Over the next two weeks, Next City will unroll short profiles of 77 people, places and ideas that have changed cities this year. Together, they make up our 2012 Disruption Index. Forefront subscribers can download the Index in full as a PDF, complete with beautiful designs and graphics by Danni Sinisi. Readers who make a $75 donation to Next City will have a full-color printed copy of the Index mailed to them.

After more than 10 years of planning and hoping, Philadelphia will soon be getting the sort of transit-oriented, mixed-income development project the city really needs. Paseo Verde will, when it opens in 2013, be a LEED Platinum-rated, mixed-use residential and office development immediately adjacent to a major transit stop. A mix of 120 affordable and market-rate apartments, the complex will include space for ground-floor retail and community services and will be a literal stone’s throw from the train station. Doubtlessly, it will transform the North Philadelphia brownfield where it’s slated to rise, bringing new residents and businesses to a part of the city that for too long has languished without investment.

The man behind the project is Jonathan Rose, whose Jonathan Rose Companies has long been an innovator in the sort of green development projects that are beginning to reshape cities around the world. Rose, working closely with the city and architects Wallace Roberts and Todd, developed Paseo Verde in partnership with a local community development corporation Associación de Puertorriqueños en Marcha. If all goes as planned, the project will be a model of how to revitalize a neighborhood without pricing community members out. Rose’s work on Paseo Verde represents an example of a big-time developer doing good. May others follow in his path.

Nate Berg is a writer and journalist covering cities, architecture and urban planning. Nate’s work has been published in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, NPR, Wired, Metropolis, Fast Company, Dwell, Architect, the Christian Science Monitor, LA Weekly and many others. He is a former staff writer at The Atlantic Cities and was previously an assistant editor at Planetizen.