Sister Cities Plaza: Youthful vision of a Parkway oasis

'Maybe all the little things add up," says architect Mark Sanderson, standing on Logan Square in front of what will be the new Sister Cities Plaza, a cafe, pavilion, and garden designed by his firm, DIGSAU. This is surely the prayer of the decade: that in an age of shrunken budgets, a city such as Philadelphia can nevertheless reassert itself on the urban scene.

In the morning shadow of the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, Sister Cities Plaza is indeed an ideal place to test the power of this prayer. The plaza is one section of one square on the long Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which itself is one stitch in the reknitting of Philadelphia. But if successful, the project will tell us a great deal about the potential of small interventions to transform the way we experience the city.

Like many public spaces in Philadelphia, Sister Cities Plaza has been a moribund place, heavy on meaningful gestures - in this case a monument to Florence, Italy, and Tel Aviv, Israel, two of Philadelphia's 10 sister cities - and light on things to do. Split by four and five high-speed traffic lanes, the square itself has long ceased to function as a unified space, its edges, including Sister Cities Plaza, taken over by homeless encampments.

In 2003, the Center City District began to think critically about how to re-stitch the Parkway, which opened in 1927 already compromised by the automobile. "We decided that a simple proposition would be to design nodes of activity," explains Paul Levy, the district's president and chief executive, "so that you would pass a cultural institution, a sculpture, a cafe, every two to three minutes." The district, masterful at fund-raising, raised enough from various sources - particularly the Pew Trusts, the William Penn Foundation, and the state, under the administration of former Gov. Ed Rendell - to install pedestrian and architectural lighting, revamp Logan Circle and Swann Memorial Fountain, upgrade sidewalks and curbs, and, in 2008, to build Cafe Crêt at 16th Street. Last year, the Fairmount Park Commission and the district designed interpretive signs for the vast collection of art and architecture.