 in 1998, and I was sharing with some folks today, that was right at the time when we had finished a community-wide process related to our master plan policies. And the person who was the mayor at that time was also an urban planner. So I was very excited about all the cutting-edge planning that was going on in San Antonio. What happened, unfortunately, was that although a lot of work went into creating the master plan policies, it wasn't something that was often referred to in relation to key decisions and development that went on in our community. And so here we are in 2014, and we're about to embark on a comprehensive planning process here in San Antonio. And my hope, my deepest hope and desire, is that the plan will be the people's plan. And so toward that end, we have invited some special guests to come in and share with us. Their experience from Philadelphia on how they engage the broader community in a comprehensive plan for the city of Philadelphia. And we certainly hope to learn, and we've had an opportunity to share throughout the day, and I think we've shared about our experience as well. But again, I'd like to thank everyone who helped to put this event together and make today possible. I'd like to thank our guests who were probably tired. They've been meeting with, they went to the mayor's state of the city address and they've had breakfast with several of our key stakeholder groups. And now they're here this evening to share why we should care about the comprehensive plan and to talk about what they did in Philadelphia. So I'm so excited. I'll go ahead and bring up our first presenter, who's Mrs. Sean McKaney. Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman. And thanks again to the AIA chapter, the university and the river authority for inviting us down. I've been saying all day, I can't tell you how excited we are to be in San Antonio, coming from the third snowiest winter in Philadelphia's history. I was joking earlier that we've got new words in our vocabulary. I want you to listen to this. Have you heard of a snow gym, a shovel gym? Well, we're just happy to wake up and not have to shovel out a driveway. So we're gonna talk tonight about our experience trying to promote more civic engagement around comprehensive planning in Philadelphia. But I'd say from the beginning that we expect to learn just as much from San Antonio as maybe you'll learn from us. But as a cynical, jaded Philadelphian, I reserve the right to maintain that we have it harder, right? Our problems are more severe. We face deeper challenges. San Antonio's are smarter. They're more sophisticated. They're better looking. But seriously, just aside, I would say that we did have problems trying to engage people, trying to reengage folks in planning in Philadelphia. And our goal was even more fundamental. We're gonna talk about a specific public policy intervention. But our goal as a foundation that I represent was really it was about restoring public confidence in public processes. Restoring people's belief that Philadelphia had a future after many decades of decline. And that cities with futures plan for them. So just to give you a little overview we're gonna talk about, I'm gonna explain why the William Penn Foundation, which is the largest private foundation in Philadelphia, was interested in promoting civic engagement and comprehensive planning. Harris Steinberg, my colleague from Penn Praxis is gonna talk about a specific public policy project that we funded to model a new process for civic engagement. And then my colleague, Donna Carney from the Philadelphia City Planning Commission is gonna talk about the Citizens Planning Institute, which is how we're institutionalizing civic engagement in Philadelphia. So you can sort of see our work as a sequence of events. Foundation helped initiate public planning process. Harris's group created a model to demonstrate how it would work. And today, Donna is continuing the work by running the Planning Institute. But to begin with, I'm gonna give you a compressed history of Philadelphia. When you leave the room tonight, you'll all be experts on Philadelphia's history. And it's really easy, okay? There's only three things we're gonna talk about tonight. Okay, so 1776, right? Those guys in wigs go in that building and spend the summer sweating through their silk stockings and invent the United States of America. And a byproduct is they give the world modern democracy. Afterwards, they go out, they party, they ring the bell too hard, they break it. Flash forward to 1876 and 10 million people come to Philadelphia to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the nation. Now, this was a time when only 40 million people were in the entire country. People came from all over the world to go to this, to marvel at the new technologies that were available at the time. Alexander Graham Bell's telephone was introduced at the S&T exposition. But the effect of the exposition really was it changed the perception of the United States from being a rural, agricultural backwater to an emerging industrial giant. And Philadelphia played a big part of that. Philadelphia itself was becoming a huge industrial city. And we really would become what we like to call the workshop of the world, an arsenal of democracy. For 100 years, Philadelphia was a huge, important manufacturing center. We built everything from Stetson hats to Baldwin locomotives. 100,000 people worked just in textiles in Philadelphia at the peak of the industry. Okay, now the only, the other third event or the major milestone you need to know about is the movie, right? So flash forward another 100 years and Rocky wins Academy Award for Best Picture. I'd forgotten, I was a kid when this movie came, I was too young even to see it in a movie theater. Stilvestre Stallone was the star, but Philadelphia played a really major role in this film. It really was the backdrop of the film. And looking back now, you know, Harris and I are natives of the city. Boy, it was grim. I mean, Philadelphia in the 70s really was showing its age. It was really a period of post-industrial decline, deterioration and, you know, which is marvel at how different the city is today. But in 1976, the city really had experienced at least two decades of industrial disinvestment. Flash forward another 10 years and this is really the low point of Philadelphia's modern history. The city of firsts, the first hospital, the first university, the first computer was the first city in America to bomb itself. We literally, a police helicopter literally dropped a satchel bomb on the rooftop bunker of a back to nature militant extremist group and burned down an entire neighborhood. 65 homes burned, 11 people were killed. And this was the images of Philadelphia throughout the world. Every TV, every national news broadcast covered it. It was around the world that, you know, this was what people saw of Philadelphia. And it really, it really is emblematic of how things felt like then out of control. There was a lack of strong leadership and civic vision. But eventually things began to change. In the very early 90s, a whole series of factors, national trends, local trends, local events, began to reshape the future of Philadelphia. We elected a very different kind of mayor in 1991. Ed Rendell, who unlike any mayor before him would open the city swimming pools by jumping in with kids. He went on to become governor, a less successful chairman of the Democratic National Committee, but really by dint of his personality, he was a tireless promoter of Philadelphia. And he reinvented, the first thing he did is reinvented our tourism economy. So what was an industry about school buses coming for a quick trip to see Liberty Bell turned into, made Philadelphia into a really a national destination for heritage tourism. Another event that happened around the same time was that Philadelphia established the Center City District, which is now an international model for business improvement districts. We basically started cleaning the place up. I mean, really hosing the streets, cleaning the streets, making them feel safer. Major investments in streetscape and just improving the public realm. It really was one of the seminal milestones for the revitalization of Center City. And our economy changed. So in 1970, 189,000 people worked in manufacturing in Philadelphia. In 2010, 184,000 people worked in healthcare and education. This image is just the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. This is not the entire campus, this is just the medical campus. So this huge investment in eds and meds really, really completed the shift of our economy from a manufacturing industrial economy to one that was focused on services. And flash forward now, Center City today has sort of risen from the ashes of the move incident of 1983. I mean, Philadelphia now has the third largest downtown population in America, behind only New York and Chicago. And in folks who live in downtown enjoy first class, first world existence. I mean, great parks, culture, outdoor dining. It's just an amazing, amazing transformation of the city over the last couple of decades. I was just saying to someone earlier, we had colleagues in from Cleveland, and it was a Tuesday night, we were walking around downtown, it was full of people, and they said to us, why are always people out? Like, is there some kind of special event? I mean, is there, and now it's just Tuesday night in downtown. So Center City used to be this. This is what was traditionally defined as downtown. This neat, tidy box of two square miles between the two rivers. But effectively, we now talk about Greater Center City. 200,000 people now live in the zones that are identified here. And what's happening is the two local economies of downtown and the university district are now basically merged into one single economy. And it's pushing in all directions. The effect is that the city's downtown has become really a 24-7 downtown. So all this change in 1997, the city passed a 10-year tax abatement which triggered a building boom in downtown. 