It can seem that for every new park, bar or apartment complex in Philadelphia, there’s a barbed wire-shrouded, plastic bag-laced empty lot brimming with potential.
“As a longer term vision, this could become an economy for rebuilding the city,” says founder Douglas Meehan, who was drawn into urban planning by a fascination with post-industrial vacant space, and spent four years studying urban planning and landscape architecture at Penn grad school & worked in Philly for three more before moving to New York for a job.
The idea was inspired by Meehan’s participation in the Urban Voids competition, which challenges participants to lay out the best plan for repurposing urban space. He was irked by the competition format, which asks challengers to come up with individual plans within silos.
“I thought, why aren’t we sharing this information?” says Meehan, who eventually wants to invite professionals at all stages of experience, like those who would participate in Urban Voids, to find work on the platform and use it to build a career.
But to begin with, he’s forming the foundation of a user community by reaching out to organizations like West Rockland Street Project, news community Hidden City Philadelphia, West Philly’s Farm 51, Philly Food Forest and youth-action groupPublic Workshop, who are already invested in solving the problem of vacant spaces from the grassroots.
Cities have traditionally dealt with the problem of vacant space using a top-down approach, Meehan said, overhauling lots across wide swaths of city as puzzle pieces in a master plan. While the top-down approach promotes cohesive design, certain communities are neglected.
Possible City’s approach intends to balance bottom-up advocacy with a holistic view of projects across the city, with the goal of attracting public and private investment to popular projects.
Of course, there are other efforts around vacant land in Philadelphia, which has caught plenty of attention.
Meehan’s next step is to move these groups into a beta test, and begin gathering feedback on what they like, what they don’t like, and what they would add.
“This could be one of the projects on Possible City,” says Meehan.
From Detroit to recession-hit Spain, the world is full of abandoned buildings: factories left by companies that went somewhere else, suburban subdivisions from the boom years, crumbling farms and churches in remote places. Italy has an estimated 2 million such properties; Spain, another 3.5 million; America, many more.
Andrea Sesta, who lives in Milan, has been trying to find alternative uses for some of them. His web site, Impossible Living, allows anyone to map unused real estate, and act as champions for their renewal (even if they don’t own them). If there’s a building standing empty near you, you can add an address, put up some photos and videos, and then call on the web to help develop new ideas. "It’s a communication tool between the activator and the community," he says.
Sesta is driven by two problems, as he sees them. One, that abandoned buildings contribute to neighborhood decline, feeding cycles of neglect, vandalism, and crime. And two, that developers often fail to meet civic needs. "In Italy, there is a big gap between what people would like to have and what investors realize," he says. "In particular, for the younger population, there are not a lot of innovative services in place."
He sees Impossible Living acting as a bridge between investors on the one hand and the community on the other, allowing capital to go where it’s most needed. "We want to put the question on the web, so the investors can arrive at an idea that they couldn’t come up with on their own. That might be mixing different functions that are not so common at the moment."
There are currently 15 "reactivations" on the site, including several buildings from the small town of Favara, in southern Sicily. Two-thirds of the place has been abandoned, including castles, and former cement, and candle factories. But artists and technologists are now beginning to move in, attracted by open space, and cheap prices. "For us, this place is very important because it’s a way to rethink the abandoned world, reconstructing a territory that’s basically dead," Sesta says. "The big value is that the property is worth nothing almost, so you can have a lot of space for free."
