Moving Here : In The News

The Atlantic Cities takes a broad look at wayfinding, or environmental graphic design, including our city's 17 year-old Walk!Philadelphia pedestrian wayfinding program.

If you've been to downtown Philadelphia since, you may have appreciated how easy the convention center was to find. But you probably did not appreciate that someone had to design your path there.

"My parents never understood what it was that I did," Labouvie laughs. "People know what advertising is. They know how to sell products. But understanding that there are best ways of moving through cities, that there are cues that will help you do that, people don’t understand that until it’s really pointed out."

Original source: The Atlantic Cities
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The Hamilton-Wenham Chronicle catches up with local native Nate Trunfio, an Eastern University grad who founded the Philadelphia consumer electronics accessory startup Caseinitiy with some friends.

The marketing genius for the company, he draws on his marketing and management knowledge gained during his tenure at Eastern University in Philadelphia and selling insurance as a first job after graduation.

The young entrepreneur works for Caseinity during his free time, when he isn’t working fulltime as a mortgage loan officer at a local Philadelphia bank. Caseinity is being funded in part by Trunfio and through Kickstarter, an online funding platform that uses a threshold pledge system for creative projects.

Original source: Hamilton-Wenham Chronicle
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Shopping Center Business takes a stroll through Center City Philadelphia, finding a bright spot for U.S. retailers via redevelopment and growing assets.

Meanwhile, Walnut Street -- Center City’s high street shopping district -- and its surrounding streets continue to pick up additional retailers who want to capture the city’s affluent residents (Philadelphia has the third largest CBD residential population following New York and Chicago). Center City District estimates that a business located on the 1400 block of Walnut Street can expect to see an average of greater than 2,000 people per hour. The Center City District estimates retail demand within one mile of City Hall is $710.9 million per year. Center City has a population of nearly 180,000, 73% of which have at least a bachelor’s degree.

Original source: Shopping Center Business
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The rise of college-educated residents and predominance of unmarried households put Philadelphia sixth on Kiplinger's 10 Best Cities for Singles list. Do you agree?

Now, one in two Philadelphians is unmarried, one in five is between 20 and 34, and one in three holds at least a bachelor's degree. Young people congregate in Northern Liberties, Fishtown and Fairmount, where rent for a two-bedroom apartment averages about $1,000.

Original source: Kiplingers
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The American Planning Association's Sustaining Places blog takes a look at how zoning code reform in Philadelphia is promoting sustainability.

Early in the zoning reform process, the new Zoning Code Commission agreed on a set of seven broad goals for the new code. Four of these goals addressed code structure and administration: simplify base districts, simplify overlay districts, simplify approvals, and improve readability and reorganization. The other three goals aimed more at the substance of the code: protect neighborhoods, promote sustainability, and promote quality and design.

Original source: American Planning Association Sustaining Places blog
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Young Upstarts takes a peek at Philadelphia's Storably, launched in September by Wharton graduates and on the verge of bringing its platform -- likened to Airbnb for storage -- to other markets.

The founders started working in a basement from May this year, putting together mockups and building the site with an off-shore development team. However, the quality wasn’t quite what they expected. Kowitt and Gupta then hired a full-time VP of Engineering, Nick Shiftan, who rebuilt the site from scratch. They later brought on Brendan Lowry as a community manager. The site was formally launched in Philadelphia on September 21, and the startup intends to expand nationally soon.

Original source: Young Upstarts
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A University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine study found that converting vacant lots into small parks or community green spaces can reduce crime in distressed neighborhoods, reports The Atlantic.

Vacant lot greening was associated with significant reductions in gun assaults across all four sections of Philadelphia in the study and with significant reductions in vandalism in one section. Greening was also associated with the reporting of significantly less stress in one of the sections of the city and with more exercise in another. Cholesterol numbers were lower to a statistically significant degree for the greened areas across all four city sections.

Original source: The Atlantic
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A Wharton School MBA is working with a University of Pennsylvania team on a local startup that aims to make transferring money overseas more efficient, reports el-emergente.com

Edrizio De La Cruz, a recent MBA graduate from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, founded Regalii and leads the UPenn team working on it. For Edrizio, It’s a personal mission. "I grew up in the Dominican Republic," Says Edrizio, "and immigrated to New York's Washington Heights neighborhood, which was probably 110 percent Dominican. But I went to high school in Queens, where I used to play basketball with Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians and Salvadorians. I quickly assimilated to each subculture. But my social circle was pretty homogeneous. Almost everyone around me was an immigrant. So I assumed that only immigrants sent money or remained connected to family in Latin America."

Original source: el-emergente.com
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As construction on the Parkway wraps up, The Barnes Foundation has been given the judiciary green light to leave Lower Merion, according to the Associated Press.

Montgomery County Orphans Court Judge Stanley Ott ruled Thursday that there is no new evidence to consider.
Petitioners had asked Ott to re-examine his 2004 decision allowing the Barnes to leave its suburban home.

They contend the 2009 documentary "The Art of the Steal" includes new evidence that he didn't have when he originally ruled. But Ott disagrees.

