The loss of industrial jobs and a decline
in manufacturing in Philadelphia is certainly nothing new, but most
residents of the region would probably trace the start of the downturn
to the 1960s and ’70s. In fact, the attrition started in the 1920s, said
Acting Deputy Mayor Alan Greenberger, at a panel Friday morning at the
University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design.
Greenberger, still
playing at least three roles as head of the Planning and Zoning Code
commissions, said the decline abated during World War II, but resumed
not long after.
“That big sea change has resulted in, depending
on your point of view, either an opportunity or a problem that we need
to solve,” he said. “We need to solve it at a time when we are embarking
on the first comprehensive plan for the city in 50 years. For us, the
Planning Commission, this industrial study is incredibly important.”
Greenberger
was referring to the city’s soon-to-be-released “Industrial Market
& Land Use Strategy,” researched and authored by the Philadelphia
Industrial Development Corp. and a team of consultants.
On hand
from PIDC to give an outline of the study was John Grady, vice president
of real estate, and Prema Gupta, the quasi-public agency’s real estate
manager.
“Prema told me not to say ‘post-industrial city’,”
Greenberger said. “And she’s right. It’s a ‘post-19th and 20th century
industrial city.’ That’s a fair statement. Things continue to be made
here, as we broaden our understanding of what industry means.”
“Two-thirds
of my R8 train ride to get to Center City is fallow, industrial land”
of Civil War era vintage, said Gupta. “But there’s a mismatch between
that and what modern users want.”
That’s
an understatement, her remarks that followed revealed, underlining just
how embedded industry is in what used to be called “The Workshop of the
World.” As it happens, many of the long-abandoned buildings (and even
some still in use) on all that land are multi-floor structures that
pre-dated Ford-style assembly line manufacturing, which came into
common use about a century ago.
Also presenting was Scott Page,
founder and principal of Interface Studio, a main consultant to PIDC for
the study. (PlanPhilly got a preview of the report, due out soon, last
week at the American Planning Association conference in New Orleans,
where Page was also a panelist. Read his extensive comments from that
presentation here.)
“There
is a market potential in Philadelphia, but to meet that potential, we
need land to support it,” Page said Friday, referring to the city's
on-going rezoning process.
The
special guest was Greg Nickels, the former mayor of Seattle (2002
through 2010), who had undertaken a similar study during his
administration.
“I congratulate you on doing this,” Nickels said.
“I’m very pleased that you’re asking the right questions, going through
a very similar process that we went through where we asked our Planning
Commission, ‘Just what is our future that you see?’ We brought in
developers landowners and asked those questions, and at the end of the
day we had a strategy that worked for us.”
Commentators at the
end of the morning were John Landis, chair of City and Regional Planning
at PennDesign; Brian Cohen of Liberty Property Trust (the company that
is redeveloping the Navy Yard with PIDC); Ned Rauch-Mannino of the Urban
Industry Initiative; Matt Pappajohn, a custom woodworker with a small
company in the city’s Frankford section; and Paul Parkhill, a director
at the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center in Brooklyn.
Moderating the event was Laura Wolf-Powers, assistant professor of city
and regional planning at Penn.
“Thinking about how to grow –
that’s not something we’re used to doing,” said Steve Wray, executive
director of the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia.
Wray
started the morning by stressing the importance of a fresh, innovative
approach to business and economic development, and a description of
Economy League efforts at “alternative histories of the future” to make
for a “world-class Greater Philadelphia.”
The Economy League in
recent years has worked with PIDC on a study of Philadelphia’s ports and
their potential, and tackled subjects as broad as “green
infrastructure,” the “knowledge industry” of our colleges and
universities and the city’s state of entrepreneurship.
Contact
the reporter at thomaswalsh1@gmail.com
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