One of the smartest and best aspects of the Penn Praxis plan for Philadelphia's waterfront is to extend the streets to the river. Extending the street grid extends the neighborhoods and just like that! you finally have a habitable waterfront. It may not be THAT simple, but once the steps are taken and the infrastructure for the extention of those streets is laid down, beautiful organic development will go wild.

But it seems that developers are making a bid to close off this realizable piece of Penn Praxis's ambitious vision. Michael Sklaroff of Ballard Spahr and the city Historical Commission wrote a letter to the city planning director, warning that laying down a normal street grid would be "a disastrous showstopper for waterfront development." And Craig Schelter, former city planner and consultant to area developers, wants the waterfront to remain cut off: "there are a lot of people coming in from the suburbs who don't want the rest of the world walking through their project."

The quotes are from a great piece by Inga Saffron where she decries this logic, references Penn's orginal street grid and its balance of healthy development and public use within a gorgeously livable streetscape, and invokes what is at stake--the lived experience of our city:

The Penn Praxis plan includes lots of pretty renderings, but keep in mind that those geometric grids of streets and blocks are what will make everything else work. Think of city streets as a corset, holding in check the sprawling tendencies of modern construction. Without the streets, developers will go wild with acre-size big-box stores, massive parking garages, and gated towers.

Penn Praxis started as tilting at windmills. They've built a huge network connecting experts and citizens, and opening spaces to learn and participate in the development process. So everyone, participate! This is really the time to speak up and push the new mayor and the new and old councilpeople and the appointed zoning reform board to start shaping this city for the people who live in it. It only gets more too late from here.