12,000 condominiums were built between 1997 and 2007. The national trends, the real estate bubble, the early part of the 2000s, the tax abatement, folks, empty nesters moving to the city was really pushing a huge bubble of development through the city. And it began to concern us as a key stakeholder about the potential that we would squander a huge opportunity. Essentially, all those years of decline, we had lost all of our planning, development, and regulatory infrastructure. Or we hadn't adopted a comprehensive plan in 50 years. Our zoning code was hopelessly out of date. Our planning commission was marginalized. Our mayor and city council had no interest in planning. Yet all this development was happening and it was becoming alarming again that a lot of it was happening in an ad hoc, uncoordinated way. And of particular concern to us, it was the Delaware Riverfront, which we consider the city's single most valuable redevelopment asset. And within the zone of the riverfront, in 2005, we conducted a study and learned that 10,000 additional condominiums were in the pipeline for the riverfront. Two casinos were planned and Harris will talk about that in a moment. And 5,000 parking spaces. And the challenge we saw was that, it was all happening without any kind of plan or strategic framework. And our concern was that if there wasn't a stronger framework for land use and zoning, that it wouldn't add up to the world-class waterfront we wanted. We were very careful observers of our neighbor to the North New York. And had studied Battery Park City as a key model. And recognized that the real estate deals, the individual building that occurred in Battery Park City, made Battery Park City a reality. But it was the plan that went before, the strategic framework that Battery Park City Corporation created that made it excellent. That created that extra increment of value. The public realm that New Yorkers enjoy was all part of that planning process. So we felt that a plan was necessary and engaged Penn Praxis to help lead an effort to rethink the Delaware River Waterfront, to ensure that public access, there's no public access currently on the industrial part of the river, that public access would become the organizing principle for redevelopment of the riverfront. So this is the roles we see that William Penn Foundation plays or foundations can play in cities. We really think that we have an opportunity to be a catalyst for change, that we as long-term stakeholders, we're not subject to election cycles, we're not beholden to anyone but ourselves, that we have the ability to be independent and be, again, a catalyst for change. We can also be a force for helping raise expectations. This was a big problem in Philadelphia. People were accustomed to not being involved in decision-making, assuming that someone else was going to do it, that deals were going to be made in a back room. And we also recognized that to make anything sustainable, to make any kind of policy change that was durable, that we had to build a political constituency for planning. I've said many times that the plan that Harris led, our goal wasn't to create a plan, it was to create a client for a plan, it was to create demand for a plan, create market for a plan. As an investor in the city, we also have the ability to make strategic investments. Philadelphia, like a lot of places, is divided into councilmatic districts, and public investment is usually just a matter of cutting up the pie. Every councilman gets their piece of the pie. So it's very hard for cities like that to be strategic. However, when we are able to contribute capital to investment decisions, it allows the city to use us as an excuse to be more strategic, to leverage our funding. And finally, as Donna will speak to in a moment, we are very interested in finding ways to institutionalize change. How do you make it last? How do you make it survive the inevitable change in mayoral and council administrations? So when it came to trying to promote a new way of thinking about the waterfront, we really made civic engagement the centerpiece of our work. And we did it for a couple of reasons. We felt that on the one hand, any plan that needs to be based on what people in the local communities want, to legitimize it, to make it credible. It's not about our plan. It's not about elected officials' plan. It's about the desires of the community. You also need, if you're gonna implement a plan, especially a long rain one, public support to drive a plan implementation. You also need that public support to transcend administrations when we began the planning process. We were at the end of one term of a mayor with another of mayor administration pending. How do you make sure that whatever planning you're doing is not rejected or put on the shelf as the work of the last administration? And finally, we're very interested in private stewardship. We're very interested in people owning the kind of investments we make and protecting them and conserving them. I'll close. I'm gonna turn it over to Harris, but I wanna talk about one internal tension within our foundation, which is a false choice, I really think, between policy and transactions. On one hand, there's some folks who feel that it's all about policy. You need policy from the top to flow down and direct and control change. There's another school of thought that says, well, actually it's transactions. It's development. It's projects that drive changes in behavior. So even in our organization, we've sort of gone back and forth about which way to focus. And to me, I think it really is sort of a false choice. That really, you need both. You need planning processes, long range planning processes to make sure you're making good decisions, that you're making strategic decisions, but you also need early action, specific concrete projects that demonstrate to people the kind of policy changes you're trying to achieve. So I sort of mushed these together to my personal model of citizen-based action-oriented planning. Now, if I was better at this, I would have arranged those words to create a cool acronym, but I don't. But I don't have that, but these are the ingredients. We will not fund a planning effort in Philadelphia that doesn't involve citizen engagement on one end and doesn't also involve capital for early action. We want plans that will be implemented. We want plans to move directly from planning into action. So that's the new model that we're using. I'm gonna segue now to Harris who's gonna talk about a specific model or demonstration of this process. Harris, you wanna come up? Thank you, Sean. That was a fantastic kind of overview and setting the table for the work that I'm about to show, so there we go. Okay, so I'm Harris Steinberg. I am the director of Penn Praxis, which is the applied research arm of the School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania. My job is to facilitate faculty and student collaboration on real-world projects across the five disciplines of the school, architecture, landscape architecture, city and regional planning, historic preservation and fine arts. As a result of this kind of unique organism or entity that we have at the University of Pennsylvania, I'm able to work with folks like Sean McKaney at the William Penn Foundation to try new ideas, particularly in the city of Philadelphia. And as he said before during his opening, he and the foundation were really looking for us to model a new process, new behavior, a new way of doing planning in Philadelphia. So what I'm gonna show you now is that test case. It's about the planning of the Central Delaware Riverfront, six and a half, seven miles of the waterfront from, for those of you who know Philadelphia, Allegheny Avenue at the north and Oregon at the south. It was an area of the city that was formerly what was known as, as Sean mentioned, the workshop of the world, a place where we made virtually every kind of type of ship, boat, train, hats, felt, you name it, chocolate. This was an intensely industrial waterfront. This is 1908. The city was expanding. We were building new park systems. We were building new subways that were really connecting parts of the city. This was the growing heart of the industrial metropolis. By the end of World War II, we were trying to envision what the future would be as we were beginning to think about the decline of the industrial city. This is a photograph from Ed Bacon's Better Philadelphia exhibition. For those of you who know the history of planning, 1947, he, Oskar Stonarov and Lewis Kahn create a exhibition three floors of Gimbal's department store in the heart of Philadelphia to really picture the future, the post-industrial city of Philadelphia. Captured the imaginations of Philadelphians. Over 385,000 Philadelphians visited this exhibition. School children's came through and it really created a whole generations of Philadelphians that were invested in the built environment. The legacy, however, was checkered, Bacon's legacy. Bacon became the planning director in Philadelphia, and while we created some extremely beautiful and fine grained historic restorations, we also tore apart parts of the city in a very 1960s kind of urban renewal way. So again, we had this history and legacy of looking ahead, but we also had a checkered past that we were dealing with. By the time we reached the 1990s and early 2000s, Sean talked about our charismatic mayor, Ed Rendell. He was wonderful in terms of galvanizing civic interest and trying to kind of bring Philadelphia back from the depths of bankruptcy, but he also was selling us visions like this along our waterfront. Believe it or not, this is a 400 car parking garage with a children's museum on top and then there would be a tram that would be on top of that. This was a Rube Goldberg that was never meant to survive and fortunately it didn't, but it gave us an opportunity as a civic citizens in Philadelphia to actually try to organize kind of against this kind of action. But by the time the millennium had come around, we had come very far from the world that Ed Bacon had given us. But there were lots of people who were doing good work in the meantime. I've used this term planners in exile. So while official Philadelphia had sort of clamped down on vision and had to become extremely transactional, you had going back into the 70s, Philadelphia Green, which was a project of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society that was greening vacant lots. You had the work of the Center City District, which Paul talked about. Many nonprofits and organizations, many of them funded by the William Penn Foundation, who were really doing the work on a case-by-case basis, on an issue-by-issue basis to try to mend the city back together and fight in many ways, not only the decline, but the disinterest of the central administration. So, Sean painted the picture extremely well in terms of what the central Delaware, and this is the project area that I'm going to kind of give you a case study of, what it looked like in the middle of 2000s. We had intense real estate speculation in a city that really had not seen a real estate speculation probably since the 1770s. This is not a, Philadelphia grows in about 50-year increments. It's a Quaker city. There's a lot of consensus. It's a great city in that respect. We don't necessarily destroy a lot of our past, but we don't do things quickly. And yet by the middle of the 2000s, not only the tenure tax abatement, but the funny money pre-crash was just creating a building frenzy and much of it here along the central Delaware. What's important about this image, the figure ground, if you look at this big gray kind of rope, if you will, of the highway, which is I-95 that cuts off traditional Philadelphia, which is the very dense, row house neighborhood of old Philadelphia, the river wards, as they're called, which are just to the west, or the up on the screen. And then what it would look like, vacant properties. This is, as one consultant like to say, the remains of the industrial glacier as it left Philadelphia. All of these big post-industrial sites, some as big as 200 acres, were really being held by folks who were just banking land waiting for a casino to be built there, because for about 20 years, the Philadelphia government as well, the state government had said we'd be getting casinos and they were just in cents holding the waterfront hostage. You'll also notice that New Jersey is to the south and we really don't show to the bottom of the page, that's the east, we don't show what that looks like, but you can imagine there is a city called Camden on the other side in Philadelphia, does have a relationship with it. Another interesting thing to note, and then I'll kind of move on, is that the district that we decided to kind of work within, that the foundation was interested in us doing this work, was within one councilmatic district. So while the river crosses geopolitical boundaries, in Philadelphia it's extremely important to be able to kind of work within the political structure where councilmen have a prerogative to really oversee any development that goes within their district. So this was a test case within one councilmatic district that really began to put pressure on one councilman to start to affect change. An extremely fractured landscape, I talked about I-95 and it's a pet peeve of mine, because this is really what separates our traditional, in many ways what the new urbanists think of as urbanism we've had here again since 1682 when William Penn landed. We have a dense walkable human-scaled environment that unfortunately Ed Bacon had cut off the riverfront from traditional Philadelphia with I-95 and its connections back to the center of the city. But we also had a fractured civic landscape because of lack of planning and because of lack of trust between citizens and agencies and a variety of different ABC organizations. This was a landscape that many people had controlled over different pieces but there was no vision to guide the whole. And as you'll see as I get into the story we're talking about an area of the city that was really beginning to experience significant change that had a tremendous industrial past but that's shifting demographics both in terms of the millennials and the baby boomers who are moving in, the new economies that we're beginning to take over, the historical underpinnings of the, not only the industry, but the colonial past were all kind of embedded in a rich zone of the city with no plan or vision to guide development. And so we had a waterfront that was becoming increasingly cut off from its citizenry. We had gated communities that were being built along the waterfront. We had of this five or six miles of waterfront, 95% of the properties were privately owned. So there was very little potential to get significant public access and yet that was a key objective of the planning process. And oh by the way we had the Pennsylvania state legislature passed legislation the dead of night on July 4th weekend of 2004 that there would be casino gambling in Pennsylvania. 14 casinos would be in the state, two would be in Philadelphia and oh by the way you Philadelphia can't tell us where they go and what they look like and how you get to them. Our state senator who drafted the legislation who was a Philadelphia decided Philadelphia would make it too difficult so he stripped us of our land use prerogative and we were being told that we'd get two casinos most likely down on the Delaware riverfront. You can imagine the toxic brew of civic unrest that that unleashed in terms of the citizenry particularly along the river wards. Sean talked about the 12,000 or the 10,000 rooms or condominiums that were being built 22 projects were being planned that read one might call it gesture along the central Delaware would have been the second tallest building between New York and Chicago on a part of the riverfront that maybe there are two-story row houses just behind it. I mean this was a crazy LSD induced pre-grade this was funny money at its funniest and yet we had to take it seriously. These projects were being entitled they were going through city council the land uses was changing rapidly as we were trying to kind of jump up onto this train that was that had no end in sight. So there was a call for a process a little bit of a backstory. Penn praxis the office that I run at the University of Pennsylvania which I'm the founding director of but it was founded by a former dean Gary Hack 12 years ago when I arrived with the kind of all the turmoil in the built environment that we've talked about a bit I began to create strategic relationships with our the mainstream media. Remember that those days when the newspapers actually meant something. These were very powerful institutions 12 years ago and the editorial pages in particular were extremely powerful and the relationship that I built between the design school at the University of Pennsylvania and the editorial board of the paper in conjunction with colleagues of ours at the University or experts in civic deliberation and civic engagement. We created we began to create a series of model processes that engage the citizens of Philadelphia the expertise of the University and the editorial and kind of outreach a potential of the newspaper to really begin to create a counter narrative to that which was being perpetuated by the establishment. And these projects which started out small became very powerful. We were it was almost as if the iron curtain was lifting and Philadelphians were coming to meetings like this in droves like this and even big numbers as we started to get moving that really tapped into the thirst for engagement in determining the future of our city. They had been fed up with being told what was good for them and what would work because we were so desperate for any development. So this was about the partnerships between Penn Praxis and the local press. In the summer of 2006 at the height of the kind of pre-great recession building frenzy as casinos were being kind of planned for the riverfront there was a call for a process. This was the end of one administration John Street who's the mayor that you see in the article right there. Didn't really care very much about planning but one of the councilmen whom he had become aligned with whose district the casinos and much of the development was being kind of done in really felt the need politically to have a process. And Sean and I sat in meetings with the mayor, the district councilmen and a number of their staff members. And I kid you not, this all came down to basically trying to outfox one of their political opponents. And so a mayor who was not known to do anything quickly within three months signed an executive order authorizing Penn Praxis to do the work that I'm about to show you. It didn't hurt that the William Penn Foundation was paying significantly to do the work. But Sean's both at the time, feather Houston was an extremely sophisticated political operative and she knew that unless the mayor signed an executive order authorizing the work she was not gonna give a dime to the process that he really had to demonstrate that this was something that the city wanted. The mayor signed the executive order and we were off and running. When I was asked to do the work by the chief of staff of the district councilmen in the first district of Philadelphia I said I would do it under the following conditions. Number one, this would be citizen driven in a city that had become the kind of bastion of back room deal making this was all gonna be about what are the citizens of Philadelphia interested and what are the values that are gonna drive this process. So we ultimately hosted 200 public meetings over 13 months that engaged over 4,000 citizens. So the vision that Australia was based on that level of civic engagement that it would be open and transparent that there would be no behind closed doors meetings. So any meetings of an advisory group which were formed by the executive order of the mayor would actually be open to the public. You could come to those meetings. You could speak at those meetings. We had folks come down from New York to talk to us to inform the public. This was very much about a process that was accountable, open and transparent. And finally the press would be involved. That would be my Trump card if you will that would ensure that this was an open and transparent process. With some of the funding from the William Penn Foundation we