Anthony West
Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:28:02 -0700
It's like the relationship between, say, a Penn-affiliated museum-signage designer and a gallery that employs him or her: after the exhibit is hung, he or she isn't expected to patrol the museum for possible signage revisions month after month and take responsibility for reorganizing it. It would be on the gallery itself, the customer, to call back and request such a service.
So if someone wants to employ PennPraxis in the 40th St. planning process again, the likeliest way would be to work through Friends of 40th St. first. Have you contacted this group? What was its response to your inquiry?
You're right on one point: my guess is PennPraxis does require some kind of operating agreement with all sides in a dispute. So if you, working on behalf of Friends of 40th St. or some other body, want to hire PP to talk about a particular bridge or a particular building, PP will need at least passive cooperation from other major parties to the discussion; which obviously includes Penn, if you want to play a role in planning Penn's property.
It would probably be on you, as the other-body guy, to negotiate such an agreement first with Penn, if that's your "other side". Otherwise, no facilitator will want to step in.
In the case of the South St. bridge, Penn declined to weigh in on a bridge that is *not its property* and let the City of Philadelphia, plus a rack of other governmental authorities, handle that decision-making. I don't know anything about the neighbors' complaints, but it is just barely possible Penn made a smart decision then. You yourself say below, Penn says it negotiated a compromise that fiddled with the guardrails. What more were "the neighbors" expecting from Penn in this case? Unlike the Pine St. property, this bridge isn't Penn's bridge in the first place.
In this case too, did the "neighborhood groups" you write of, seek planning-process facilitation from PennPraxis? If you don't know whether they did, you can't very well complain PennPraxis didn't get involved with them. You can't complain you didn't get a pizza from Colonial Pizza, if you neglected to order the pizza in the first place. It's not Colonial's job to figure out when you want a pizza.
-- Tony West
au contraire, tony.the campus inn at 40th and pine was cited by the developers as part of the 40th street development, and for years now the development of 40th street has been THE agenda for 'the friends of 40th street forum' working with penn praxis.here is what the penn praxis 'friends of 40th street' website says on their homepage:So, Penn Praxis, working with a community-based steering committee, created a process that gave the community the chance to talk about 40th Street, a way of building bridges and trust among people and communities, a place of common ground where we could feel comfortable about our place at the community table. We created a series of safe and facilitated conversations (see documentation in the right column) that allowed people to talk about something that is often difficult to talk about. In the case of 40th Street, many people and communities feel passionately about the street and all too often difficult histories prevent us from creating a shared future. The community forum process was and remains about a shared future.but you will find no mention of the proposed hotel in newspapers or even on the friends of 40th street website:http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/local/40th//reference.html that is why I wrote:consider that penn praxis was conspicuously absent from the media when it came to helping neighbors deal with penn's proposed hotel at 40th and pine- - - - - -and in the case of the south street bridge, the neighbors DID ask penn to intervene for them, but penn said NO:http://tinyurl.com/6kbpw2The design proposed by the city will make the South Street Bridge much more structurally sound than it is today. Still, several neighborhood associations recently joined forces to push for changes, arguing that the current plan is cold, industrial and lacks pedestrian-friendly features. The coalition has been unable to sway the Streets Department to consider changes, so it is turning to another neighbor of sorts, the University of Pennsylvania, for help. But to their surprise, Penn officials say they will not get involved. [...]University spokesman Tony Sorrentino said Penn will not take a side in the current debate, to the dismay of Campbell and the other groups. "We don't want to use our authority to affect someone else's project," said University architect David Hollenberg. He added, however, that the Streets Department did consult him and his predecessor, Charles Newman - who declined to be interviewed for this article - about the design several times during the planning process. Penn even lobbied successfully for some changes during meetings with the Streets Department, according to Hollenberg. One such change was a redesign of the guard rails on the sides of the bridge...................UNIVERSITY*CITOYEN
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