Save Penn's Landing!!

Remember when Penn's Landing was a pleasant (though hard to get to on foot) place to enjoy one of Philadelphia's natural wonders; the Delaware River? The recent failure of Melvin Simon's Penn's Landing shopping mall presents Philadelphia with another opportunity to buck the trend towards the privatization of public spaces, and to bring ordinary citizens into the process of restoring access to and enjoyment of this wonderful public space. Do we want another poorly-planned commercial structure like the failed Mall, which seemed to be designed to keep people away from the River? The original Penn's Landing development, for all of it's faults, was at least designed to give pedestrians enjoyable access to the river. PIRA wants to know what you'd like to see on the Penn's Landing site:

PIRA is proud to announce
An open call for creative solutions to the problem of developing Penn's Landing in the public interest.

• Who can enter? Anyone is welcome to submit an idea or proposal. No special training, degree, certification, or technical expertise is required to submit your idea. PIRA encourages everyone, including people who don't live in the Philadelphia area, to submit your proposals.
• Does it have to be a building? No! Any and all ideas, from the wonderfully practical to the sublimely ridiculous will be considered. PIRA's aim is to stimulate discussion and debate. Homeless shelter? Luxury hamster resort? Portal to another dimension? Recycling facility? Great ideas! The city needs your inspiration, so follow your interests and passions, and submit your proposals.
• What should I submit? PIRA will accept submissions of any kind. If you want to submit a drawing, anything from a rough sketch to an architectural rendering is fine. Don't like to draw? PIRA will accept submissions in any medium: a model, a written or recorded description, a Flash animation, a poem or song, a performance, a tattoo... whatever medium suits you and your proposal best. Feel free to EMAIL: us if you have any questions.
• When is the deadline? There is no deadline. In the extremely unlikely event that, at some point in the distant future there actually is a successful, completed development of some sort on Penn's Landing we will still accept alternative proposals.
  All submissions will be displayed on our Website.
• Isn't the City already asking for people's ideas? The City has a Website here where you can join discussions on a bulletin board and look at some maps and images. They have also announced that some public forums will be held to discuss the project. While PIRA applauds these efforts, we do have some problems with their execution. The Website requires that you register and sign in to participate, which seems unnecessary to us. The site's image-galleries section is remarkably slow to load. We have tried to upload images of a PIRA proposal into the forums section three times, and the site has crashed or given back an error message each time. There is no explanatory text in the image-upload area explaining whether the images that people want to contribute have to be approved or will be added to the site automatically.
  

Click here to see the submissions.

Would you like to make a suggestion for or questions or comment about this project? e-mail us at:

EMAIL: