Independent Studio: Plumlee and Reese-Julien

Interdisciplinary Independent Studio: Jackson Plumlee and Jamaica Reese-Julien

Contested to Commons: Reclaiming Public Land in Philadelphia

Under the current system of policies and practices in Philadelphia, many public spaces are becoming increasingly commodified and surveilled, which bears consequences for the types of people, practices, and expressions that they foster. In some places, community groups have broken this paradigm by occupying, contesting, and liberating public land for more collective benefit. We mapped public spaces in Philadelphia based on their Ownership and Degree of Inclusion to understand where we could target and orient our own work in solidarity with grassroots social movements.

Jackson Plumlee

Jackson Plumlee
Across the city 14.8% of land is publicly owned. The spaces and institutions that occupy this land vary from individual lots and homes to large scale public housing and regional parks. We found that the most quickly vanishing public land resource is properties owned by the Philadelphia Land Bank, the City’s clearinghouse for publicly owned vacant land. Much of this land is in low-income communities of color that have experienced decades of disinvestment and are now faced with escalating market pressures.
Jackson Plumlee
The Land Bank was established in 2013 with good intentions to disentangle the mess of public land ownership among many city agencies, which made it nearly impossible to transfer ownership of public land. However, it has since evolved into a financial instrument that enables and enforces regressive forms of property taxation and expropriation in low-income communities of color, with the ultimate goal of raising the citywide tax base. Meanwhile, private developers receive tax abatements for new construction, which leaves long-term residents with an undue tax burden to pay for the infrastructure and public amenities used by wealthy newcomers. There is growing support, evident in the current races and platforms for City Council and Mayoral seats, to reform the Land Bank.
Jackson Plumlee
Grays Ferry is a neighborhood of predominantly low-income Black families in South Philadelphia, who have all been impacted in some way by the harmful effects of pollution from the now-defunct Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refinery. The human toll is evident in high rates of asthma, respiratory illness, and cancer. The refinery’s harm to residents’ well-being and the ongoing challenges of gun violence in the neighborhood have tragically normalized the loss of family, friends, and loved ones. This is a community on the frontline of the struggle for environmental justice and the residents are long overdue for reparations and a brighter future. Moreover, it is also a neighborhood of aging homes and residents are facing imminent displacement pressures from rising real-estate values, predatory land speculation, and major redevelopment projects proposed nearby. In a neighborhood in desperate need of affordable housing and spaces of togetherness, public land is a critical, but disappearing resource.

Philly Thrive is leading the fight for Environmental Justice in Grays Ferry. Our work grew out of several years of engagement with Philly Thrive’s campaigns as volunteers. Through this project, we aim to build on Thrive’s work and support their grassroots organizing efforts to secure a better future for Grays Ferry residents.
Jackson Plumlee
This project explores spatial strategies and organizing tactics that can reclaim space and build a structure for neighborhood-based governance and collective benefit. This multi-stage approach is as much about developing the organizing, building, and stewardship capacity of people in the neighborhood as it is about spatializing and materializing climate justice in their physical environment.
Jackson Plumlee

Jackson Plumlee
The project is not a comprehensive plan, but rather a strategic campaign that could engage design, political, and community action to enact change at the scale of both systems and everyday spaces. Throughout the neighborhood, homes and neighborhood land are prioritized as the fundamental units for materializing climate justice in the built environment. Adaptation and addition are prioritized over removal and redevelopment.
Jackson Plumlee
Alongside these spatial interventions, organized residents can also build more collective forms of governance and ownership of land for community uses and affordable housing. Creating a community land trust preserves long-term affordability by removing land and housing from the commodified market.

Ultimately, we illustrated interventions on specific sites, that could demonstrate new forms of neighborhood land development, rooted in collective action, care, and community togetherness, which grow and coalesce over time. These spaces also model climate resilience at a tangible human scale, by prioritizing human well being and comfort alongside systems for collecting and providing water and solar energy in situ. A Healing Garden at the Peace Plaza, a worker-owned Home Workshop, and a Climate Oasis on a corner lot are just a few of the many possible productive uses for public land. This project seriously explores the idea that radical investment and design don’t have to result in the displacement of long-term residents. Through parallel acts of design, community organizing, and policy action, residents can build the environmentally-just future they have long-envisioned for themselves.
Jackson Plumlee
Jackson Plumlee
Jackson Plumlee

Interdisciplinary Independent Studio: Jackson Plumlee and Jamaica Reese-Julien

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