We’re pleased to announce – on the eve of our sold out event tomorrow, no less! – that the Philadelphia City Planning Commission (PCPC) has been awarded the 2013 Best Practice award from the American Planning Association (APA) for our “ innovative approach at leveraging the synergy between citizen education, planning, and zoning reform.” This is referring to our three-legged-stool approach to how we plan for the city’s future through 1) Philadelphia2035, 2) the rewritten zoning code, and 3) The Citizens Planning Institute.

We won’t physically receive the award until this year’s APA national conference, taking place this April in the Burnham-tastical land of Chicago, but we’re excited to announce this in what we hope will be a series of positive headlines throughout this calendar year. Our incredibly planning-savvy populace is mostly used to how our agency and so many others do business: what works and what doesn’t, the regulatory wins and political debates, the iterative planning process and its seemingly endless parade of meetings and charrettes and visioning sessions. So it’s particularly valuable and important for an outside organization to help us take a step back and acknowledge that what are carrying out on a daily basis here is no small feat. More importantly, it’s very different than how we operated even a few short years ago.

We feel APA’s Dennis Puko says it best in the press release, which you can read HERE: “In any city, let alone one as large and politically complex as Philadelphia, undertaking either a comprehensive plan, zoning code rewrite, or citizen planner leadership program, would have been a major accomplishment. Philadelphia through 2011 to 2012 did all three, and integrated them to achieve the most positive outcomes.” 

While we bask ever so briefly in the glow of national recognition, we will also be the first to say that this recently established framework for educating, advancing policy, and implementing regulation will be all the more laudable if we can continue to make things happen through its structure: zoning map revisions based on District Plans; capital projects winning outside grants through their prioritization in our plans; by-right projects rolling through with more frequency; and more citizens leveraging their new-found understanding of these systems to achieve better outcomes for their communities. We’ll continue to track how all of this plays out across Philadelphia as this year and the ones after out come and go. In the meantime, you should feel glad to live in a place that’s turning heads for how it’s attempting to frame its future.