urban revitalization through Community Decoration Initiatives

Studies have shown that industrial redevelopment is most successful in areas where noncommercial interests have the ability to access the full range of public/private interfaces for expressive purposes. Analysis of public spaces in Philadelphia finds an increasing percentage of surfaces being utilized for advertising:

• Building-sized billboards
  
• "Wrapped' cars and buses
  
• Ads in stalls and above urinals in public toilets
  
• Corporate logos attached to most new public structures and events

Simultaneously, the Center City District and other public-private partnerships employ workers to remove any public expressions by individuals; posters, stickers and graffiti.

While the Shopping Mall Paradigm in urban planning offers good short-term returns for business, it will ultimately undermine the vitality of the city and prove corrosive to urban democracy. The mobilization of non-governmental and noncommercial entities ("people") is the linchpin of PIRA's long-term redevelopment planning strategy. Our Office of Community Initiatives acts as a clearinghouse for information on citizen-based Urban Ornamentation Campaigns and Community Decoration Initiatives. Our long-range planning group is working on the creation and implementation of a series of Keystone Ornamentation Zones throughout the city.
Philadelphia is richly blessed by the diversity and vigor of our neighborhood decorators. These quiet heroes lift people’s lives in ways that are beyond government and business’s know-how, usually on shoestring budgets, and they heal our city’s ills one heart and one act of kindness at a time. PIRA is committed to a concerted effort to identify and remove needless barriers that thwart the heroic work of these individuals and groups. Those who risk injury and arrest to beautify the city with noncommercial posters, stickers, and similar creative expressions are freedom-fighters, exercising their First Amendment right to freedom of expression.
PIRA understands that encouraging the work of this diverse Volunteer Citizen's Corps will result in some controversy:

• Where is Urban Ornamentation appropriate?
• Is there such a thing as too much?
• As organizations like the Center City District push the blurring of the line between public and private, who should control public space?
• Is the privatization of public space desirable?

Our Urban Ornamentation Initiatives will stimulate public debate on issues vital to industrial redevelopment and healthy democratic culture.

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