created a website called planfilly.com which has gone on to become a web journalism site actually run by professional journalists that cover the design and planning beat in Philadelphia. Many of these are journalists who were former professional journalists with our two local dailies. But for the first nine months of its existence it followed the process. It gave me the ability in public meetings to say, hey guys you can act however you want. You can shout and scream and act like idiots. But by the time you get back to your office this is all gonna be on the web because we're videotaping this and this is all part of the public record. So again this is all before you had cell phones with videos believe it or not. It's 2006. But that level of transparency was critical to enabling us to come follow through with a process that was valid. And it was an extremely fractious process. Casinos really bring out the best in people in terms of showing up to meetings. You can get great numbers but you also have to manage it in a way that really is authentic. I add to that longshoremen who are afraid of losing their jobs. People told me I should check my car before I get up in the morning. This was a, fillies are rough and tumble on the waterfront kind of town and this process certainly didn't want for that. On the other hand we worked with extremely talented professionals who helped manage the public conversation in a way that really helped distill tensions. And to be honest before we did any of this my staff and I went around to all the community groups all the different organizations essentially on a listening tour to introduce ourselves and to show that we weren't coming with any answers. We were really here to help facilitate a process and to move a dialogue forward. They were informed by best practices much like we're doing today we brought in people from elsewhere. I mean that's a way to kind of validate your thinking to show that other folks are doing it to learn from people around the country as well as from people within our city government so that there was a dialogue between what we're doing locally and what we're doing nationally and internationally. We created a set of principles and this in many ways is the foundation of the work that we do. These are values based. So the process that we use to get to these principles are all initially about eliciting values from the citizens who attend the public meetings what's important to them in terms of their city, their region, their waterfront, whatever the issues are. It's not about I wanna Walmart here or I wanna playground there it's really more fundamental and these become translated then ultimately through the filter of best practices into a set of planning principles that are backed up with a lot of data and language but these become the language that the citizens, the elected officials, the press and the public use to discuss the work it's how we judge the work and it really becomes an important part of the legacy of the process. We hosted a charrette at a workshop with architects and planners that came from around the world Peter Lats from Germany, Walter Hood from Berkeley many of our local and talented planning community. You can see the kind of response we got in terms of when we would show the results of that charrette in real time we literally kind of the designers walked on to the stage after three days of being at the Seaport Museum and presented their ideas. Some of the ideas that emerged had to do with Sinking I-95 but also re-engaging with the industrial pass and naturalizing the edges of the riverfront. They were wildly kind of in many ways antithetical to the development proposals that we had seen before but these reflected not only the vision and values of the citizens but the best practices that we had heard. And the press loved it. So much of what this process really is about is the partnership between the public and the press in moving an issue. If you've got an authentic process if it really is based on openness and transparency you're going to have the support of the press which is important obviously in terms of opinion makers but it also validates the work of the citizenry and I think the reciprocal relationship between the public and the press is something to be very mindful of. Casinos continued to dog the issue the Philadelphia city planning commission actually had to approve casinos on the waterfront as we were doing this work so you can imagine how fractious it was but ultimately from this we came up with a very simple series of systems that we used to put forward a vision for the waterfront. We were careful to say this is not a plan. There are no takings involved in this we're not planning streets but we are reflecting the will of the people of Philadelphia who participated in this process to create a vision for the future. So the first was really to create a grid of streets over what was that no man's land 1100 acres almost the size of center city Philadelphia that would break down the scale of the street of the scale of the area connect back into the city and become part of a future network of transportation. A network of green spaces trails edges parks and green connector streets. So where there is currently about eight acres of green space and 1100 acres we were proposing about 330 acres just redressing the balance and trying to through a very sort of strategic alignment of waterfront trails as well as larger park spaces give the adjoining neighbors 60,000 people who live near the riverfront a 10 minute walk to a major park along the water. And finally the rest was development. There was lots of pressure on me to determine what was actually going to go in the different parcels along the waterfront and where the casinos would be built. And I said when William Penn came in 1682 and laid down a grid here he didn't know that casinos were gonna be built here. He just said these are this is how we're gonna move about the city we're gonna do the same thing we're not gonna be bogged down by land use because that can stop the debate. We're gonna talk about what the public realm is what the quality of the streets are what the scale of the parks are because that's gonna be the lasting gift that we're gonna give to the city and then uses can change they're gonna be uses that we haven't thought of that will eventually come. We went back to the citizens we had this iterative feedback loop it was really a continual process of saying did we get it right? Did we hear it right? Developers finally started to kind of take us seriously and began to mount a fairly sophisticated behind closed doors attack on the planning process which you see here is a picture of me presenting a version of the plan before it's released to the Philadelphia city planning commission just for information only which you have a former director of the city planning commission who had gone over to the dark side who was trying to discredit the process as not being valid because we were essentially goring sacred cows. We were bringing them we were forcing them to come out into the sunlight to talk about projects to talk about the public good and this was rattling some fairly powerful people. But again, the press responded and created what I call a civic force field around this process. Again, not only when you've got 4,000 people that participated in the process when you have about 172 different articles over a 12 month period that are focusing positively on a process like this it's very difficult to kind of deflate it and the press played an incredible role in that. So by the time I presented this process and many people had obviously seen it as it was going along with the final unveiling at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in November of 2007 1,500 people come to see a plan. I mean, imagine that it's just an absolutely staggering concept but by the end people were standing there was a standing ovation for again, a plan and the wonderful part about it not that there were so many people there but it was almost like a convention you had the Longshoremen you had the college educated you had the working class this really had tapped into a whole cross-section of Philadelphia's socioeconomic strata that showed the power of civic engagement in the planning process. I'm gonna quickly show you some of the before and after shots that we showed Philadelphians because ultimately visuals really help drive home kind of what we can do. This is our, what's called Penn's Landing which is not where Penn actually landed because it's landfill but it's now a, this is where that parking lot with the museum on top and the tram was gonna be and that stanchions over there the Stonehenge remains of would have been an aerial tram to Camden. The most important part of this are the ramps that where I-95 is. So we imagined a city that actually took down I-95 I jokingly would say they can let it go through New Jersey because that's essentially where the main north south route is anyhow and give the city back this very gradual and gracious kind of connection between river and street it's only about an eight foot rise which right now feels like it's a 600 foot gap but create an elegant urbanism at the shores of the Delaware. At the northern end of the district we have the former Port Richmond rail yards one of the busiest rail yards in the world during the workshop of the World Days. How could you imagine the extension of Philadelphia over or under I-95 into a more perhaps kind of industrial or kind of office complex? How do you, how do we deal with the edges of I-95 and the areas underneath it in more progressive ways that could manage stormwater, mediate the sound and create positive amenities as opposed to the gash between the communities that we have now. How do we engage some of these industrial relics that really are just kind of hanging out there at the northern end of the districts but couldn't one time become really the foundation for a new community? Here at Penn's Landing which has really languished for 40 years with a succession of different over the top developments we essentially said create a great lawn let the city come up to the edges of it and create what like in any