Bill signing ceremonies are generally pretty rote affairs. City Hall staffers and a few interested parties pack the seats in the portrait-bedecked hall known as the mayor’s reception room. The politicians deliver a list of obligatory ‘thanks yous,’ and that’s that. But there was a sense that history was being made at today's signing for the new zoning code – in more ways than one.  

The new streamlined code is historic, of course, because it replaces a bloated and busted rulebook dating from the Kennedy era. It took four, excrutiatingly long years to rewrite the zoning code, and another half a year to convince council to pass it. Things got pretty ugly in the final months. The reform effort  became a legislative sumo match, with council heavyweights vying to squash the life out of the proposals before council went out of session. So the mere fact that Mayor Nutter had a bill to sign was a big deal.

But what really made the event special was that the room was filled with many regular citizens who devoted large chunks of personal time to the seemingly arcane project. Unlike so many things in Philadelphia, the new zoning code was not the product of top-down, backroom deal-making (although there was certainly a little of that) but a true citizen effort. The project involved people on all sides of the development spectrum, from high-priced zoning lawyers to neighborhood activists. Hundreds of meetings were held, all of them public.  

This type of citizen-led policy making is becoming the norm in Philadelphia. As a result, the list of people to be thanked was longer than usual.  During the recitation of the names, it occurred to me that such public engagement has its roots in the 2006 effort to rethink the Delaware waterfront. Politics and policy-making in Philadelphia were forever changed.

Of course, this isn’t the last we’ll hear about the new zoning code, which is intended to make it easier and cheaper to build in Philadelphia. Thanks to the last-minute wrangling in council, the new code won’t formally go into effect until Aug. 22, 2012. And then it will take another five years to revise the city’s zoning maps, which will allow the code to be put to use. But one senses that Philadelphia has already become a more modern and progressive place.

Having worked as the Inquirer’s architecture critic for a decade, I knew that the election of Mayor Nutter in 2007 had freed Philadelphia’s planners from the shackles imposed by the two previous administrations. Over the last four years, the department has been on a creative tear that has resulted in a string of major planning reports. But I didn’t understand how those plans added up to something special until I arrived at Harvard this fall for a Loeb Fellowship.

I was comparing notes with another Loeb, Anne-Marie Lubenau, and she couldn’t stop gushing about Philadelphia’s planning accomplishments. As the former head of Pittsburgh’s Community Design Center – and a Philadelphia native – she had been following the city’s progress from afar. She was deeply impressed with how Philadelphia’s design advocates, foundations, citizen activists and media had managed to get urban design on the political radar in the 2007 campaign. Nutter embraced their ideas to become a powerful advocate for improved planning and zoning.  “Good leadership can make a difference,” she told me.  “What Philadelphia has accomplished is nothing short of remarkable.”

Philadelphia? Remarkable?

After taking a moment to absorb this statement, an idea began take shape:  Let’s put on a panel about Philadelphia’s planning accomplishments.  And, while we’re at it, let’s invite the mayor, Planning Director Alan Greenberger and other key players to talk about planning at Harvard’s design school.  

All the stars aligned yesterday for the event, titled “The Philadelphia Story: Planning. Politics. Reality.”  Despite the early morning confrontation with Occupy Philadelphia, Nutter and Greenberger made it to Cambridge for the two-hour conversation at the design school’s Gund Hall. They were joined by PennPraxis’ Harris Steinberg, who has been a strong, independent voice for urban design, and the Water Department’s Glen Abrams, an architect of its innovative stormwater management strategy.

Listening to speakers (while simultaneously moderating the discussion) brought me back to the bad-old days when pay-to-play and transactional deal-making were rife in the city. Philadelphia paid a heavy price for the policy inertia that resulted from patronage politics. While other cities were busy tearing down highways and building new neighborhoods, Philadelphia’s allowed its beautiful Delaware waterfront to be used for parking cars. Because of that reputation for corruption and “squirrelly zoning,” Greenberger told the audience, Philadelphia was only one of the nation’s top five cities that failed to attract any national-name developers during the boom years. The new zoning code - surely one of the Nutter Administration’s big accomplishments - should make the city a more inviting place to build.

