Nathaniel Popkin

The visionary William Penn has ideas about city planning. He’s experienced the great London fire of 1666 and observed vulgar Paris. The wide streets, ample lots, and regular squares of his “capital city” will guard against fire and vice; its uniform street grid will encourage rational land development. The city, in Penn’s thinking, is connected to country by hierarchies of land use: farm, town, city. Thus regional planning is born. A purchaser of a 5,000- to 10,000-acre farm is given a 100-acre plot in a “greene country town” and a lot in Philadelphia, near the port. Philadelphia will be located at Upland (the present Chester). All this is formulated in London. Meanwhile, Upland is too built-up to acquire, plantation sales are poor; indeed, most Quakers are city folk, who want small plots and urban lots. Many arrive before he does. They live in caves along the Delaware.

Nothing goes quite as planned. Instead of a 10,000 acre city, Philadelphia will be wedged into a much smaller site between the Delaware and the Schuylkill. Instead of rural towns, Penn’s surveyors demarcate suburbs, what they call “liberties.” The only green country town is Newtown, in Bucks County. Instead of Philadelphia growing evenly from each riverfront toward centre square, most people want to be as close to the Delaware wharves as possible. Instead of a city of airy lots, by 1698, there are nine crowded alleys carved between Front and Second streets.

There’s no tabula rasa, even in the New World. It only gets harder later. Civic visionaries endure a long battle against “Pennsylvania Conestogaism” to establish Fairmount Park, a longer one to design and build a somewhat diminished Parkway. Mayor Rudolf Blankenburg’s 1913 transit plan—for a dozen or so subway lines—goes almost completely unbuilt. Ed Bacon, Philadelphia’s post-war city planner, is never able to convince entrenched neighborhood residents of the value of his transformative ideas.

Philadelphia presently hopes to be America’s greenest city. It’s a natural idea for the American city longest-engaged in bold questions of public health and city planning. As the effort unfolds, there’s a common tendency to draw on William Penn’s idea for a “greene country town.” We now know that’s the wrong lesson. And even if the reference could be accurately applied to Philadelphia, its only value is to those who recoil from the brilliant grit of cities in favor of something quaint and less dangerous. Indeed, the genius of Philadelphia, from the very start, is the intersection of grand vision and untidy reality. It’s there, in the clash of individual dreams, in the battle between progressive policy and tradition, reform and parochialism, that a particularly Philadelphia solution to global warming will emerge. There won’t be “biketopia” unless car drivers are engaged, cajoled, lured, confronted. There won’t be a sea of green roofs without the active participation of the thousands of small builders who by habit currently employ the cheapest materials possible. Penn understands. “Government,” he reminds us, “like clocks, go from the motion men give them.”