of the great cities of the world just a beautiful edge to the city at the river. We then went on as Sean said with the support of a new mayor to create an action plan. So we didn't stop at just the vision. A new administration came in and braced this having 1500 people at a convention sitting with a standing ovation does get the attention of a new mayor and we were able to with continued funding from the William Penn Foundation come up with an action list of 10 things you've got to do in the next 10 years which they have done remarkably. The first was to actually reform the disgraced waterfront corporation that had really failed to develop the waterfront. You can see the banner headline that that engendered over there. So again the relationship between action, press, public and policy. The impact has been profound. The mayor not only changed the waterfront corporation has made it an open and transparent organization. There has been the creation of an advocacy group that meets every month to ensure that the city is actually following the vision. It's called the Central Delaware Advocacy Group. And the new waterfront corporation has prepared and adopted a new waterfront plan which use very closely to the values and vision of the civic vision. So you can see that the work is continuing. There are a number of early action projects. Many of them have been funded by the William Penn Foundation, a new peer which is on the right, that's the left on your screen, by James Cornerfield Operations, the designer of the High Line in New York who's a member of our faculty. One acre peer at the foot of Race Street that is now an extremely elegant kind of urban oasis. There are some of these other early actions that the Foundation is funding. All of which really are meant to demonstrate that it is not just about planning, it's not just long range, but it's tangible and it's going to serve the needs of those who are adjacent. Some of the lessons learned, I'm not gonna go into them, this is the last slide, but I think you get the idea that the relationship between a Foundation that can take the long view, in the case of the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Praxis that was seen as an honest broker, the role of the citizens, the role of the press, all of which came together, right time, right place, right actors to make a lasting change on the city of Philadelphia. Donna's now going to take it home in terms of how the city and the current administration has institutionalized, internalized and really made this the new normal for what was a, I'll use the word Wild West, which maybe I shouldn't because I'm in San Antonio, on the central Delaware, is now what we do kind of in a quite civil fashion. Donna, yes. I don't like going last, because I always get shortchanged in time. I have about 20 minutes, so are we good? Okay, good. I think I'm gonna ask Sean to teach in the Institute the history of Philadelphia. I really liked that, that was really good, thanks. I'm the director of the Philadelphia Citizens Planning Institute and I'm here to talk about the CPI, as we call it, citizen planner model for building a constituency for planning. Considering that CPI is a staff of one, that's me, it may be useful to share with you where I'm coming from. I'm not a planner, professionally I'm an architect. I'm not from Philadelphia, though I live there now and I do love where I live. I'm not a Planning Commission staff member, though I'm a consultant and I do work with staff, so when I say we, that's what I'm referring to, all this to say that coming into this was somewhat of an outsider perspective and I've been learning right along with all the people in the Institute. And also I have a long history of working as a civic volunteer and making fish heads to wear in parades and I don't just collect degrees, I really do love learning. When I came on as a consultant to the Planning Commission in 2010, I was told the intent of the CPI was to be the outreach and education entity of the Planning Commission. Go. Here's a list of some of the outcomes that were identified before I got there when they got their funding through our initial William Penn Foundation grants. And some key words there, I'm not gonna read this, is better informed citizenry, expand relationships, increase capacity to educate, and increase citizen support. Before I talk about CPI, what it is and about the outcomes for this kind of citizen engagement, you need to understand the context. What was going on in the city that made informing the public and gaining support so important. And that was called the integrated planning and zoning process. And that actually won a national planning award for best practice last year. Prior to 2010, the last major revision of the original 1933 zoning code was done in 1962 and the last comprehensive plan was done in 1960. So they were both a little bit out of date. And here's what I'm showing. After a 2007 voter referendum calling, I think 80% of the voters called for zoning reform. And the statistics here show the extensive public participation that was done over a four year reform period. And I can't get into the whole zoning code reform effort, but from a public participation perspective, what's important about the new code are new procedures which codify the role of citizens in the development approval process, which promotes much greater predictability and transparency in the process. And two of those are called registered community organizations and civic design review. The planning initiative branded as Philadelphia 2035 started in 2010 and focuses on the physical development of the city over the next 25 years. The city wide vision was mostly a one year planning process and was driven almost entirely by planning commission staff. It's important to note that this was a key platform of Mayor Nutter's office who recognizes the importance of long range planning and was also supported by the creation of a new deputy mayor of economic development and planning position. Also important was that this was designed to be a really inclusive process. And I think you can read that with an outside advisory board comprised of some key thought leaders in the city, a city working group which was composed of all city agencies and incorporated the work of a lot of previous plans such as green 2015 by the parks department, green works by the mayor's office of sustainability, green city clean waters by the water department and also the Delaware Riverfront Action Plan. There were for public outreach, there were two rounds of four meetings each. A public meetings held in various parts of the city. In the first round, we used a mapping exercise to solicit big ideas on different types of development projects such as parks and trails, rapid transit expansion, and they had little key game pieces there to make their maps. We asked table teams to identify their top five ideas and then name their map to reflect those priorities. And there you can see Walk of Delphia. There was lots of other very funny names. In the second round, attendees looked at three maps, each one reflecting the projects that corresponded with the three big themes and that's how the comprehensive plan was organized around those themes, thrive, connect, and renew. They were given a budget and some play money that would pay for only half of the total cost of the projects on each of those maps and they had to decide as a group which one of those projects to fund. So that was a really good exercise in prioritizing with limited budgets. Prior to our big celebration to adopt the city-wide vision, the public had another opportunity to provide feedback on the draft plan online as well as the many city agencies we worked with. Here you can also see participants from the CPI pilot and spring class being recognized with their certificates. And I think that meeting wasn't as impressive as years of 1500 people, but I think there was close to 300 people at that. Philadelphia 2035 was designed as two phases. The first one is the city-wide vision which I just talked about and the next one is the smaller scale district level series of plans which is happening now over the next five to six years and these are shorter range strategies and recommendations that are about five to 10 years looking in the future that tie back to the city-wide comprehensive vision. There will be 18 district plans. You can see how the city's divided there. Generally three done per year and these are also again done and housed by staff. It also includes a parcel by parcel surveying of every single parcel in the city, something that's never been done before. I think that's really amazing. It applies the city-wide goals and recommends capital projects, land use changes and it guides remapping, a zoning remapping which is our key tool in planning. And it also creates a framework for future neighborhood plans. For each district plan, there's a steering committee and that's comprised of community stakeholders, business, institutions, residents and representatives from city agencies as well as city council offices. There are three public meetings. The first one is a mapping exercise to identify areas of strengths and concerns and the second one is a prioritization exercise based on their feedback from the first meeting and data research. And then the third is an open house where the draft plan presents key recommendations and we get again people's feedback on that. The bottom photo shows the largest crowd we had at any of these meetings, almost 200 people for University Southwest. The district plans uses those three big themes from the city-wide vision to apply specific project and land use recommendations and you can see all these completed plans on the FILLA 2035 website. In the plan, also there's an implementing action section that lists all the city agencies and other organizations that will need to collaborate to actually implement and get each recommendation done. Last year marked the adoption of the two Metropolitan Center plans, the Central and University Southwest and the sixth graduating class of CPI and the mayor attended that as he does almost all of our celebrations. You can see his little head there circled in