One way development and improvement projects are incubated at public institutions in a city facing a stressed budget, is through workshops organized by smaller organizations who connect the necessary professionals to the communities in need.

The goal is for the project to go from the whiteboard to the parcel, so to speak. That’s what’s happening at the Henry C. Lea School, located at 4700 Locust St. in West Philly. In May, we wrote about a design charrette hosted by the Community Design Collaborative. The goal of that charrette was to generate community ideas about how to green the schoolyard at Lea, now a lake of concrete.

Lea school

School yard

The event featured relevant professionals from SMP Architects, Viridian Landscape Studio, Meliora Environmental Design LLC, and a cost estimator who after the charrette compiled the ideas, refined them and applied them to…

Philadelphia’s stormwater management efforts might soon be privy to ideas generated by the best minds working in that field across the country.

This fall, those behind the Infill Philadelphia initiative, brought to us by folks at the Community Design Collaborative (CDC), plan to host a nationwide design challenge for three sites chosen by an interdisciplinary jury. The goal is to figure out how to be smart about stormwater management and also raise consciousness and awareness about the issue, according to Beth Miller, executive director of CDC.

This initiative is the next chapter in Infill’s revitalization efforts across the city, which began in 2005 with a pilot program that hosted a design challenge to generate new ideas about affordable housing prototype models. The efforts continued in three later phases, examining commercial corridors, food access, and industrial sites (which concluded in 2010), and focused on refreshing…