The Community Design Collaborative has had the opportunity to explore walkability through its work with community-based nonprofits. Here’s a sampling of how we’re is helping neighborhoods rethink their streets and sidewalks, enliven their built environments, and enhance connectivity.

Bache Martin Elementary School/Fairmount CDC
Conceptual Master Plan for Exterior Improvements
A community task force of parents, teachers, students, neighbors, and government agencies collaborated on a master plan to connect two buildings, create green school yards, and improve surrounding streets and sidewalks. A key element of the plan is a crosswalk that calms traffic and collects stormwater.
Value of Services: $35,000

Nicetown CDC
Gateways and Bridges: Conceptual Design for a Neighborhood Center
This corridor improvement plan offers design strategies for bringing vibrancy to several blocks of Germantown Avenue by connecting key landmarks and community assets including the Roosevelt Expressway Bridge underpass, Nicetown Park, Edward T. Steele Public School, and the Wayne Junction train station.
Value of Services: $26,500

Friends of Marconi Plaza/Lower Moyamensing Civic Association
Conceptual Master Plan for Park Improvements
Traffic calming is a key aspect of this conceptual plan for a large neighborhood park in South Philadelphia. Landscape improvements recommended for the park would allow park users to safely cross busy South Broad Street, which bisects the park.
Value of Services: $34,500

Park(ing) Day Philadelphia
Pallet Park
Temporary projects can be a great way to try out new ideas for walkability. This mini-park was designed by Collaborative volunteers and built from recycled pallets for Park(ing) Day, a multi-city event that encourages people to re-imagine meter parking spots as green public space.
Value of Services: $27,000

Roxborough Development Corporation
Conceptual Design for 6170 Ridge Avenue Park
A driveway between shops was redesigned as an inviting link between a public parking lot and the Ridge Avenue Commercial Corridor in Roxborough. The new connection is enlivened by a curving pedestrian path, planting beds, a sitting area, and a mural.
Value of Services: $40,000

Walkability is a measure of how friendly a community is to walking. Walkability’s impact is not limited to the built environment—it affects to well-being, safety, environmental quality, and economic vitality of communities.

Walkability is something that Philadelphia does well. We rank fifth in the nation in walkability, according to Walk Score. Joe Minott, executive director of the Clean Air Council, noting our good standing at last night’s Urban Sustainability Forum, posed the question, “What do we have to do to become #1?”

Dom Nozzi, executive director of Walkable Streets, says the next wave of transportation planning and design will focus on “fixing the mistakes we’ve made.” “It’s not about providing new facilities for pedestrians, but about taking some of the space now allotted to cars and putting it into the realm of pedestrians and bicyclists.”

Taking the space from cars and using it for bicyclists and pedestrians results in a very different design philosophy for the public right of way. After decades of designing “forgiving streets,” transportation planners are embracing “street chaos”, which is a lot less risky than it sounds.

Forgiving streets are engineered with wide lanes, easy turns, and plenty of stoplights to reduce the attention and decision-making demanded of drivers. Instead of making streets safer, though, forgiving streets has engendered inattentive drivers… and more traffic accidents.

Street chaos—right of ways designed to force drivers to slow down and pay attention—has a toolbox that includes chicanes, surface patterns and textures, and mid-block pedestrian crossings. Last October’s Better Blocks Philly demonstrated these design elements of walkability convincingly.

“It’s not so much about training professionals to design walkable streets,” says Nozzi, “but more about giving them permission to apply what they already know.” He recounted a story about a city official who put out a call for a safe intersection design for parents with children. He was flooded with ideas and options.

Philadelphia is ahead of the game, according to city planner Debby Schaaf, who is leading Philadelphia’s soon-to-be-completed pedestrian and bicycle plan. Our city’s mix of land uses puts lots of useful destinations (stores, restaurants, the gym—and work, if you’re lucky) within walking distance. Our narrow easy-to-cross streets, a continuous network of sidewalks, and (oddly enough)short signal cycles that minimize waits at intersections encourage walking.

For all that, Philly rates a silver level designation from the Walk Friendly Communities Program , a nationwide program with the goal of encouraging towns and cities throughout the United States to establish (or recommit to) a high priority for encouraging and supporting more safe walking. What do we have to do to go for the gold?

Walk Friendly says Philadelphia needs to pay more attention to our network of sidewalks—keeping them in good repair and retrofitting many of them. A full time pedestrian coordinator on the city’s staff and training to help city officials support walkability in their day-to-day decision making would also earn us points.

Walkability is a fascinating corner (intersection?) of transportation planning where lots of innovative, interdisciplinary thinking is happening. It promises to have a growing influence.