Nutter, who was apparently operating on very little sleep because of the Dilworth Plaza confrontation, admitted he came into office not knowing much about urban design, but still hoping to change the development culture. The law limiting campaign contributions to Philadelphia officials, which he helped to enact, was an important step.  “It’s not about who you know any more,” said Nutter, who was at Harvard for a mayors' conference.

Of course, the seeds of change were planted long before he came into office by groups like PennPraxis, a non-profit design consultant housed at the University of Pennsylvania’s design school. As its first project, PennPraxis took on the failed Delaware waterfront, founding director Harris Steinberg recalled yesterday. His group organized hundreds of Philadelphians to produce a civic vision for the waterfront, and that experience encouraged them to demand more policy-driven government. The city’s new waterfront masterplan would never have come into being without PennPraxis’ work.

So many plans have been produced in the last four years that it’s sometimes hard to understand how they fit together So it was a revelation when Glen Abrams produced a single slide that explained the relationships. It depicted the reports as planets revolving around – what else? – the city's ambitious Greenworks sustainability plan. Together with Parks and Rec, the department also developed another plan, Green2015, to create a green park in every neighborhood – 500 acres all told. Along with greening streets and other hard surfaces, it will help the city to avoid spending $10 billion on a network of pipes, which would be a lot money down the drain.

I agree with Anne-Marie that Nutter’s leadership has made a difference. At the same time, I can’t help but notice that there’s still a disconnect between the administration’s aspirations and the reality on the ground. There’s a reason we included that word in the event’s title.  As I observed during the yesterday’s discussion, it’s tragic that the first building to go up the waterfront since the master plan’s adoption will be Sugarhouse’s seven-story parking garage. The new zoning code didn’t manage to put a stake in the heart of council’s pocket veto, the notorious councilmanic prerogative, either.

For all the bold new plans, the administration is sometimes blind to the most important projects. Take the first question from the audience: “What’s it going to take to tear down I-95?” asked Aaron Naparstek, founder of Streetsblog, and a fellow Loeb.

Nutter said his goal was institutionalize the cultural shift in City Hall so that Philadelphia can continue to pursue ambitious planning thinking long after his term is over.  Nothing would be more ambitious that figuring out how to deal with I-95.

The Red Sox may be tanking, but it's still hard for a Philadelphian not to feel jealous of Boston.

As people here are endlessly fond of pointing out, Boston is the world’s 11^th largest financial center. This town knows how to use its political muscle, too. Two decades ago, Congressman Tip O’Neill snagged $9 billion in federal aid to demolish Boston’s s downtown highway and now the city has a seamless connection to its glorious waterfront. On top of that, Boston’s population ballooned by over 6 percent in the same period – a feat that makes Philadelphia’s 0.6 percent blip in the recent census seem hardly worth mentioning.

But did you know that Boston was pretty much considered an urban basket case until the start of the 1980s?

It’s true. Corruption took a heavy toll on Boston in the 20^th Century, and by 1950 it was routinely described as a “hopeless backwater.” I’ve been learning a lot of surprising details about the city’s history in a class at Harvard’s GSD, called Cities by Design. It’s really a series of mini courses about five cities, taught by hometown experts. The course kicked off with a two-week session on Boston by the noted planner Alex Krieger. Next up: Barcelona, Mumbai, Mexico City and Rio de Janero.

Krieger’s Boston lectures have already provided what feels like a semester worth of revelations. He started by showing a time line of Boston history that was eerily similar to Philadelphia’s. Having been a major cultural and industrial center from its founding, Boston, like Philadelphia, began to nosedive around 1920 (after seeing its population peak at 750,000). By 1960, Boston had lost a quarter of its residents to the suburbs – same as Philadelphia.

But if you had asked anyone back then which city was more likely to come roaring back, the experts might have put their money on Philadelphia. Planner Edmund Bacon seemed to be dealing with Philadelphia’s problems in a subtle, surgical way - modernizing the downtown office core, reinventing downtown shopping, reviving downtown living in Society Hill – while his counterpart Ed Logue presided over the stunningly brutal clear-cutting of 90 acres of downtown Boston.

