Filling in the Gaps: A Q&A With Alan Greenberger, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development

New York City native Alan Greenberger has been championing responsible Philadelphia architecture and development since 1974. After 34 years with MGA Partners (formerly Mitchell/Giurgola Architects), in 2008 he joined the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. Greenberger also serves on the boards of several nonprofit organizations, including the Design Advocacy Group, Envision Peace Museum, and the Association for Public Art. Generocity spoke with Greenberger about his work and his vision for a more beautiful, sustainable Philadelphia.

You serve on the boards of several organizations championing art, design, and culture. From an architect’s perspective, why are these facets so important to city planning?
I live and breathe the world of design every day of my life. So from that sense, it was a natural interest. I’ve always been interested in the world of art; architecture is not art, but it exists in a world that is artistic. Architecture is a very practical thing but it is also an aesthetic thing; it’s very much about what you see and how it makes you feel and how you want to live. I also happen to be married to someone who is trained as an art teacher!

How did you come to co-found the Design Advocacy Group? What are its specific missions and methods?
I was on the board of the Foundation for Architecture — a spinoff of the American Institute of Architects Philadelphia chapter. It was very much about promoting design sensitivity and awareness in the built environment. I was on the board for a number of years, and we had something called the civic issues committee, and we met every month.

When the foundation folded, as a board member I took responsibility for making sure all of the programs landed somewhere. The one thing that couldn’t find a foster home was this committee. Bill Becker and I were friends; we did the civic issues committee together, and we were having lunch after the foundation closed, and we realized that there was no venue anymore for civic issues. So we sort of made a pact, and called a couple of people we know to see if they wanted to get together and start meeting.

We met as a group of four, then it was six, then it was 15, and it started to get serious. First at my office, then Temple loaned us some space downtown [DAG now meets at the AIA’s Center for Architecture]. Slowly over a year or two, this thing evolved, and 20 to 40 of us met every week with no budget, no staff. We decided it was better as a non-organization.

We had a big fight over a parking garage on Chestnut Street, and even though we lost we made a name for ourselves. We were approached by the William Penn Foundation and they wanted us to become an organization, and we said no. Penn Praxis eventually gave us money to build a website, which was significant. And eventually over five years DAG became a significant voice in the city for design issues. We have credibility, we have friends in the media.

It was a pretty smart, almost guerilla operation, but done totally out in the open by people who take this responsibility seriously, take the city seriously, who are really trying to think things through. Today it’s about an 1,100-member organization, done entirely through the Internet.

The whole goal of the thing was to say that design, both from a planning perspective and an architectural perspective, is an important criteria for planning in the city, along with economic issues, political issues, social issues. They all need to be there at the same time. We always said we don’t expect to win every battle on design, but we expect it to be taken seriously. It’s a national model and the ingenious part is that we did this with almost no money. We literally passed the hat to buy our domain name.

What are some of the major issues/hurdles facing Philadelphia urban planners?
The garage that was proposed on Chestnut Street needed 7 different variance zones, and we thought that Chestnut Street needed various uses. What that pointed to at the time is that this city’s zoning code was a mess, completely broken. DAG was one of the major advocates for fixing it, along with several other groups. Much to everybody’s surprise, along comes this guy Councilman Michael Nutter, and every time he’s out there talking about planning, everyone in my world is saying he’s right on the money. Even more shocking, he wins the election and now he’s the mayor. So it unleashed this whole planning and zoning reform effort.

The really important part about it is that it involved the government and the citizenry who worked on these things to believe that Philadelphia can take control of its future. You can organize the values of a community so that everyone is generally headed in the right direction. You can take control of your destiny. Philadelphia has moved in fate and victimhood, with a chip on its shoulder about its identity. I’ve lived in Philadelphia for 39 years, and one of my frustrations has always been that Philadelphians don’t care for it the way they should, they don’t see its assets, and that’s changing.

What are the city’s major goals for architectural development?
My goals, and I’d say the mayor’s too, are to promote development, not development at all costs, but good development. We want to fill in the gaps of the city where bad development has created areas that are not walkable, because Philadelphia is very walkable, but there are gaps. One of our goals is to fill those and the two we’re working very hard right now is Market Street East and North Broad. These are major thoroughfares in the city and they should be great streets, and they’re not. We want to induce, cajole, help clear the path for development that will create a more walkable set of streets, reduce the tax base, create jobs.

On North Broad, the big thing is the Divine Lorraine Hotel. We’ve made progress; we got the thing out from under a bank’s pile of bad commercial debt, we’ve got an owner prepared to renovate it, we’ve been working with him. And we’ve been working for a long time now quietly with the owners of the Gallery to renovate.

We’re trying to be sensitive about how to do historic preservation. Cities must always be changing and developing, otherwise they’re dead. We’re going to have new homes, new condos, new businesses, and somehow in that context, we have to have a measure of control and regulation on it so we’re not inappropriately tearing down historic buildings. Nobody likes change; it’s very hard to deal with. We wind up making decisions every day about change, and it makes a lot of people very nervous. But it needs to happen.

How important is ecological sustainability in your work with the Design Advocacy Group, Delaware River Waterfront Corporation, etc?
It’s usually important. I was in college on the first Earth Day. On my office wall is a little yellow blue and green button that was the symbol of the Earth Day movement in 1971. It took 30 years and climate change and weather disasters and a different generation of young people to really appreciate that sustainability is a really big issue in this world. I think now people at least get it.

We need to be smart about this, both from the point of view of our relationship with nature, but also from the point of view of our relationship with energy usage. The people who can be the smartest about this are going to be the cities that make it.

The basic bones for a sustainable city are here — a tight grid city, a lot of walking, a lot of public transit.

What are some current methods/best practices for improving ecological sustainability in Philadelphia? For improving affordability?
One of the critical ones is just energy usage of the buildings by themselves. It’s simple dumb mathematics here: Save money on energy, use it for something else, like your kids, like a vacation. And not use irreplaceable resources in the process. In this city we are a national leader for stormwater management.

The biggest issue for the city is that if we take all of our stormwater from roofs, sidewalks and roads, and we just dump it in the sewers, all of this goes into the sewage treatment plant. That puts stress on the plant, on an aging pipe network underground, and in cases where flooding happens, these combined sewers can back up and back up into people’s basements. The very best way to deal with it is don’t let the stormwater get into the sewers in the first place. Our water department has developed a very aggressive strategy about greening the city, which makes it more pleasant, more tree cover provides more oxygen, more shade in the summer. So at that level, we just have to be doing more of it, incentivizing others to do more of it.

How can citizens be involved in advocating for design and preservation in their own neighborhoods?
I think the most important thing they can do is get engaged in dialogue. We’re doing a district plan in every corner of this city over the last five years, with readings and workshops and open houses. My encouragement is to get involved; [the events are] on Facebook, they’re on social media. Go to the historical commission, go to the neighborhood and start expressing your opinion.

Quality of life and character of neighborhoods is a hugely important determinant in how people feel about the city and how they make decisions about the city. If you’ve ever been involved in a college selection process, you know that one of the critical determinants about where people go to school is what’s it like. Quality of life is a big deal.

We run something called the Citizens Planning Institute to help people understand the basic concepts of planning and how that applies to their neighborhoods. It’s been a hugely successful program.

Philadelphia is a great city with great planning. It’s the largest planned city in America. There’s a great history of design in the city, and sometimes we forget that.

People visit the city and they’re blown away. We have great architecture, tight streets, great transit, parks systems. We’ve got this extraordinary city that the rest of America has turned onto.

Photos by Albert Yee