,” reflects Paul Malvey of New Kensington CDC.

In a dramatic turnaround, a land management effort initiated by the CDC and Philadelphia Green in 1995 has since reclaimed about half of the area’s unmanaged vacant lots, turning them into basic green spaces, creating gardens, and transferring lots to adjacent homeowners through a side-yard program. The land management program has also helped to create an identity for the neighborhood.

While New Kensington’s land management program has been a success—and played a key part in laying the foundation for their recent plan—it cannot simply be copied for every neighborhood. “New Kensington’s program works because of the CDC and its ability to tailor its program to the needs of area residents,” notes Scott Page, adding that the scope of any land management effort must fit the capacity of the invested local organization.

Through these efforts—combined with the CDC’s economic development, housing and community organizing activities—both partners recognized that the community needed an overall infrastructure plan, coordinated with circulation and land use, that would define and sustain the civic landscape and be the center of future planning efforts. Led by Wallace, Roberts & Todd, this Neighborhood Plan offers recommendations that integrate future open space and streetscape improvements with economic development and housing initiatives. With the core of the neighborhood already well established and inviting to both existing and new residents, the focus of this plan is to re-create the edges of the community with an array of uses and connections to nearby neighborhoods, the waterfront, and public transportation.

“The plan gives us a blueprint for the future,” says Sandy Salzman, executive director of New Kensington CDC, “with a specific focus on what needs to be done west of Frankford Avenue.”

A Planner’s Perspective

“Many neighborhood plans are based on land use, primarily around the need for new housing,” says Scott Page, project director at Wallace, Roberts & Todd (WRT). “But for APM and New Kensington, there was an interest in creating useable, safe open space in relationship to housing, institutions, and other development efforts.” In fact, before the planning processes even began in these areas, the CDCs had focused on open space, further emphasized by partner organizations like Philadelphia Green and the Pennsylvania Environmental Council. “Both CDCs were already taking a different approach to revitalization,” notes Page, referring to the climate before WRT became involved.

Opportunities for Open Space

Philadelphia’s abundance of underused land presents a tantalizing “blank canvas” for the city’s policy-makers, planners, and other stakeholders. With a smaller population, changing housing preferences in the city, and an overall shift from a manufacturing to service economy, there is simply too much land to redevelop in the near future. Managed open space, then, becomes an identifiable thread, a way to stitch together the fabric of neighborhoods drained by decades of urban blight. In certain cases it is an interim solution, a way of addressing neglected land until new commercial or housing development occurs. Open space presents the opportunity to give older inner city communities a range of permanent active and passive recreation amenities—and an identity—that they often sorely lack.

Philadelphia has benefited from a range of greening and open space initiatives across the city—from revitalized parks to cleaned and greened vacant parcels to dynamic landscaped entryways and promenades. In order for open green space to have the most impact, it must be planned for and set aside, and it must be a part of broad neighborhood revitalization plans. To pay inadequate attention to this aspect in planning for the future of redeveloping neighborhoods is to invite the cycle of decline again in the future.

Asociación de Puertorriqueños en Marcha and New Kensington CDC are representative of community-based organizations in the city who are proactively looking at open space as part of their overall approach. Optimally, a larger citywide plan should be developed that will provide the framework for neighborhood plans and help chart a unified vision for a thriving 21st century Philadelphia.