Professor Anne Whiston Spirn to Speak about the West Philadelphia Landscape Project on Oct. 23

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Professor Anne Whiston Spirn will give a presentation about the West Philadelphia Landscape Project at 4 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 23, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus. She will introduce and screen six multimedia videos about the project, and a short question-and-answer session will follow. 

Spirn, professor of landscape architecture and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded the project in 1987 while at the University of Pennsylvania.

For more than 25 years now, the project has worked in the Mill Creek Watershed, with a focus on the Mill Creek neighborhood. It has worked with the people of Mill Creek to address the opportunities and challenges posed by the urban landscape.

The mission of the project is to restore nature and rebuild community through strategic design, planning and education projects. It seeks to demonstrate how to create human settlements that are healthier, economical to build and maintain, more resilient, more beautiful and more just. The project was cited as a Model of Best Practice at a 1999 White House summit for leading scholars and artists in public life.

A key proposal of the project is to manage the Mill Creek watershed as part of a broad approach to improving regional water quality and as a strategy to secure funds to rebuild the neighborhood. They employ landscape literacy as a cornerstone of community development.

Hundreds of students, teachers, residents and public officials have contributed to the project. Its numerous partners have included the Philadelphia Water Department, Penn’s Center for Community Partnerships, Aspen Farms Community Garden, Sulzberger Middle School, the Mill Creek Coalition, the Philadelphia Urban Resources Partnership and Philadelphia Green.

Between 1987 and 1991, the project was part of a collaborative landscape plan and “greening” project for West Philadelphia. A team of faculty members and students at the University of Pennsylvania created a digital database with maps of the neighborhood’s demographics and physical features, made proposals for the strategic reuse of vacant urban land in the Mill Creek watershed, and designed dozens of gardens.

The project also led an experimental community education project in partnership with Sulzberger Middle School and the Aspen Farms community garden in West Philadelphia in 1994. From 1996 to 2001, hundreds of children participated in the program, where they learned to read the neighborhood’s landscape. They traced its past, deciphered its stories and told their stories about its future, some of which were built. The success of the Sulzberger program was recognized in Philadelphia and across the country.

In 1998, Governor Tom Ridge invited the students from Sulzberger to make a five-minute presentation to the State Legislature. Their presentation was televised, as well as the legislature’s response – a long, standing ovation. In 1999, the Mill Creek Project was the subject of a report on the national NBC Nightly News program.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton visited the school. The Philadelphia Water Department took over the summer program with Sulzberger and the Mill Creek Project, and Anne Spirn and her students continued to work with Sulzberger after she joined the faculty of MIT in 2000. The community education project came to an end when key teachers left after the state of Pennsylvania took over the Philadelphia School District in 2002 and placed the school under private management.

In fall 2009, the Philadelphia Water Department announced a landmark proposal to reduce combined sewer overflows through green infrastructure. Spirn and Jim Wescoat, an MIT colleague, began an MIT course that explores the feasibility of the water department’s proposal.

Students have studied and visited the Mill Creek watershed and neighborhood, explored new strategies for water management, created new visions for Mill Creek’s buried floodplain and presented their ideas to the water department.

The landscape project continues its relationship with Aspen Farms Community Garden and started a new initiative with Earthkeepers, an organization dedicated to teaching high school students about their environment.

Spirn is an award-winning author, photographer, teacher and practitioner. Before coming to MIT, she taught at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the chair for the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning.

Spirn has written several books, including The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (Basic Books, 1984), The Language of Landscape (Yale University Press, 1998), Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and The Eye Is a Door: Landscape, Photography, and the Art of Discovery (2014). Her current book-in-progress, titled Top-Down/Bottom-Up: Restoring Nature and Rebuilding Community, describes research-in-action and lessons to build safer, healthier and more equitable and sustainable communities. Spirn received a Guggenheim fellowship for this book.

The public is invited to attend the presentation. Admission is free, with limited seating.

For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or architecture.uark.edu.