An Alternative “History of the Future” for Philadelphia Comes into Focus

What will Philadelphia be like in 2076? How will it look? Where will people live? What neighborhoods will be safe, clean, and green? Which will have the most resources and the most public space?

Visitors can help answer those questions this week at the interactive exhibition A People’s Philly, presented at the Village of Industry and Art on Broad Street for the annual, citywide festival DesignPhiladelphia.

The exhibition is the result of collaborations between Weitzman architecture faculty, a constellation of community advocacy groups, and a group of eighth graders. Led by Presidential Associate Professor of Architecture Rashida Ng and Senior Lecturer in Architecture Eduardo Rega Calvo, the exhibition “invites viewers to consider how collective care might transform the city and the possibilities we envision for its future.” Ng and Rega Calvo first collaborated in 2023, organizing a “Housing Justice Futures” forum on design, race and climate change in Philadelphia, and have co-taught elective seminars at Weitzman.

In the lead-up to the Semiquincentennial of the United States, they reached out to Michael Spain, the director of k-12 education for Design Philadelphia, to talk about working with young Philadelphians on a future visioning project. That led to a collaboration with Breakthrough of Greater Philadelphia, a nonprofit that provides academic enrichment to high-achieving public school students. In a 10-week course late last year, Ng and Calvo asked students to envision Philadelphia 50 years in the future, modeling their own third places, and sorting through what aspects of the city’s built environment they felt should be maintained, altered, or gotten rid of. When that program ended, Ng and Calvo brought students’ ideas, and their own, to community groups they’d built partnerships with: The North Phillly Peace Park, Kensington Corridor Trust, Norris Square Neighborhood Project, Philly Thrive, and the New Africa Center. Learning from their work, they developed a speculative history of the city’s next five decades, highlighting practices that could bring a more just city into being.

“It’s a history of the future but it’s a fictionalized path and fictionalized images of possibilities,” Ng says. “The project really is about inviting Philly to consider alternatives to the trajectory that we’re on right now. How do we get there? It’s really intended to awaken people’s consciousness to possibilities that might seem out of grasp.”

The exhibition will feature workshop materials and images that were used by students and community partners. Throughout the exhibition, including during a workshop on October 8, visitors will invite visitors to contribute their own visions for Philadelphia’s future through mapping, collage, writing, model-making, and activities for children.

“The idea is that this is not an exhibition that we are just presenting to you,” says Nadine Nashef, a Weitzman Master of Architecture graduate who is coordinating the exhibition. “We’re presenting a work in progress, and you’re invited to be part of that progress.”

Visitors will also be able to interact with four virtual characters developed using video-gaming technology. The characters represent the four Philadelphia neighborhoods—Kensington, North Philadelphia, Grays Ferry, and West Philly—where the partner community groups are based. They’ll be able to speak about the history of Philadelphia and a speculative history of the next 50 years, each with a different neighborhood focus.

“It’s another way of navigating the content, by having an interactive conversation with a character of the future,” says Rega Calvo. The development of the characters was led by Nadine Nashef with Human XR Lab at Universidad del Atlántico Medio in the Canary Islands.

While the exhibition is speculative, it’s also rooted in specific places, exploring how different social practices could contribute to changes in the built environment. Philly Thrive, for instance, grew out of community efforts to fight environmental hazards from the Philadelphia Energy Solutions oil refinery in South Philadelphia, and to shape the future of the site after it was closed. The New Africa Center has worked, sometimes in partnership with Weitzman faculty and students, to establish a “New Freedom District” in West Philadelphia that emphasizes the area’s Black heritage.

“All of these organizations and movements that we’ve been in conversation with for a while now are very much grounded in struggles for space, struggles for land, and struggles against erasure and against displacement,” Rega Calvo says. “Their organizing is all very grounded in land defense, in space defense, in alternative ways of being in those spaces that counter the exploitative dynamics that we’ve become used to.”

The exhibition is designed to elevate those community efforts, and to game out how they could change the city. It opens to the public on Thursday, October 1, 6:00 - 9:00pm at 320 South Broad Street, and the public is also invited to a workshop and reception on Thursday, October 8 at 4:00 pm (registration is required).

“I hope it will challenge people’s imaginations,” says Ng. “To think that things that might seem impossible are possible, and to facilitate more conversation, more sharing, more connection, more solidarity between people that are already doing really good work.”