June 9th, 2010 |
By Lee Stabert
A plan is powerful. Lines on a page are often the first step towards realizing the transformation of a space, or a neighborhood. The Community Design Collaborative is driven by this idea.
“Design is not a luxury,” explains Executive Director Beth Miller. The organization was founded in 1991 by a group of architects and planners who wanted to improve Philadelphia neighborhoods. For 20 years, the Collaborative has been coordinating pro-bono preliminary design services for community groups, helping them realize their ambitions while offering pragmatic council.
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June 4th, 2010 |
By Elizabeth Fiedler
Design professionals will unveil plans to turn a few of Philadelphia’s old industrial sites into spaces for new job-generating industries. The project that matches community groups, owners of industrial buildings with local architects and planners.
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June 3rd, 2010 |
By Gabby Warshawer
Designs were revealed last week at an Infill Philadelphia: Industrial Sites event. Infill Philadelphia, sponsored by the Community Design Collaborative and the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, involved having design teams come up with creative visions for reusing three old industrial spaces: The wing of an old factory and an abutting lot in North Philadelphia; a vacant manufacturing complex in Kensington; and a section of land on the southwest bank of the Schuylkill. Read More »
May 14th, 2010 |
By Katherine Sharpe
Last year, ReadyMade broke the news about the dumpster pools of Brooklyn—a story that quickly grew wings and took off, gathering attention from corners of the mediasphere as varied as the New York Times, BoingBoing, ABC News and NPR. This year Macro-Sea, the company that conceived and built the pools, is back with a new project, a “psychological recycling center” called Glassphemy! (Read the New York Times article about Glassphemy!, here.) And ReadyMade is teaming up with Macro-Sea to sponsor a contest to get our readers involved in the recycling and design process, too.
Not so long ago, in Philadelphia, a meeting of architects and urban planners was convened by the Community Design Collaborative to think of ‘interim uses’ for empty lots around the city. One of the lots in question was always strewn with piles of broken glass. The architects and urban planners furrowed their brows in thought: would it be possible to create a project that would lure people away from their littering ways, converting the lot for more constructive uses?
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May 13th, 2010 |
By Ariela Rose
Infill Philadelphia has more than one reason to celebrate. The five-year urban revitalization initiative will complete phase three of the program this fall, and they’ve also been awarded a $25,000 grant from the Urban Land Institute’s (ULI) Community Action Grants program.
Grant recipients are judged on ULI’s three core values: sustainability, infrastructure and workforce/ affordable housing. Conceived by the Community Design Collaborative, Infill has excelled in all three areas, bringing attention to the city’s countless vacant and neglected spaces.
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May 3rd, 2010 |
By John Steele
Keystone Edge
Commentators past and present, from Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair to Jon Teaford and the opinion section of the Detroit News, have both celebrated and bemoaned the decline of urban manufacturing. While unchecked manufacturing has historically caused pollution and exploited workers, the proud tradition of American innovation built our great cities. Now, rusted factory silos and empty, unremediated brownfields scream a stern reminder of our industrialized history, for better or worse.
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April 26th, 2010 |
By Thomas J. Walsh
For PlanPhilly
April 23, 2010
The loss of industrial jobs and a decline in manufacturing in Philadelphia is certainly nothing new, but most residents of the region would probably trace the start of the downturn to the 1960s and ’70s. In fact, the attrition started in the 1920s, said Acting Deputy Mayor Alan Greenberger, at a panel Friday morning at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design.
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April 20th, 2010 |
Urban Land Institute Foundation Announces $86,000 In Funding Through Community Action Grants Program
Four Winners of Semi-Annual Awards Announced at ULI Real Estate Summit in Boston
WASHINGTON (April 15, 2010) – Four grants have been awarded in the Urban Land Institute’s (ULI) semi-annual funding of its community action grants program. Through the program, created over five years ago, the ULI Foundation Fund has raised money to be distributed as grants to district councils or ULI members on behalf of nonprofit organizations for entrepreneurial programs that aim to improve urban growth in their communities.
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April 15th, 2010 |
By Thomas J. Walsh
PlanPhilly
Read the article at PlanPhilly
NEW ORLEANS – A much-anticipated study due out next month from the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. was previewed Monday morning at the American Planning Association conference, held here through Tuesday.
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March 16th, 2010 |
By Nina Rappaport
The Architect’s Newspaper
To anyone riding Amtrak from New York to Philadelphia, the demise of the former “workshop of the world” is evident in the crumbling brick stacks and punched-out windows of factory relics. But while other cities have all but given up on attracting new industries, Philadelphia has embarked on conceptualizing a revitalized manufacturing future.
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