Manifesto

There are thousands of empty lots in Philadelphia, and in the neighborhoods surrounding Lancaster Avenue up to 42nd Street, specifically Mantua and Belmont, they are especially prevalent. I don't like anything to go to waste, and I feel that an unused empty lot is a waste of space. A common problem in cities is a lack of space, where people have small back yards or none at all and there is few unpaved areas.  It makes little sense for lots to just sit there and fill up with trash. Using empty lots as a resource, they can help to improve the area, instead of being an eye sore. As a part of Neighborhood Narratives I wanted to do something about it.
Initially I approached this idea for a project in a purely aesthetical and naturalistic way. This both lacked any community engagement and seemed like it was potentially invasive and just didn't accomplish anything. I wanted to keep the naturalistic elements by essentially using only what I found on site to support the idea of reuse instead of bringing in something new, because this is key to sustainability in all uses of the word. I thought something functional that was also aestheticly pleasing, naturalistic, and simplistic would be the best thing we could do, so we subsequently decided to build a fire pit. This also seemed like the perfect project because of the connections fires and barbeques have with community and storytelling. Having heard that the neighborhood has lost a lot of the sense of community it once had, it is fitting that we created a place where different members of the community can come together. Two of our goals were to have engagement during our creation process, and after we had left. I would not say everything went as smoothly as possible, but we did achieve these goals. Neighborhood kids helped us with the site, and someone made a fire there later on. Ultimately this individual project will not make any grand changes, but the idea is that it is the first step. Things can change if more and more people do this sort of thing, and the projects get larger in scale as they develop.

Final Project

For my final project I made a fire pit with George at 38th and Wallace in Mantua. Overall the communities response was positive, although we did receive some trouble for taking pictures of this group of kids who helped us carry fire wood another guy had dropped off for us. A group of people came to yell at us for it, but it was really only one guy who seemed livid. The people who lived on either side of the lot thought what we were doing was great, and that they would definitely use it themselves. Many people who just walked by asked us what we wer doing and seemed pleased by it. Since building this I have been back with class and one other time. The structures were still standing a week after we built it, and the pit had been used at least once. We heard from two of the children that the angry man from earlier in the day had said he was going to destroy everything. Maybe when he saw what we did he decided not to or maybe someone convinced him not to possibly the people who live next door. Or maybe he was just to lazy. I don't think we'll ever know, but I'm just glad it has survived this long, because the longer something lives the longer its ultimate lifetime will be.