"Smart City Challenge"

Philadelphia's Office of Innovation & Technology recently launched "Smart City Challenge," a website designed to field innovative ideas from residents and tech pros through a lengthly and legal-laden government .PDF, ultimately asking innovative geniuses to email their thoughts to the city's Deputy Chief Information Officer. 

If that doesn't sound very innovative to you, welcome to 1995. 

To say this effort is at the very least an earnest one is gracious. The "Challenge" was launched by the stagnant Office of Innovation & Technology after Mayor Kenney reconfigured it, pressuring its staff to innovate something. It's a little depressing that after years of employing allegedly innovative minds, the best the Office could come up with was outsourcing their jobs to the general public, along with an amateur website.

The Office has been nationally decried as a failure, its only notable product being the defunct Wireless Philadelphia, a citywide broadband initiative that neither Comcast nor Verizon wanted any part of. Wireless Philadelphia hired EarthLink, because that's where you go when Comcast and Verizon shut you off, and Wireless Philadelphia found itself a bit too reminiscent of AOL 4.0 for its users.

None of that says Innovation & Technology.

Despite all the press that the "Smart City Challenge" is receiving, it's really just proving how ineffectual the Office of Innovation & Technology actually is. And the minuscule research the media has done regarding the Office is indicative of a time when the same publications were lauding Wireless Philadelphia. In fact, PhillyMag.com didn't even bother to mention that "Smart City Challenge" was launched by the Office of Innovation & Technology, only that it's being overseen by Chief Administrative Officer Rebecca Rhynhart.

CAO Rhynhart wears a lot of hats, overseeing everything from Human Resources to Public Property. Innovation and city bureaucracies are notoriously at odds, so new technology will certainly take a backseat to anything else that comes across her desk.

There's no question the "Smart City Challenge" will field some great ideas, but good ideas for streamlining cities are made over cocktails at dive bars across the country all the time. The city will still have to do something with those ideas, and the Office of Innovation & Technology hasn't proven itself capable of producing anything innovative.

It's unfortunate, but even cities synonymous with technology - be it San Francisco or Seattle - are saddled with bureaucratic entities struggling to catch up, even in departments solely dedicated to innovation and technology. You can hire the best and the brightest to innovate your city, but if City Hall doesn't prioritize those efforts, a city becomes saddled with a bunch of high priced bodies pushing paper, and posting .PDF documents on a website that could have been made in Geocities. 

The truth is, Philadelphia can innovate, and it will. But it won't come from City Hall. It will come from the same places that made a name for other innovative hubs: universities, hospitals, and private technology companies. It will come from the Pennovation Center, Drexel's Schuylkill Yards, the Navy Yard, even Comcast. It won't filter into the city through an email that the Office of Innovation & Technology won't even bother to read. Like too many bureaucratic paper-pushers, those people are just trying to keep a cushy job doing as little as possible. It's going to come from places where innovation is the bottom line, and then - hopefully - spillover into the streets. 

It will come from places like this.

Philadelphia's Next Downtown

If you've been following local architecture news, you've seen Drexel's transformative Schuylkill Yards proposal and Amtrak's plans for the actual rail yard. It's a doozy. In fact, the last time anything this city-altering faced Philadelphia was when Broad Street Station was demolished and the central business district was moved from Old City to West Market.

Unfortunately, that massive demovelopment coincided with an exodus that saw Philadelphia lose the population of Atlanta. It took decades for the skyscrapers we now know as "downtown" to fill the void Broad Street Station left behind. More than fifty years later, there are still remnants of the "Chinese Wall" and massive parking lots in its wake.

Fortunately, the master plans taking shape west of the Schuylkill aren't being drawn with the same raze-and-pray approach that wrecked the historic Broad Street Station. But the idyllic renderings being thrown around the media and blogosphere should also be taken with a grain of salt. Keep in mind, the longest running of these concepts isn't meant to be completed until 2050. I'll be in my 70s, and I like to think I'm still young...ish. 

I'm not getting too excited because (if) these plans bring of a forest of skyscrapers to 30th Street Station three decades from now, I'll have to enjoy them from a virtual reality cafe in the floating city of New Miami (yes, I paraphrased a 30 Rock quote).

For a realistic look at these wild proposals, the definitive voice for Philadelphia architecture and development - Inga Saffron - has a pretty spot-on breakdown of at least four projects set to change what we think of University City, and "downtown" Philadelphia.

What we do know is something will happen. Drexel has partnered with Brandywine Realty Trust, and Brandywine is one of the region's largest real estate investors. When Brandywine's Cira South was proposed, it seemed like a pie-in-the-sky idea. Cira Centre itself was a Cesar Pelli work of art, but the audacious proposal for two more - maybe a third - Cira tower was a little too much for the Negadelphians of the early 21st Century to accept. But it happened, and it looks even better than it did when it was first pitched.

