The Possible City

An excerpt from Nathaniel Popkin's new book

by Nathaniel Popkin

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Published: Sep 3, 2008

Nathaniel Popkin is writer-in-residence at Philadelphia University. This is excerpted from his new book, The Possible City: Exercises in Dreaming Philadelphia, published by Camino Books in August 2008. Available at bookstores and caminobooks.com.

My earlier book, Song of the City, concludes with a short chapter, "Perchance to Dream," in which I invent an imaginary planning commission to dream of the possible city. What follows in this book is the culmination of several more years of exploring Philadelphia, talking with some of its most interesting and knowledgeable citizens, and reflecting on what this place is and might be. Many readers recognize that "The Possible City" is the title of a column I write on the Web site phillyskyline.com and, indeed, many of the ideas in this book are derived from those columns as well as guest editorial columns in City Paper and material prepared for and presented in other publications.

In Philadelphia, imagining a new city is a singular act of citizenship. When we look at Philadelphia, we see what might be. That tendency to see possibility around every corner comes in response to two sensations. The first is the recognition of what isn't. Here is the cold understanding of what, in comparison to other cities, Philadelphia lacks. The second is the awareness of what was. We're reminded of this ceaselessly, of the city's founding ideals, of its political, economic, and industrial prominence. In Philadelphia, William Penn sought a different kind of city, one guided by principles of tolerance and love. These are active principles in Philadelphia, and we turn to them especially in times of crisis. They help us see what might be.

We dream so intensely because a more satisfying city feels ever so tantalizingly close. We dream too because as hard and unforgiving as Philadelphia is, it also relents; any one of us it seems can mold it to the shape of our desires.

It's all there in the ruins we call the contemporary city.

But we well know that the act of dreaming isn't the act of building; nor, even under the best circumstances, do the vast majority of dreams come to reality. The present paradigm rewards the rich—so much so that on many streets a desperate fatalism seems to have descended; and like a low pressure system, it sits no matter the hopeful rhetoric otherwise. At times it feels intractable, engendering not only hopelessness but a defensive pride. In some neighborhoods that pride is wielded to assert control—to erect boundaries—enforcing a parochial outlook, denying the city its hope for elevation, and leaving little, if anything, to show for it.

Still it is worth remembering that for every Mary Brown, longtime West Philadelphia neighborhood organizer whose sensible hopes for 52nd Street were ultimately plowed under by the brutal disorder of poverty and inadequate public investment, there is Shane Claiborne, the visionary you'll find in Chapter 2, whose singular spirit has infected the blocks around Kensington and Allegheny. For every Foxwoods Casino, a mindless giveaway to well-positioned developers, there is Cedar Park, the pizza slice of public space just east of 52nd Street that was lovingly rebuilt last year after the completion of a well-honed process of community design.

Our dreams remain particularly defiant and fierce, and a great many of them endure. Certain urban observers call this irrational. What's a Philadelphia in contemporary America? An anachronism no more. But others, including University of Virginia law professor and former Philadelphian Richard Schragger, suggest that cities, uniquely, drive the creation of wealth and culture.

Schragger says cities therefore ought to assert a native economic power, doing so in part by exploiting the gray area of law that exists in our federal system. Not unfamiliar with revolutionary posturing, Philadelphia has done just so throughout its history, recently by defying Pennsylvania state law on gun control, but also with political ambitions about trade, energy, and the environment.

But will political and legal defiance — the erection of gun control at the local level, for example — turn the city that might be into the city that is? It will help, if only as a practical matter, to solve a local problem — but also by asserting power. Defiance feels good. It builds confidence.

It doesn't, however, rebuild neighborhoods or piece a city back together. I offer here what I hope is a useful tool. A current University of Pennsylvania professor of architecture, Winka Dubbeldam, has noted a difference between architecture that functions and architecture that performs. In thinking about cities, the difference between the two concepts is telling. Philadelphia, indeed, functions. It has altogether resisted paralysis — no small feat considering the extent of loss and decline. But it rarely performs. By that I mean it doesn't entertain, dazzle, inspire, show off, cohere, or elevate; it rarely makes one feel great.

Between the two, the city that isn't and the city that was, we come to see the city that might be. Here, then, is the only possibility. A Philadelphia that is meaningful to its citizens, to America and the rest of the world, will be a Philadelphia that performs — in profound and particular ways.

[Such is] the kind of obvious [dream] that makes a more social, attractive, and exuberant city seem not very far out of reach. There are so many others like it, many of them derived from the experience of other cities, where transit, public spaces, and city parks seem more vital, exciting, and fun. What is it with this place, we wonder, why don't we have that? But before the words have escaped our lips, the dreaming has started. It feels like an act we can't control.

"I have always dreamed there should be a Tivoli in Fairmount Park," says Farah Jimenez, a Fairmount Park commissioner and the director of Mount Airy USA, a community development corporation in the city's northwest. She's referring to the amusement and entertainment districts in Copenhagen and Stockholm.

Why is that? What is it about Philadelphia that conditions, over and over, the same kind of response? It goes back to the combination of what was and what isn't. What isn't is a city that feels energized by the world around it. It's just not open enough. And that lack of openness leaves it feeling all too often more lackadaisical, somber, and somnolent than it should be. What was, of course, are the physical ruins of a city that in its scale, ambition, and architecture mirror the world's greatest. So we can't help but see our city as being one of them. But Stockholm — despite the Swedish colors of the Philadelphia flag — it isn't.

And so we dream. A Tivoli in Fairmount Park? In 1876, feeling rich and proud, Philadelphia invited the world to celebrate the nation's Centennial. About 10 million people came. The 700-acre remains of the world's fair — formal gardens, monuments, a zoo, and a grand hall — form the core of the west part of Fairmount Park. But it's a disconnected core, an all-too-empty core, despite including an outdoor musical amphitheatre, the Mann Music Center. So the Fairmount Park Conservancy, a park advocacy group, has commissioned a plan to build upon the ruins, with the hope of erecting a fully cohesive entertainment district from the present disparate parts.

And so we dream, of ice skating rinks and lawns and movie screens and café tables and jugglers and artists and sculpture competitions and mini-museums and cooking demonstrations and gardening workshops; we dream of ice cream stands and vendors' carts and lunchtime dining and wine bars and free speech zones; we dream, as Mayor Nutter has, of farm stands, of tables upon tables upon tables punctured by a giant sculptural Philadelphia stoop, where under the shade of a Franklinia tree it might be possible to dream away an afternoon. (Benjamin Franklin deserves a place here because it was his persistence at the French court that produced the money for the American Revolution, bankrupted the monarchy, causing the French Revolution, and ultimately putting the Tuilleries and the New Louvre, the buildings from which City Hall was derived, in the hands of the people.)

These City Hall visions join our other, endless Philadelphia dreams: of uncovering lost streams, of building green roofs, of recreating remembered homelands, of diagonal subway lines, of bike sharing, of skateboard parks, of museums for art and immigrants and food, of literary events, of movie theaters, of drawbridges, of promenades, of wild ruins left to rot, of 1,500—foot skyscrapers, of restored trolley cars, of restored railroad stations, of train lines long defunct, of public climbing walls, of marinas, of street performers, of ice cream stands, of balloon men, of championship parades, of clean streets, of the political and economic reality it will take to make the dreams reality.

"Places don't have an intrinsic worth," says the Tunisian Murtada in [Hassan] Nasr's [novel] Return to Dar al-Basha, still searching for family members to help him restore his grandfather's house in the medina. "We're the ones who assign them an appropriate value by the love we grant them, the work that we realize there, and the schemes that we devise. With our work — not with dreams — we can increase the value of Dar al-Basha."

Benjamin Franklin couldn't have said it more clearly, or more precisely described the present reality. In a suburban nation, it's sometimes hard to tell if anyone cares about cities. Certainly it doesn't seem that politicians and policy-makers at the federal level see our old cities as a problem worth fixing. But a great many Philadelphians do. And all their work defines, to the greatest unassailable degree, the life of this immensely creative city. I am speaking of the young woman who on Saturday mornings at the edge of Kensington hands out clean syringes and loving, nonjudgmental smiles to junkies and who takes those who ask to the back of the mobile clinic for an AIDS test; of another young woman, recently married, who provides counseling and support to elderly people in their Nicetown homes with the hope that they'll stay there longer, stabilize the neighborhood, and stay out of the nursing home. I am speaking of the man who transformed the triangle formed by three intersecting streets into an urban garden where now patrons of a restaurant can sit and eat in the open air; of the hippie artist whose sprawling mosaics have turned a neighborhood's walls into a living gallery, a biography of people and their ideas; of the tenacious and brilliantly analytic technocrat who keeps an entire city department functioning during crisis; of the imaginative green thumbs who've turned old industrial land, abandoned lots, and empty fields into productive urban farms that supply local restaurants; of the pair of brothers and their partner who keep expanding, reinventing, and adapting their two neighborhood bars into centers of a swirling polity; of the carpenter who instead of working for his own profit teaches troubled kids in North Philadelphia how to build, and to the kids themselves who've renovated rowhouses all across the city; of the city attorney who comes home every night and removes the day's accumulated trash from his block in Passyunk Square; of the immigrants from the Mexican state of Puebla whose music stores, abarrotes, tamale carts, taquerías, leather shops, produce stalls, and the green-white-red Mexican flag they've woven into the long-standing green-white-red Italian heritage of South Philadelphia, and whose licuados have changed the way that district tastes; of the West Philadelphia neighbors who patrol the streets and alleys night after night; of the young architects who design and build their own buildings, which now dot Fishtown, Kensington, and the Northern Liberties; of the furious resident who stands up at a community meeting to demand a developer's accountability; of the muralists who teach white, African-American, Vietnamese, and Mexican-American children how to paint and reflect on their own experiences of community and isolation, all the while turning a wall overlooking a grim parking lot into a brilliantly colored allegory on human migration; of the video store impresario who took over a floundering film festival and made it one of the most engaging weeks of the year; of the stubborn women in Norris Square who refuse to be intimidated by drug dealers on their corners and who by their own fierceness and love watch over neighborhood children; of the writers, poets, historians, journalists, archivists, librarians, and musicians whose unvarying engagement with the ideas, stories, and culture of the city's past keeps Philadelphia's metaphysical spirit alive and relevant, and of the blacksmiths, carpenters, metalworkers, masons, and plasterers whose simultaneous reinvention of the city's physical heritage keeps the architectural visions of past centuries in our open view.

"Dreams are beautiful," says Murtada, "but work is even more beautiful."

A book launch and salon for The Possible City will take place Sun., Sept. 21, 8 p.m. at Johnny Brenda's, 1201 N. Frankford Ave., 215-739-9684, johnnybrendas.com. Visit nathanielpopkin.net for information about additional signings and readings.

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