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A key proposal of the West Philadelphia Landscape Project is to manage the Mill Creek watershed as part of a broad approach to improving regional water quality and as a strategy to secure funds to rebuild neighborhoods. We employ landscape literacy as a cornerstone of community development.
During the past three decades, hundreds of students, teachers, residents, and public officials have been associated with WPLP. We have worked with numerous partners, including the Philadelphia Water Department, Penn’s Center for Community Partnerships, Aspen Farms Community Garden, Sulzberger Middle School, the Mill Creek Coalition, the Philadelphia Urban Resources Partnership, and Philadelphia Green. WPLP is led by Anne Whiston Spirn, a professor of landscape architecture and planning at MIT, who founded WPLP in 1987 when she was at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Mill Creek once flowed from its headwaters north of the Philadelphia city line to its mouth at the Schuylkill River. In the 1880s, the creek was buried in a sewer, its floodplain filled in and built upon. The Mill Creek sewer now drains the stormwater and carries all the wastewater from half of West Philadelphia. After heavy rainstorms, combined sanitary and storm sewage overflows directly into the Schuylkill River, causing water pollution downstream.
The Mill Creek sewer has also been a problem for the neighborhoods through which it flows. For almost a century, the ground has fallen in along the main trunk of the sewer, undermining streets and buildings. Hundreds of homes have been condemned and demolished, producing concentrations of vacant land in Mill Creek’s buried floodplain.
The Mill Creek neighborhood lies just north of Market Street, at the heart of West Philadelphia and the Mill Creek Watershed. The neighborhood’s landscape is a textbook of American city planning and city building from the colonial period to the present. In the 18th and 19th century, the neighborhood was populated with mills, farmers, the country estates of wealthy Philadelphians, and institutions seeking space at the city’s edge. By the late 19th century, Mill Creek had become a streetcar suburb of densely packed, two-story rowhouses. The neighborhood is both a catalogue of the failures of 20th-century urban policy and design and a testament to the energy and initiative of its residents.
From the 1930s on, banks refused loans for the purchase of properties in the Mill Creek neighborhood, a practice called red-lining. In the 1950s and 60s, large urban renewal projects, including public housing towers, disrupted the neighborhood of small-scale rowhouses. Philadelphia experienced a massive migration of white middle-class residents to the surrounding suburbs, and, between 1950 and 1970, the overall population of Mill Creek declined by 27% and lost the racial diversity that had characterized the neighborhood since the early 19th century. Given the outward flow of population and capital and the inward flow of sewage and groundwater, by 1980 Mill Creek had an abundance of vacant land and deteriorating or abandoned properties. Vacant urban land is a social and environmental problem, but it is also a resource for reshaping the Mill Creek neighborhood to serve the needs of its residents and to improve both local and regional environmental quality.
Beginning in the 1970s, residents reclaimed some of this vacant land for community gardens and adopted other vacant lots for private gardens and parking. Recently, new houses have been built on former vacant properties, much of it on the buried floodplain, even as the Philadelphia Water Department launched a landmark proposal in 2009 to address the city’s combined sewer overflow problem through green infrastructure.
From 1987-1991, WPLP was part of a collaborative landscape plan and “greening” project for West Philadelphia. A team of faculty and students at the University of Pennsylvania created a digital database with maps of the neighborhood’s demographics and physical features, designed community gardens (including new common space for Aspen Farms), and made proposals for the strategic reuse of vacant urban land in the Mill Creek watershed, including green infrastructure projects to capture stormwater and reduce combined sewer overflows to the Schuylkill River. The West Philadelphia Landscape Plan: A Framework for Action (Spirn, 1991) describes core recommendations, including Mill Creek Park, The Urban Forest, the Market-Walnut Corridor, Redesigning Small Neighborhoods, and a Community Data Center.
Starting in 1994, WPLP initiated a community education project on the Mill Creek watershed in partnership with Sulzberger Middle School and Aspen Farms community garden. University students joined Mill Creek children in weekly workshops during the academic year and in a four-week summer program at the school and at Aspen Farms. From 1996-2001, hundreds of children participated in the program, where they learned to read the neighborhood’s landscape: they traced its past, deciphered its stories and told their stories about its future, some of which were built. The success of the Sulzberger program was recognized in Philadelphia and across the country. In 1998, Governor Tom Ridge invited students from Sulzberger to make a five-minute presentation to the State Legislature; their presentation was televised, as was the legislature’s response: a long, standing ovation. In 1999 the Mill Creek Project was the subject of a report on NBC Nightly News, a national television program. In 2000 President Bill Clinton visited the school. The Philadelphia Water Department took over the summer program with Sulzberger after Anne Spirn joined the faculty of MIT in 2000. Spirn and her MIT students continued to work with Sulzberger, but the project came to an end when key teachers left after the state of Pennsylvania took over the Philadelphia School District in 2002 and placed the school under private management.
In fall 2009, the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) announced a landmark proposal to reduce combined sewer overflows through green infrastructure, along the lines of previous WPLP proposals. Since that announcement, Spirn and her MIT students have probed and explored the feasibility of the PWD’s proposal. Students have studied and visited the Mill Creek watershed and neighborhood, explored new strategies for water management, created new visions for Mill Creek’s buried floodplain, and presented their ideas to the PWD.
WPLP continues its relationship with Aspen Farms Community Garden and with community acitivists in the Mill Creek Watershed.