Considering Brandywine's investment in neighboring projects, and its proven ability to pull off a "master plan," it's a good sign for architecture fans that they've been tapped for Schuylkill Yards. Basically, they're a fan of good design, urbanism, and they get shit done.  

At the same time, keep in mind the renderings being passed around the internet are conceptual. Don't hold your breath for that whacky skyscraper in the middle. It will probably look a lot different when it happens, if it happens. Amtrak's plans for capping the railroad tracks are even more farfetched, and that's by no means a new idea. Property value in the vicinity would have to become so astronomically high that the expensive endeavor of building atop the tracks would outweigh creeping into Powelton Village and Mantua. Unlike Hudson Yards, Amtrak's plan doesn't have Manhattan humping its ass. 

Nevertheless, it's a very good sign that Philadelphia's developers and universities are looking at Philadelphia with optimism, and that Amtrak has recognized this city as a valuable hub. 

University City's Academic Turf War

As University City continues to redefine the city's skyline, one of its most lackluster additions might also be one of its most divisive. Bohlin Cywinski Jackson's New College House spans the 3300 block of Chestnut Street. Instead of building up, the space-saving alternative that Drexel has recently embraced, New College House drones dully through a former lawn as if to deliberately divide the Ivy League university from Drexel to the north.

Whether that was the building's intent, Dr. Amy Gutman, Penn President, might be the only one who knows for sure. It's a fair assumption considering the former lawn's central position between both campuses. Once enjoyed by both Penn and Drexel students, New College House could have been doubled in height to save half of the lawn. Instead it builds a wall against Drexel's massive expansion pushing into Chestnut.  

It looks as though a high-priced academic turf war is taking place on what now houses Philadelphia's most expensive real estate, with Penn's conservatively low-rise, brick-and-mortar bumping up against Drexel's sky scraping, modern delights.   

Whether an architectural rivalry truly exists in University City is anyone's guess, but Drexel is gearing up to change the way we think of the American campus. Drexel's departure from their aging brutalism with a modern, and ironically soothing interpretation of the same style, has been a welcome change for a campus consistently ranked amongst the nation's ugliest. Drexel may not be competing with Penn, but with its own past. For decades its orange brick and harsh lines sidled up to the classical curves and lush lawns of Penn's campus, traditional tokens synonymous with the Ivy League. 

We've gotten a sneak-peak of what's to come from Drexel in the last few years, but the transformation officially began today with Drexel President John Fry's announcement that Brandywine Realty Trust will be heading up an ambitious project to house a growing student population in an integrated and urban fashion. 

Dubbed Schuylkill Yards, Drexel's expansion will tap into the underutilized space surrounding 30th Street Station, blending updated incarnations of existing infrastructure with modern infill. Taking a page from the city's most innovative endeavor, the Navy Yard, a development that borrows heavily from the workplace philosophies throughout the Silicon Valley, Drexel isn't just expanding their university up and out, they're fostering an environment for innovation. 

The term "mixed-use" is thrown around so often it's almost meaningless, and often leaves us with parking podiums and empty storefronts. Where it's worked most in Philadelphia has been in University City, specifically amongst Drexel's recent developments. Walking along Chestnut Street, it's very apparent that there's a college somewhere in the mix, but at its heart, it's the city. Walnut Street, on the other hand, clearly belongs to Penn. To walk Walnut is to walk through the heart of a campus. 

Drexel's plan is smart. Its absence of collegiate isolation doesn't just attract retail to its mixed use element, but it's inviting technology firms, medical labs, and a student experience integrated with neighboring colleges, even the city's school district. 

Penn will always have a place alongside the historic greats - Harvard, Princeton, and Yale - but the relevance of that position is changing. As tuition costs soar, prospective students are taking a closer look at their postgraduate opportunities and what employers are looking for. Law firms and traditional employers still eye the Ivy League for buttoned up recruits, but for more innovative corporations like Google, Apple, even our own Comcast, it's quickly becoming less about where you went and more about what you did there. Playing a role in that place has become a huge component of a successful education, an integrated component that Penn hasn't grasped or is too arrogant to admit. 

In the 1990s, graduates who didn't land their ideal career simply went back to school and Van Wildered it through degree after degree, and twenty years later, many of them are finally paying off their loans. With today's cost of education, that luxury is gone, but universities like Drexel are replacing it with another. Students are now analyzing what it takes to land their backup jobs, and looking for educations that either place them in positions before they graduate or teach them how to create their own. 

As Penn continues to dominate as the region's premier, traditional education, Drexel is charging into the future of academia, a future where students are not merely offered an education, but also trained on the realities of a postgraduate world and what it takes to own it. Drexel is giving their students a place to grow after they graduate right here in Philadelphia. 

Penn's turning out doctors and lawyers, but Drexel is graduating students who will invent the next Google or Tesla. If a turf war is unfolding in University City, Drexel is winning by not merely carbon copying what worked for Penn once upon a time, but by building better to create what works for the future.