Geography & Urban Studies

ABSTRACT: Today, when passing through Lower North Philadelphia, one can see almost no signs of the vast amount of redevelopment money that has been spent in this neighborhood in recent decades. Generally, the area exhibits the signs that we have come to associate with urban decay and decline. It is a residential neighborhood filled with social problems and decayed buildings. An amount of more than $775,000 has recently been advanced to construct a project to revitalize Lower Northwestern Philadelphia via Urban Initiative Grant. The area is boundaried by Broad Street, 26th Street, Poplar and Susquenhana Avenue. This is not the first project that has sought to revitalize Lower North Philadelphia. In fact, renewal projects targeted to this area since 1950s. In these renewal projects, the issues of historical perspective seems just like these projects to the area- a routine topic. Social-economic analysis and political critiques have identified certain key factors such as population structure, criminal, bureaucracy and renewal policies, racial invasion, racial segregation, housing market, etc. The sphere of physical environment retrospective has been significantly overlooked. The spatial structure of the neighborhood, the institutions (e.g, churches, schools, hospitals, etc.), the buildings, the streets, the land uses, are also important elements. It is essential and also interesting to study the development process of physical environment that has occurred in study area before we propose any other renewal project. This paper seeks to present the major elements of North Philadelphia's physical environment across different time periods that in Philadelphia. Historic research presents the background for the present reality. A simplified case study of those renewal projects has been undertaken at the end of this work, in order to foster critical discussions of these projects