red. He's a big promoter. And we also had our first graphic progress report on the city-wide vision. We handed that out. It's a yearly calendar, but it compiles progress on that city-wide vision. How are we doing from all city agencies? So how do we get the word out? You're probably all familiar with those kind of traditional ways of getting the word out. We have a planning commission has an email list of about 3,000 plus names that get regular updates. For the University Southwest plan, we used two new tools to try to get a younger demographic involved. And one of those, and maybe some of you have heard of this text as in, which was designed by Code for America or otherwise known as Peace Corps for Geeks. And it asks specific questions that can be answered by texting. And those questions were posted on buses, on bus shelters and train stations. And we had 700 respondents for three questions. And over 500 of those responses was for the transit-related question. Big surprise. And Community Planet was an online game that you advanced through different levels. It had questions and projects specific to that University Southwest district. And you could also promote ideas for projects. And it resulted in one idea being voted as the winner. And they actually won actual money of $500 to implement that idea. So kind of a crowdfunding idea. So now you've heard an overview very quickly of the two components, two components of the integrated planning and zoning process and a little bit about our public outreach. Now I'm gonna talk about the third and I think the most important part, which is the Citizens Planning Institute. You can see how there might be a need to help the general public explain and advocate for these new planning and zoning initiatives that were new in the city. And CPI was designed to expand the constituency for planning and build capacity for conversations about planning and development in every neighborhood, not just those neighborhoods that had the most resources. CPI's become an umbrella brand for a growing number of outreach and education activities, but at its core, it's a series of classes. We offer two sessions per year, one in the spring and one in the fall. We receive between 60 and 100 applications for 30 seats and the course now is composed of three hour evening classes. There are three core classes. You see on the screen here for the fall course last year and three electives with topics that change in each series. An optional Saturday workshop and a course project which could be an action plan for a particular project. In last fall's session, we also heard from a graduate of the program and I'd like to do more of that, bringing back graduates for a little peer to peer learning to share lessons learned and their successes. After our pilot course, which was just those three core classes, based on feedback, we added elective classes which change in each session. And participants need to take at least two of these electives to earn their certificate. Last fall, we had an elective on vacant land, which was very timely because we had a national conference in Philadelphia on reclaiming vacant land. And I should mention too, all of our instructors are volunteer. They come from public and private and nonprofit sectors. Some of the other electives we've had in the past is commercial corridor development, that's always very popular, preserving a sense of place in neighborhoods about historic preservation, greening Philadelphia through better design, making your organization more effective because again, most of the participants are working as volunteers. So how do they build capacity in neighborhood level? And this spring I'm gonna offer electives on riverfront development and parkland stewardship. And good planning begins with good data, which is looking at kind of DIY mapping and how you use data. In designing the institute, I did dozens of interviews with staff, other city agencies and neighborhood civic leaders to learn what the needs were. What did they think the gaps were in information and how this new institute should be structured as well as research on other academies across the country. For the learn to plan, plan to change workbook that they get at the very beginning, I borrowed a DIY planning approach I actually found on San Antonio's Planning Commission's website, which is very interesting. And I did credit San Antonio's effort there. It's called the goals and strategies report and there's a number of those reports that have actually been done in Philadelphia now. So I was very excited about that. A key part of classroom learning is the interactive nature of classes. There are presentations by our volunteer instructors, but group exercises in each class make space for learning from each other and practice in teamwork, empathy and role-playing. New for last fall, we were able to offer a number of scholarships by making a champion level of support available on the application. And that meant that person paid for one other person's core course fees. And last fall we had 24 neighborhoods represented in the class and there are about 165 unofficial neighborhoods in Philadelphia from 11 of those 18 planning districts I showed earlier. At the upper left is a table team who won a fake $10,000 check for their doggy park action plan. And that action planning is a really key thing I like to promote that for their course project because it gets them thinking about planners. What's the first step we need to take? What are the resources we need? Who do we need to talk to? And it's, I want to make it fun, but that's how they get practice for the real money. A national survey on citizen planning academies was conducted in 2012 by Lynn Manderano at Temple University School of Environmental Design. And you can see the five locations there at the top of the slide. The survey included over 50 questions and I should mention Philadelphia had the highest response rate. The study hasn't been published yet but I received partial results from the Philadelphia respondents and you can see some of the key questions there I thought were significant. Important feedback is how having exposure to real people working in city agencies breaks down that us and them barrier, us in the city. And a big shift in how participants perceive and feel a part of city government and one quotation I like to cite is, I now know there are good people doing amazing work for our city. I have a student intern now doing more to update the research and she's found about 19 comparable citizen planning academies across the country. So how do we measure what we're doing? How do we measure success and outcomes? And that's really the feedback that we get from our participants and the success of the program depends on our participants what they take away and how they use it, how they're able to use and how they stay connected. So here's some of those responses back. I have many, many of these. Some of them are on the website. An important part of the program is accepting participants from geographically diverse parts of the city for each round so they learn more about the city as a whole and that's why I particularly like that first quotation. My sense of community expanded to include the whole city. So they're not just thinking about their neighborhoods isolated, they're thinking about how what benefits that neighborhood is gonna benefit the entire city. Graduates are invited to return and take electives for any seats not taken by new students and at that time they return a six month check-in so I can update their information and learn about what they're doing in their neighborhoods and I show this slide because I think it's a continuous it's a process of continuous improvement. I feel really strongly about maintaining a high quality in terms of what we are delivering in content and instructors, the participants. In each class I have a pretty extensive evaluation form that I hand out and we take action on. I use focus groups and surveys so it's a rich source of improvement. Good planning hopefully leads to real projects as we've been talking about. Last month we held a celebration called the power of the plan, making it happen and this featured storytelling of at this event four projects that show how a plan was essential to make their project come about and I had this brainy idea instead of having people stand up here and talk that I would have them stand on hot button, those are actually coffee tables and they had 10 minutes and we talked longer than 10 minutes, I made them get off the coffee table. And we had close to, well we had over 200 people come to that event, so again. At this event the two year progress report calendar was distributed and the August month in this calendar features progress on the Citizens Planning Institute and you can see that we've had 210 participants to date representing 17 of the 18 planning districts and those participants influence over 400 different neighborhood based organizations because many of these people serve on more than one organization and we've also had over 65 volunteer instructors. Some of those come back again and again, I don't know why but they seem to love it and it also listed some of the many occupations of graduates and that's really interesting because it truly reflects the diversity of the city as a whole. Here's graduates from last year's two sessions. So what do graduates do? What does citizen planners do? They serve on some of our district plans during committees, they help our staff out with facilitation at public meetings. They've sponsored community zoning workshops to educate others about the new zoning code and they generally act as planning ambassadors in all corners of the city. Also on our website, Citizen Planning Institute, we have a grads in action page which is kind of a blog like page that highlights stories of what grads are doing and that's a terrific evidence of the impact of the program. Joyce Smith, she was in our pilot class and she's kind of our poster child like trotter out at all kinds of events. She demonstrates the empowerment aspect of CPI. They're dealing with really high vacancy in her neighborhood in a two block area and she's just gone through a partnering