In Northeast Philadelphia, 19th century infrastructure was designed to generate profit from the transport of hydrocarbons at a rate never seen before in the world. A rail corridor constructed by the Pennsylvania & Reading Railroad conducted millions of tons of anthracite coal from Northeastern Pennsylvania down the Schuylkill River and across the northern industrial fringe of the city to the railroad’s own riverine terminal, Port Richmond. This infrastructure, defunct since the 1970s, has preserved a huge scar of undeveloped land through the dense urban grid—an isolated chasm-viaduct that became a center for squatting and drug use within this economically devastated neighborhood. With design intervention and ecological restoration, this tract of open land could be transformed into a public space that provides social, ecological, and even economic benefits to the surrounding area.

My project proposes a rejuvenation of this disused infrastructure, transforming it into an inclusive, climate-resilient preserve for urban nature within the specific environment of North Philadelphia. Taking cues from the regenerative capacities of ruderal species and spontaneous ecosystems that already emerge along this polluted and degraded site, this project imagines a place for interstitial, self-organized, interconnected and reparative abundance within an anthropogenic ruin. Large areas are designated for collaborative ecological restoration and stewardship, and new infrastructural interventions (stairs, ramps) allow access to the park at the scale of humans and other living things, re-knitting fractured streets and neighborhoods.

By reimagining and repurposing the disused scars of mass hydrocarbon industrialization in this way, we can—after a century of damage wrought by intensive and singular commodity investment followed by the near total abandonment of capital—secure a decommodified future for this site that evades the whims of the market, consciously establishing a long swath of a new commons.