Studying Neighborhoods in Philadelphia

 For this studio project, I will be investigating the neighborhoods of West Kensington, Manayunk, and Rittenhouse in the city of Philadelphia with the goal of identifying equities and inequities across these areas. 

On Wednesday, I conducted my first site visit by walking through a portion of the West Kensington neighborhood and recording my findings in the following maps and charts. West Kensington is a majority Latino and specifically Puerto Rican neighborhood. The City Data website has some good introductory statistics for your prevue. 

Above is a sampling of some of the photographs I captured during my site visit on Wednesday September 15, 2021. These images demonstrate the range of conditions encountered on site. 

Below, you can explore the interactive map that I created, focusing on the areas of:

• Green Space (intentional such as public parks and playgrounds and unintentional such as empty and vacant lots that include a mix of local citizen's upkeep and neglect).
• Housing (including highlighting areas of high and low density and the effects of urban decay)
• Upkeep (my catch all for what some call urban blight - places in need of repair or maintenance as well as places actively being constructed. For example, abandoned buildings with broken windows, trash dumps, and unfinished new construction projects in progress)  
• Stores (including typology, a local corner store is different from an ethnic store which is different from a big box chain store or strip mall)
• Services (this includes things like community centers, schools, hospitals, libraries, and the like).
• Art (This includes public murals and sculptures, but also artfully composed graffiti - different from simple mono-line graffiti tags which I categorized as upkeep.)  

Additionally, I explored several other layers of interest:

• Homelessness (evidence of homeless encampments)
• Transportation (SEPTA bus stations in this example)
• Sensory Information (in one area a rooster was crowing, another the bark on some trees was peeling in a beautiful display, and in another area a delivery man was cursing out some drivers at the top of his lungs for several minutes. The drivers joined the cacophony with their horns).  

I believe that these factors indicate factors that influence the quality of life for residents in a neighborhood in general. These factors are also easy to observe, quantify, and compare across neighborhoods. I am looking forward to exploring the next neighborhood in my sequence next week to begin drawing those comparisons. 

Here are some preliminary charts that I created as I begin to organize and understand the data that I collected. 

My conclusions are as follows: West Kensington is a neighborhood of highs and lows. Some areas, such as the Taller Community Center and the shopping area indicated on the map are attractive places to visit with proud expressions of Latino culture and a vibrant community spirit. Other areas are struggling. There are also marked differences in density between the high density row house areas indicated in brown on the map and the very low density areas where lone row houses beaten and neglected stand as ghost islands surrounded by the "missing teeth" of vacant lots littered with trash, tires, and bombed out cars. And amidst these extremes there are a plethora of people who take pride in their neighborhood: they raise chickens and roosters, they decorate their cars with Puerto Rican memorabilia, and they put home made tire planters outside filled with herbs and flowers. Here school children play outside and relaxing covered courtyards can be found where unseen voices speak jovially in Spanish.