Changing Skyline: A small-scale vision of Philadelphia's future

In 1960, Philadelphia peered into a crystal ball and tried to divine how the city would look 25 years in the future. The exercise in clairvoyance produced the city's first Comprehensive Plan, an amazing, 375-page document that showed the rough outlines of what would become Penn Center, Market East Station, and the revitalized Society Hill neighborhood.

City planners also misread some key signs. They were way off in their prediction that the city's population would balloon to 2.5 million by 1986. And when they designated land for a new waterfront neighborhood called Penn's Landing, they neglected to recognize that a certain planned interstate highway would fatally wall off the site. Still, if planners had not pursued a few transformative ideas, such as the tunnel projects that paved the way for a single, unified transit system called SEPTA, Philadelphia probably would not count itself today among the nation's survivor cities.

We are once again living in a time of pulse-quickening civic visions, thanks both to Mayor Nutter, who has made good on his campaign pledge to untie the hands of city planners, and the William Penn Foundation, which has picked up the tab for many of the studies. The planning frenzy is a huge turnaround from the Rendell and Street years. It now feels as if a new report comes out every month.

Tuesday, it was the "Philadelphia 2035" vision plan. Modeled on the 1960 Comprehensive Plan, it marks the first time in half a century that Philadelphia's Planning Commission has taken time to sort out its long-range priorities and identify projects key to its future. The 2035 plan will inform every major decision the city makes in the next 25 years, whatever the inclinations of the mayor who succeeds Nutter.

Thinner in bulk than the original - 227 pages - the new comp plan also is pared down in ambition. City planners seem to have taken the opposite tack from that advocated by the great Chicago planner Daniel Burnham, who exhorted his city to "make no little plans. They have no power to stir men's blood."