To promote environmental and social resiliency in inner-city neighborhoods, I helped to craft feature-length documentary about a landscape and community development project in West Philadelphia.
Role Co-Writer, Co-Editor
For MIT DUSP
Date 2020 -
Service strategy, research, content
Project website https://wplp.net/
How do you awaken people to the social power of design?
In 1987, the floodplain of the Mill Creek neighborhood in West Philadelphia was in trouble. Failing water infrastructure and 100 years of discriminatory housing practices meant that houses and streets were quite literally collapsing into subterranean rivers that the city had paved over in the late 1800s.
Inspired to show how design could address these challenges, in 1991 the landscape architect Anne Whiston Spirn and her team at the University of Pennsylvania delivered the “West Philadelphia Landscape Plan” to the City Planning Commission. Despite overwhelming evidence and cost-savings benefits for taking nature-based approaches to transforming West Philly, the plan was completely ignored.
But Anne never gave up. Relaunching the project in the mid-90s as the West Philadelphia Landscape Project, her work ended up sparking a revolution in community-driven water management and helping the city to restore urban nature and rebuild inner-city neighborhoods in Mill Creek through advocacy, education, and design. The project lives on to this day.
Story & Transformation
In 2020, Anne recruited me to spruce up some unfinished videos that were meant to communicate some of the key lessons from the project. Concerned that the structure of the existing edits wouldn’t be able to inspire her target audiences, I proposed a strategic framework and storytelling approach that would allow us to communicate all of her lessons through an overarching thesis about designing for change.
Taking inspiration from Anne’s writings and great essay-style documentaries such as Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, I proposed that we dive back into the series of interviews of Anne and her colleagues and collaborators to find a clearer sense of story and transformation. Together, we developed an hour-long documentary composed of distinct chapters that weave together community voices and connect each of Anne’s revelations about design to specific moments in the project.
Impact
Our process inspired Anne to reinterpret the book that she is writing about the project and to reimagine the audience and potential impact the film could have on design practice and curricula around the world. The film is currently in permissions stage and nearly ready for its debut.