Common Ground
In Collaboration with Armando Beteta & Jocelyn Browers
North Philadelphia
Sample mid size lot
Designed as a system of temporary, adaptable interventions, this project explores how small-scale architecture and landscape strategies can improve safety, social connection, and neighborhood identity. Vacant lots are reimagined as flexible community nodes, ranging from intimate seating areas to shared pavilions, constructed from accessible, low-cost materials. By prioritizing adaptability and community participation, the project demonstrates how design can strengthen social networks and reclaim underutilized urban space without permanent displacement.
Concept - Community Connection & Empowerment
This project emerged from an initiative to help children from nearby schools navigate their neighborhood safely as they returned home from an afterschool program housed in the Lenfest Center. The design challenge focused on creating urban-scale interventions that both activate underutilized areas and improve safety along common routes home. The work explores a replicable framework that can adapt to different vacant lots throughout the neighborhood, allowing each site to respond to specific community needs through individual or combined design elements. Community involvement played a central role in shaping lot design and use, fostering a sense of ownership and encouraging increased neighborhood awareness—ultimately creating more “eyes on the street” to support children’s safety.
Lot Typologies
Sample Medium lot
Sample Small Lot
Lenfest
Bethune
Esperanza
Master Plan
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The proposed interventions prioritize affordable, easily accessible materials that can be constructed and maintained by community members with basic guidance. This approach reinforces long-term stewardship while ensuring that the designs remain practical, adaptable, and sustainable within the neighborhood context.
Small Lot Sample:
During early site analysis, numerous small vacant lots between rowhomes were identified. These spaces informed the development of interventions inspired by the stoop, an element commonly used in dense urban environments as a place for neighbors to gather, observe street life, and socialize. The design reframes these small lots as extensions of adjacent homes, creating flexible spaces where groups of varying sizes can congregate and interact, strengthening everyday community presence.
Small Lot Study
Small Lot Day View
The small lot proposal explores scaffolding as a flexible and temporary construction system capable of adapting to different programs and site conditions. Visualizations illustrate a lightweight structure composed of scaffolding and colored fabric that provides shade and defines a social gathering space. Positioned adjacent to a corner store, this intervention demonstrates how everyday neighborhood destinations can become social anchors, offering residents a place to share meals while providing children a safe, informal space to gather along their routes.
Social & Gathering
Art & Creative
Nature & Vegetation
Play & Active
Structural Responses to Lot Typologies
Small Lot Night Activation
Medium Lot Material Studies
Large Lot Material Studies
Medium & Large Lot Sample:
Larger lots investigate more permanent installations that move beyond the temporary nature of scaffolding systems. Using reclaimed lumber and pallets, these interventions emphasize durability while acknowledging the area’s strong Latin heritage. These spaces are envisioned as venues for community events and collective activities, while also introducing vegetation into dense urban conditions. Together, the medium and large lot proposals highlight how scale and material choices can support deeper community investment and long-term neighborhood activation.
Medium Lot Night Activation