with a non-profit to get a really intensive, extensive neighborhood plan done that is attracting developers as we speak. And Duane Drummond is a young man from Mantua, a particularly troubled neighborhood where there was no civic organization and he became the new president of a new civic after he graduated. And just as San Antonio has, this neighborhood was recently named one of the five national promise zones and Duane and another CPI grad from Mantua went to DC and met the president as part of that. So that's a cool story. Somebody said to me at one of the public meetings, why should I care about 2035? I'll be dead by then. The importance of planning, as we all know, is the slow but steady steps of implementation. It's not the end goal. It's not from here to 2035. So to create the city we want for our children, we have to start today. And when we worked on the city-wide vision, we hosted a poster contest and it generated 170 submissions from 18 schools of fourth and seventh and 11th graders. And they did posters illustrating their vision of the city. And you can see the winners in the 2035 vision plan. I think that's cool. So, oh, it's fast. This is my last slide. We'll be marking the eighth session, this spring application start March one. Thank you very much for bringing us. I've really enjoyed meeting a lot of you and I hope this was helpful. We have about 20 minutes for a question answer and I wanna start off with a question to our panel which is our three speakers from Philadelphia. We took all of them with us today to go to the mayor's state of the city address and to get them a little bit more grounded in what some of the identified issues are and accomplishments that the community is rallying around. And one thing that the mayor said during the state of the city was that as we work together on these initiatives, we know it won't happen quickly. Time was a recurring theme in all these presentations from 1776 to 1876 to 1976 to this question of the pressures of time when you're being told we don't have time to go through a planning process, to the idea of engaging citizens over a period of time to get them prepared to really participate. But one thing came up in each of your presentations and I was just hoping you could recap for this group because it's something I hear very frequently in San Antonio. So you have the understanding that it takes time to plan and time to execute. But then you also have this notion that well, why should I care what's happening in 2035 and why should I work on a plan when I may never see it implemented and if it doesn't get implemented, then you get this sense of disappointment and what's been called planning fatigue. So with that notion of time and the requirements of time for a plan to be implemented, could each of you address what you think you do in your funding and your practice to combat the sense of planning fatigue in the citizens that you're relying on to make these plans reality? I suppose I touched on it a little bit already, but I'm a reformed city planner myself. I should have revealed that earlier. And like a lot of people, I'm very impatient to see change growing up in Philadelphia. People would always say, oh, Philly, you have such great potential. And I'm like, I wanna see the potential now. So we, as I said earlier, we've really committed that if we're gonna invest in planning, we're also gonna invest in capital, that we really believe that if you don't have early action right away as part of your planning process, you really lose the momentum. You really lose the energy. And as Harris said, I think it's really all going to be, you need to show people, people believe the change they can see, right? And so by having projects emerge immediately, that sort of demonstrate the kind of things you're talking about, I think that's the best way to convince people that planning has a purpose. Again, it takes years to unfold, but I really think you have to show folks from the very beginning what you're talking about with physical investment. Do you wanna, guys, wanna add to that or? Yeah, Leela, I think there's maybe two parts to the question. One is kind of temporal and time and investment that people are gonna make in actually envisioning the future and what role do they play. And then the second piece, which I think is not stated, but is how valid is that engagement? Do they really feel like they're part of it? So I think when folks feel like they're actually an authentic part of the conversation and the process and their voices being heard, it really, I think, changes the dynamic and it becomes less cynical. And more kind of not only what are we working to, but how can we make things happen quickly? What's interesting about San Antonio is that you have a tremendous legacy of planning. What we learned today when we walked the river walk with you and today was that over 100 years ago, this was envisioned. And you are the inheritors, much like we in Philadelphia, of a tremendous legacy of planning. So you have no further to look than, you know, there's no place like home. Not many cities have that. And I think that was a wonderful starting point that we had in Philadelphia, is that we could look to William Penn's plan, we could look to the creation of Fairmount Park, we could look to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. We knew that there were these milestones in time where folks were thoughtful, where they laid the template for generations to come and that we could now add our chapter to that ongoing narrative. What was important though, was to really create a place where people felt that they were authentically part of the process and an open and transparent process where it wasn't just a formal check off on a list of things that had to be in order for a project to happen. Add to that then the William Penn Foundation's imperative that there has to be early action. And I think you have a recipe for a successful engagement that combines both long range planning because you need that to do anything that's really honest, but also quick action that gets people in a 24 hour news cycle, the kind of results they need. What I think that the importance of an education based program like this, it's a reality check. And I have instructors that come in and they can share those stories of what it actually takes to get something built. Like the Franklin Payne Skate Park that was part of this celebration last month, that was a 15 year process. So it tempers some of the expectations, which is a good thing. But it's also at a neighborhood based level, I like to say, you know, radio station WIIFM, does everybody know what that is? What's in it for me? You have to address your constituency at your neighborhood. You have to take action again, just to repeat, you have to, there's no action too small, but do something small and do it well and do it successfully. And that will lead to the next step. So planning is just one small step after another. So one step at a time, celebrate it, move on to the next step. I think that's really key for the ordinary citizen to understand what planning takes. Thank you for your responses to that question. Do we have any other questions? This is a cordless mic. So if there's anyone in the audience who has a question, I'll bring the mic back there to you. And also if you could just state your name, we are doing this firm now cast and try to be clear in your question so that everyone can hear it. Hi, thank you all for coming down to San Antonio. I was actually born in Philadelphia. I lived there until 93 and moved down here for 20 years. My name is Renee Gonzalez. I'm a student studying public administration at San Antonio College here. Reports and presentations have been recently released stating that our downtown is operating at a 67% occupancy rate, 67 between 70 somewhere around there. Oh, so that's basically one in every three buildings are vacant and in fact there are entire blocks of our downtown where the entire, where a multitude of lots are actually vacant. So I was wondering in your planning efforts, have you come across this issue? And if you have, are there any prescriptive alternatives? Are there any steps or measures that we could take that the city could take to sort of address this issue? Thank you. Yeah, so Philadelphia has experienced a vacancy of that scale. In the early late 80s and early 90s, there was an office tower building boom and it created a tremendous amount of square footage of new class A office spaces and it basically emptied out every old office building downtown. And so Center City had a lot of dark buildings in it. And that was one of the motivations of the 10 year tax abatement. It essentially initially was motivated to subsidize the conversion of all of those empty class B class C office buildings into residences. It was actually most of the new construction, new condominium construction that occurred in Philadelphia was actually not new construction. It was the conversion of old office buildings to residences. And that repopulated downtown. I mean, I think I'm trying to remember the exact number, but I think that produced that problem program alone produced about 25,000 new residents in downtown. And, you know, that makes a huge impact on any city. Now that's Center City. Philadelphia also suffers from vacancy outside of downtown. It's a city that in 2000s, we for the first time mapped all the vacant land in Philadelphia and discovered to our surprise about 40,000 vacant lots in the city. Now everyone was aware there's vacancy in the city. Everyone knew a vacant lot in their neighborhood or were aware of near parts of the city that were not doing so well, but until we mapped it all, no one had any idea of the scale of the problem that essentially we had that much vacancy in the city. So, you know, a number of strategies have been employed when Mayor Street took office. One of the first things he initiated was the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, which is designed to basically remove vacant buildings or blading structures in the city. I don't remember, do you know how many structures were demolished? Huge number of structures. And then other programs were developed