So how did Boston pull ahead of its southern sibling?

One explanation, Krieger offered, is that Boston’s cruel treatment of historic core was actually a sign of boldness, ambition and - yes - public collaboration that paid off later. Because of its geography, Boston has a long history of managing big engineering projects that require lots of civic consensus. Until Krieger showed us colonial maps, for instance, I was completely unaware that downtown Boston was once a small island called the Shawmut Peninsula. Thanks to a 300-year landfilling binge, Boston is now quadruple its original size. Four out of five acres in the city are built on fill.

That makes Boston the Netherlands of the U.S. Like the Dutch, Bostonians need to work together to keep the sea at bay. Bostonians are similarly undaunted by massive infrastructure works, whether it’s filling in the Back Bay neighborhood or excavating a crosstown tunnel for the Big Dig.

 The political and planning skills needed to undertake such projects are deeply embedded in the city’s DNA, Krieger says. So, as awful as the razing of downtown Boston was, he suggests that it also provided a platform for a thriving modern Boston. By 1980, Boston had built an entirely new government center, and was busy developing the country’s first festival market at Faneuil Hall and was decking over the turnpike for Copley Place. Burying the Central Artery and reconnecting to the waterfront followed.

 Was it worth the loss of its historic center? All I can say is, I’m sure glad Bacon never realized his dream of razing Philadelphia’s City Hall. On the other hand, Philadelphia could certainly learn a trick or two from Boston’s history of getting citizens to work together for ambitious, long-range plans.

I’ve been in the Boston area just a few weeks, but I already see it’s a very different place than Philadelphia. I’ve always thought of the two cities as fraternal twins that just happened to have inherited different sets of religious and sporting genes (Puritan v. Quaker, AL v. NL). Sure Philadelphia might be almost three times the size of Boston – 618,000 inhabitants – but it’s really a statistical anomaly caused by the fact that close-in neighborhoods like Cambridge, Brookline and Somerville are independent cities.

So, even though I’m mostly in Cambridge, where I am a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, I spend just about every minute toting up how Boston (ok, Boston area) is the same/different and better/ worse than Philadelphia. One immediately visible difference is the city’s layout. I’m in a constant state of disorientation because streets in Boston and Cambridge meander in a random, medieval pattern that is so much harder to grasp than Philadelphia’s logical grid. Those curving streets produce a lot of charming moments. I was delighted to find myself at the intersection of Bow and Arrow Streets in Cambridge the other day, even though I was blocks from where I thought I was supposed to be. The erratic layout is one of the ways Boston distinguishes itself from virtually every other big American city. Now that I’ve had my first class with media expert Nicco Mele (Media, Politics, Power), I realize that a street layout is a lot like a computer operating system, in the way it interfaces between a city’s hardware (the built stuff) and software (its culture and history).

Cosmopolitan as Cambridge is, it’s hard for me to think of it an independent city. In my mind, it occupies the same geographical niche as West Philadelphia - because it’s on the Charles River across from Boston’s downtown and because it’s where the two powerhouse universities are located. But Cambridge is far more affluent and precious than West Philly, in ways that are good and bad. In the area where I’m living, plenty of gracious, early 20th Century houses are divided into apartments for students, just as they are around the Penn and Drexel campuses. But I haven’t seen any of those heartbreaking historical wrecks you find in West Philly, the ones with listing front porches and trash cans for yard ornament. I’m amazed at how many student apartment buildings have well-tended flower gardens out front, not to mention reasonably fresh paint jobs.

A plan to bring life to the vast asphalt desert at Philadelphia’s sports complex took another step forward today when a Baltimore developer released drawings for a $100 million entertainment center connecting the Wachovia Center to Citizens Bank Park.

The glitzy architectural renderings, which were presented to the city Planning Commission, showed a two-block-long, diagonal street running between the two sports venues, across the land now occupied by the Spectrum. Modeled on such destinations as Boston’s Quincy Market and Baltimore’s Power Point Live, the street would be lined with restaurants, bars and shops.

The project would replace the Spectrum, which is scheduled to be demolished early next year. It is being developed jointly by Comcast-Spectacor and the Cordish Company, the developer behind much of the nightlife at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.