Bradley Flamm of Temple University’s Center for Sustainable Communities tells us to watch out for these emerging trends: a new focus on walkability in suburban places (where half of all Americans now live), universal design principles applied to entire neighborhoods, and a more critical inquiry into the relationship between the built environment and community health.

Dickinson Square in November as construction began. Photo courtesy of Plan Philly.

Construction for Dickinson Square has begun! With hulking, dying sycamore trees and buildings, pathways, and other infrastructure last renovated in the ’70s, Dickinson Square was due for a remake. The Friends of Dickinson Square received a service grant from the Collaborative in 2007 to envision the sustainable redesign of this popular Pennsport park.

Since then, Phase 1 of the park’s improvements have been funded by the Philadelphia Department of Parks and Recreation and placed into the able hands of LRSLA Studio.  Ashley Hahn of Plan Philly’s Eyes on the Street shares her walk-through of the just-begun renovation project as the construction fence rose and the diseased old trees fell.

The Collaborative worked with Pennsylvania Horticultural Society to put together a tour featuring innovative neighborhood projects for Cities Alive, an international conference for green roof and wall professionals hosted here in Philly last week.

Conference goers were treated to an off-the-beaten-path look at green spaces and buildings in the APM, Northern Liberties, Kensington, and Fishtown neighborhoods. Stops at infill housing, green spaces, and a green high school (the recipient of the US Green Building Council’s top honors today) gave them a good feel for the green and gritty fabric of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods. And since many of the stops included trips to the roof—they caught some excellent city views too.

Scenes from the City of Neighborhoods tour:

Many thanks to Julie Snell, Chair of the Local Tours Committee, and the tour presenters!

Daryn Edwards, AIA, Interface Studio Architects
The Modules at Temple Town

David Elliott, RLA, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society
Liberty Lands Park and the Big Green Block

Bill Foley, GRP, Tremco, Inc.
The Ice House

Jane Rath, AIA, SMP Architects
Kensington Creative and Performing Arts High School

Photos courtesy of Bill Foley.

Posted by Beth Miller, Executive Director:
Since we’ve been celebrating our 20^thanniversary, 2011 has been an action-packed year at the Collaborative. But even in this extraordinary year, the ribbon cutting for APM’s Sheridan Street Housing stands out as one of the highlights.

Like all good things, these 13 contemporary, sustainable homes took time, perseverance, and partnerships. I feel lucky to have seen this project take shape, gain momentum, and get built.

While Sheridan Street Housing remained true to the original design concept developed at its start with the Collaborative—a minor miracle in itself—it also ended up being much more. It opened up new horizons for an experienced community development corporation and a young design firm. It inspired policy change. And it influenced what private developers offer homebuyers. Read Full Story

Many thanks to the hard-working volunteers who had a hand (sometimes containing splinters) in designing and building the Collaborative’s Pallet Park for Park(ing) Day. Jordan Barr, Alex Cutrona, Erin Fox, Erin Keith, Rachel Lijana, and Charlie Oropallo took the project from an interesting idea to reality. . . with help from Revolution Recovery, McNaughton’s Gardens, and Urban Jungle.

Urban Jungle, a garden center on East Passyunk Avenue that specializes in vertical gardening, took on the team’s challenge to create a vertical garden from pallets. They attached landscaping fabric to the back and edges of each pallet, filled the gaps between slats with potting soil and plants, and slowly tilted the pallets from horizontal to vertical over a period of several weeks to let the roots take… adding one brick a day in the shop. The result: ruggedly handsome, roadside vertical gardens. If you try this at home, Urban Jungle’s Chris Klotz advises, grasses work best.

Along with promoting an ethos of repurposing urban scrap, the volunteer team was attentive to what happened to their installation the day after Park(ing) Day. Revolution Recovery recycled a stack that was displayed in their “raw state” on park(ing) Day. The furniture found a enthusiastic permanent home with the Village of Arts & Humanities.

The Collaborative’s Pallet Park was one of over thirty parks created for Park(ing) Day. See some other Philly Park(ing) Day parks!

Joe Matje, a project engineer with Bruce E. Brooks & Associates and a board member of the Community Design Collaborative, speculates on the future of energy design in this month’s DAGspace. As energy costs rise, Joe predicts, the payback period for energy-efficient technologies will grow shorter and energy will become a major driver of the design process.

That trend is already in motion, according to Joe.  To demonstrate, he presents an energy use analysis he did through the Collaborative for Libertae , Inc. He calculates the  financial resources (about $12,000 per year) are  “in play” to offset the upfront costs of energy-efficient construction and upgrades.