to sort of come in behind that and stabilize that land. Harris mentioned the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. They created a national model called Philadelphia Green, basically took possession of that land and turned lots of those vacant lots into private parks, open spaces for neighborhoods, community gardens. It's a huge problem, though, still. I mean, you know, that program has addressed a small fraction of the vacancy in the city. It's something we are struggling with for sure, but there's no easier or simple answer or solution to it. What's, fortunately, what's happening for Philadelphia is that for the first time in 60 years, our population is growing again. Philadelphia was two million people in 1960. Two million people in 1960. We did a comprehensive plan that said we'd grow to 2.5 million and we declined to 1.5. You know, it's one of those things where Ed Bacon was leading this great planning effort and didn't even realize we were standing on the edge of a cliff. But since 1960, the population declined to 1.5 million and in 2010, for the first time, we started seeing population recovery. So our hope is that, you know, we are now projecting, I think, 100,000 new residents. Yeah, not a huge amount, but again, knowing what 25,000 people did to downtown, 100,000 new residents in the city can really help address incrementally over a long time, absorb some of that vacant land. Thank you. Beautiful. Okay. Any more? No problem. Any more questions? Hi, my name is Mark Cullin. I'm an architect in San Antonio. I noticed that there was such a substantial amount of planning issue there. I'm wondering if you had yielded a project that actually settled your pet peeve at the population and I'm able to make it across the highway. Why don't you take that one? We have not settled that one yet, unfortunately. The current master plan for the central Delaware that was done on the heels of the vision actually shows a cover over a portion of the highway, which is about a quarter of a billion dollar project. So whether or not it gets done, I think, is a question, but there at least is the intent to do a piece of it. The irony, of course, is that federal highways are being rebuilt every 50 years and this highway is at the end of its lifespan in about 20 years. So we really have the opportunity as a city now to call the question, are we gonna rebuild it in kind or do we take a different attack in terms of how we manage traffic through the city? And the current administration has just not been interested in having that conversation. That doesn't mean we won't have it and we have an election coming up in a year and a half and I'm hoping that that becomes part of the public conversation. So there is the vision or the idea of burying I-95, but one of Harris's also other recommendations in the civic vision was to reconnect and extend the grid of the city to the river and we're actually doing that. We have six new connector street projects underway. We're actually building new streets under I-95 to the riverfront. We're trying to come up with innovative design to improve the appearance of the underside of the elevated viaduct, new lighting, public art. So who knows how much to bury I-95? Is it 20 billion? Is it 30 billion? We don't know, but we're not letting that. We didn't pin all our hopes on burying I-95. The civic vision doesn't succeed or fail if I-95 isn't buried. We have a series of different strategies to deal with getting people to the river and we're actually building those right now. We were chastened by the big dig as we were. Doing our work and the then deputy secretary for transportation in Pennsylvania was breathing down my neck at every line that we drew to make sure that we didn't show. She had previously worked for the Massachusetts Transportation Authority. It didn't show anything that appeared to take a side in terms of burying it or not, but it remains a big issue. The decking that Harris talked about, it's the great lawn, actually, that Harris referred to. That project is, as Harris said, is a $250 million project. We were exploring a combination of federal loans through the TIFIA program, the same program that Rahm Emanuel used to build the $100 million Riverwalk in Chicago. We're also looking at a combination city and state bonding to generate the revenue for that. That decking won't preclude covering the rest of I-95, but it will create that most critical connection between the very heart of Center City and the river's edge. Well, we're right at about 7.30. We'll take one more question here before we go. So I live in an inner city neighborhood and although I love a lot of what I see going on, the river reach improvements, linear creekways, especially in the area of public spaces and green spaces, I also know that there's the programs that are designed to bring back the decade of downtown are also causing a lot of stress for these inner city neighborhoods and things are moving very quickly and people are concerned about those changes and gentrification and so forth. But you don't wanna arrest the development necessarily because it may not come back. I mean, you may end up going through then a lengthy period of decline or stagnation. So how do you balance? We're just now talking about looking at our comprehensive plan. And yet we have all kinds of things already happening. Buildings being demolished, parks, the Hemisphere Park, redevelopment project, big projects. And so how do we catch up this public process to what's already in the pipeline and going on without saying stop and then potentially creating, shooting ourselves in the foot to a degree? So we're looking for some free consulting advice here from the folks in Philadelphia. You start where you are, right? I mean, it's about a conversation and it's about being transparent about what's going on and bringing as many people who care about that together. I mean, I don't know, there isn't any magic bullet. But I'm from an education proponent background and I think you've gotta start the conversation with good information and get away from the emotional issues if possible. And that's based on good information and data and being honest. This is our history. This is where we are. And now today going forward, what do we want it to be? And that's a collaborative and inclusive process. And there aren't any easy answers. Yeah, no, I think Donna hit the nail on the head. One of the stories I told this morning at the breakfast is that I think one of the most powerful components of an authentic civic engagement process is the ability to create an informed electorate so that your job as a citizen really is to understand the issues. What are the tensions? What are the trade-offs? And be treated as an adult, not necessarily as somebody who's just being told what's gonna happen. And if you enter into that kind of honest dialogue with the elected officials and policymakers, you can then offer informed advice and you can help with the decision-making. Then it becomes something that everybody owns. That's not easy work, but it's really, as far from what we've seen, the only way you can move an authentic process that starts with, as Sean just whispered, am I a fax on the ground? Where are we now? What do we know? What are the issues? And how can we begin to make sense of it in a way that meets multiple value sets because we're not a monolithic culture? We're all friends here, right? I can tell the real story, right? So this process looked very orderly, didn't it? One thing led after another. The funny thing is, and I don't wanna tell on Donna, but we actually started the zoning first. In 2007, did you reveal that secret? And then we realized, oh geez, we don't have a comprehensive plan. So we had to actually start a whole comprehensive planning process in a very quick accelerated way to catch up to the zoning that was already happening. So I give a lot of credit to our mayor and our deputy mayor, Alan Greenberger, who has trained and architect longtime activist in the city who actually went into the administration and pulled together in an amazing comprehensive plan very quickly to catch up to the zoning process. It's not tidy, it's not perfect. There are plenty of times when Harris and I would say, I wish we could just stop everything and give us six months to catch up. The casinos were a huge issue, so divisive for Philadelphia, and yet we had to deal with that too. I mean, there's probably few political issues that have racked the city recently than the casino issue, but we had to sort of say it's a fact on the ground, it's a reality, we can't be positive or negative, we just have to accept it and manage it the best way we can and build a process around it. As soon as we took one side of the other, we would have been finished. We'd have lost either credibility with the community or credibility with the administration. So yeah, I wish I had a great answer for you. If you come up with one, let us know. I mean, we'd love to... But I think it's also important what Harris was talking about as far as meeting design and process, when you've got emotional issues, is how do you design a meeting that's gonna accommodate everybody's viewpoint without killing each other? And in Philadelphia, we kill each other. I mean... So you need help and bring in an outside third, a neutral party if you think you need it. You have to know the stakeholders, you need to know the people in the room to design a process that's appropriate for that. But I wanna thank all of our speakers and thank all of you for coming. And I especially wanna thank our sponsors for today's program, the San Antonio River Authority, AIA, San Antonio, Bear County. I know there are board members and representatives from those organizations here this evening. And this is not an opportunity to find a program that we're gonna follow to the letter that's gonna help us do this in San Antonio. It's an opportunity to start a discussion about where we wanna go and find the authentic process that works here in San Antonio and capitalizes on our resources the way their plan has capitalized on Philadelphia's resources. So thank you all for coming this evening and a big thank you to our panelists. Thank you.