Philly Gets $11 Million Boost for 5 Public Spaces

“Reimagining the Civic Commons” initiative aims to build, enhance and measure community impact.

(Credit: Fairmount Park Conservancy)

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Philadelphia has a fresh $11 million to revitalize five public spaces. It was announced today that the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and William Penn Foundation will give that amount to the “Reimagining the Civic Commons” initiative. (Knight provides funding support to Next City.)

The Fairmount Park Conservancy will partner with organizations behind these individual projects to put the funding to work: the Audubon and Outward Bound-led Discovery Center in East Fairmount Park; rail line repurposing project Reading Viaduct Rail Park; Bartram’s Mile trail project, a brownfield transformation effort; Lovett Memorial Library and Park; and the Fairmount Park Conservancy’s Centennial Commons, which would turn an underutilized section of Fairmount Park into a new playspace.

The money will go toward completion of the in-the-works spaces, as well as programming and measuring community impact.

“Every city has a collection of civic places with the potential to add to their success in a big way. In many cases however, these places are siloed from one another and in competition for dollars. Created over many decades, they are aging, saddled with legacy systems and attracting too little investment to adjust to today’s changing demographics and community needs,” Carol Coletta, Knight Foundation vice president for community and national initiatives, said in a press release. “Philadelphia is ideally positioned to help tackle these challenges; it is a city full of civic innovators eager to demonstrate the added value of a connected civic commons.”

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Jenn Stanley is a freelance journalist, essayist and independent producer living in Chicago. She has an M.S. from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

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Tags: parkspublic space

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