Harris Steinbeg | Planning is in the air

Planning is in the air.

With Penn's plan for the east-campus expansion, the Centennial District plan in Parkside, a score of community-based plans by neighborhood organizations across the city and PennPraxis' work along the central Delaware, planning in Philadelphia seems to be experiencing a renaissance.

Indeed, Philadelphia's presumptive-mayor Michael Nutter has made city-planning and zoning reform one of the top priorities in his incoming administration.

And it's none too soon.

Over the past 30 years we have seen the gradual diminishming of public oversight and investment in the quality of our streets, parks and public spaces. We've largely handed over this responsibility to individual developers without the city providing a comprehensive framework that takes into account the impact of development on traffic, public spaces, streetscapes and quality of life.

Part of the excitement around Penn's eastward expansion is the opportunity to reconnect University City with Center City. Penn's plans laudably extend the street life already established by the University with the Left Bank and WXPN projects and ties into the Brandywine Realty Trust's Cira Centre South project - an $800 million mixed-use development between Market and Chestnut streets and 29th and 30th streets that includes the adaptive reuse of the main post office at 30th Street as an office building for the IRS.

Last Tuesday, Brandywine's parking and traffic-management plans at Cira South were questioned at a public hearing of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. The Planning Commission's job is to offer advice on how buildings fit into their surroundings and the impact that buildings will have on existing roads and other infrastructure. The Commission also helps guide development that adds to the great tapestry that is Philadelphia's urban landscape.

At the Brandywine hearing, however, the Commission was shooting in the dark. There is no comprehensive plan for this part of Philadelphia (for any part for that matter, as the last city-wide plan was completed in 1960), so their comments and questions weren't grounded in want the city wants the 30th Street area to be.

The commissioners debated the number of parking spaces required for the IRS's 5,000 emloyees and what percentage of the employees would take mass transportation to work - all good questions. But without serious traffic studies, urban-design guidelines and plans to inform the discussion, it might as well have been cocktail party conversation. It was that subjective.

The irony is that more than 80 percent of the people who work in Brandywine's original Cira Centre building use mass transit to get to work. So while the Planning Commission felt that Brandywine did not have enough parking spaces planned for the IRS employees, they were missing the forest for the trees. Here is a site across the street from the second-busiest train station in the country, with 16 regional rail lines and a subway beneath Market Street. You can't get more transit-oriented than that.

It's a shame that the city doesn't have a comprehensive land-use, transportation and open-space strategy for the rail yards at 30th Street (indeed, New York has an ambitious vision for the Hudson rail yards on the West Side). Cira South would benefit from being part of a larger civic vision that stretches over the tracks to the north of 30th Street Station; one that takes into account the area's tremendous public-transit assets.

This would be the kind of plan that could be used to leverage state and federal funds to address serious infrastructure challenges such as the condition of the Schuylkill Expressway, traffic management and the possibility of a cover for development over the rail yards. It could help finance the "Grand Waiting Room," an exciting new public space between the post-office building and the train station, provide centralized, shared parking (instead of each development having its own garage) and ensure that the sidewalks are active and walkable (instead of leaving the yawning hole over the rail yards that is Cira South's front yard).

It's the city's job to establish the road map for development and ensure that developers follow the plan. Unfortunately, we've forgotten how to use these civic tools over the past few decades and so when projects such as Cira South come before the Planning Commission, neither the Commission nor the development community has a framework to guide their decision making.

Planning may be in the air, but until we ground it in a larger, public vision, we'll be flying high with no place to land.

Harris Steinberg is the executive director of PennPraxis. His e-mail address is harrisst@design.upenn.edu.

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