Source: The Associated Press
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October is Mural Arts Month, with 31 days of art activities and celebrations, as told by the Los Angeles Times.

Art is in the air in October as Philadelphia celebrates many of its more than 3,500 murals during Mural Arts Month.

What began in 1984 as part of the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network has blossomed into the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program.  Muralist and founder Jane Golden redirected the energy and creativity of graffiti artists from marring neighborhood walls into murals, and the program now gives birth to about 150 murals a year. 

Highlights of "31 Days, 31 Ways: Art Ignites Change" include mural dedications, outdoor celebrations and free tours.

Source: Los Angeles Times
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Renmatix, a company that creates biofuel from sugar, is setting up shop in King of Prussia, according to BusinessWeek.

Gov. Tom Corbett traveled to suburban Philadelphia on Tuesday to welcome a biomass energy company that plans to move its headquarters from Georgia and create 150 jobs over the next three years as it tries to develop ways to turn products such as wood and waste into fuel.

Venture capitalist John Doerr moderated a discussion of alternative energy inside the warehouse building that Renmatix -- which has another facility in Kennesaw, Ga. -- will be calling home.

The company is developing ways to access the fermentable sugars that are the foundation of biofuels. The effort, along with other alternative energy efforts, are all part of helping the country become less dependent on foreign oil, Doerr said.

Source: BusinessWeek
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Philadelphia's approach to making government data public differs from other efforts around the country, and it's paying off, according to GovFresh.

Several months ago, with the unveiling of the OpenDataPhilly website, the City of Philadelphia joined the growing fraternity of cities across the country and around the world to release municipal data sets in open, developer friendly formats. But the City of Brotherly Love did things a bit differently than most of its contemporaries.

The city actively partnered with outside parties, private firms, not-for-profits and universities to help set the direction of the city’s open data efforts. The OpenDataPhilly website itself, although it’s brimming with data collected and maintained by the city, was developed by the geospatial and civic application firm Azavea, and is not hosted or operated by the city.  The website, and the larger open data effort in Philadelphia, operates under the stewardship of a group made up of both public sector and private sector partners.

Source: GovFresh
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Philadelphia's rich landscape heritage makes for a city painted in shades of green, according to The Huffington Post.

The transformation of the urban core, as I've written before, is hot, hot, hot. Currently, there's a great deal of attention focused (justifiably) on the much-talked-about opening of the second phase of the much-talked-about High Line in New York, which has put yet more vim into that city's vigor. But if you want to see some serious va-va-voom, set your sites on Philadelphia (and don't get all snarky quoting W. C. Fields now). Philadelphia's exceptional array of parks and open spaces, and the visionary, entrepreneurial and civic-minded people behind them, is where to really see a city center in high gear (and the BYOB restaurant scene is taste bud nirvana).

For more than three centuries, city planning, landscape architecture and a unique civic ambition that emphasizes horticulture as much as the pedestrian experience in its public spaces and streetscapes, have made Philadelphia a fascinating city. From the five squares that were at the core of William Penn's 1683 plan to Dan Kiley's mid-20th-century design for Independence Mall, which connected Franklin Square to the north and Washington Square to the south, the city has a landscape heritage that few others can boast.

Source: The Huffington Post
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Philadelphia ranks third on a list of the least-polluting major cities in the U.S., according to UrbanLand.

Urban areas around the world account for an estimated 71 percent of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions (including everything from power plants to automobile driving). But a new study found that big-city metros differ markedly in how much they pollute.

In a study published earlier this year in the journal Environment & Urbanization, researchers at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., found that New York City had less than half the per-capita greenhouse gas emissions of Denver, Colorado, and Los Angeles--considered by some to be the smog capital of the country--had lower per-capita emissions than Minneapolis, Minnesota. Outside the United States, some of the largest urbanized centers, such as Tokyo, Paris, and even Seoul, had some of the lowest per-capita greenhouse gas emission rates in the world.

Source: UrbanLand
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Last week we told you about the four suburban Philadelphia communities named to Money magazine's 100 Best Places to Live in America list. The New Republic looks at those same four hotspots as evidence of a shift in the way we live in post-recession America.

But Money is still wedded to the notion that our best places are “small towns,” without acknowledging the regional metropolitan economies--with distinctive economic clusters and amenities, unified housing and labor markets, and modern transportation networks--that determine their economic prosperity and popular appeal.

The magazine does implicitly recognize these metropolitan connections. Take the four new communities in this year’s list within in the resilient Philadelphia metro: West Goshen “gives residents a rural feel, yet good access to jobs,” given its proximity to Philadelphia; Horsham “lies with easy commuting distance of Philadelphia,” Ardmore is “just a few minutes from the city by rail,” and commuters from West Norriton “appreciate that it is 25 miles southwest of Philadelphia.”

It is time to acknowledge that these “small towns,” really suburbs and exurbs, are part of highly-connected and seamlessly-integrated metropolitan economies. The notion promoted by these kinds of “best places” lists--that “small towns” or “small cities” are self-sufficient islands--is fundamentally misguided. Families and firms choose these communities precisely because they benefit from the assets, attributes, and advantages of their broader metros.

Original source: The New Republic
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