photo: Jacques-Jean Tiziou

Planning & Visioning

Hidden City, in cooperation with CultureWorks Greater Philadelphia, offers planning and visioning facilitation to sites and their communities. A substantial component of our work for the 2013 festival will include helping site leaders imagine next steps, new initiatives, and ways forward to increasing the utility and overall value of their places for the surrounding community. Our work is highly specific to the needs, context, and goals of the community. To that end, we occasionally bring in partners with special knowledge or experience to join our team and bring fresh thinking and new ideas to solving old problems and imagining new futures. Some current projects are described below. For more information, contact our Site & Community Relations Director Pete Woodall at pwoodall@hiddencityphila.org

Philadelphia Micro-Preservation Conference

Hidden City is developing a white paper and a conference for spring/summer 2012 that will explore issues in policy, regulation, and practice concerning “micro-preservation,” or low-barrier re-use of historic buildings and infrastructure. We currently do not have sufficient preservation policy, design, or regulatory frameworks to encourage safe, medium-term uses for under-utilized historic buildings. We have systems in place for very temporary projects and uses, and permanent uses, which tend to carry great expense. With our limited financial capacity today, we need to explore how to put more of our remaindered infrastructure to good use in cost-efficient and more accessible ways.