Ed Bacon, wrote the classic Design of Cities almost 40 years ago. The connectivity of movement and organic growth of urban places he depicted has lessons for us in such areas as web and mobile graphic design and technology convergence.

Ed had that devilish grin that comes from trusting and melding your instincts with creativity, smarts, pragmatism, and heart.

Ed fought for life (not his own as he worked until he died last week at 95). He fought for life and meaning in our cities.

I knew Ed from afar. He taught a class at Penn which I audited just to hear him and go on walking field trips around Philly with him. The Chinese ambassador, once pulled over in a motorcade, after recognizing Ed from the limo.

I saw him 3 or 4 years ago at a cocktail party after a 2 person show acted in by Suzanne Roberts, put on for her family, friends and Comcast associates. I introduced him to my wife as Kevin Bacon's father, and his eyes lit up, asking if we knew Kevin. Can't say I know Kevin, but his Dad is one special person.

Ed had that sparkle in his eyes, and of course loved hearing about Smarter Agent. Urban enlightenment over new media. Just a marvel that Ed. We meant to catch up and I wanted to talk to him about a Ed Bacon LBS tour of Philadelphia. A missed opportunity to get a little more of Ed.

Here's an interview I read. Interviewing Ed had to be one they would not forget. Read the last paragrpah, it's why he's Ed....

Bacon Bits
It wasn’t all that long ago that the late city planner fell off a skateboard in LOVE Park while defending skaters’ rights. Back in 2003 PW spoke with Ed Bacon about his vision of Philadelphia’s future. by Steve Volk

What do you envision happening in Philadelphia’s future? Can we reverse the population decline we’ve experienced?
"I first of all have to tell you the population decline is a cliche that in no way represents what’s actually happening. People think of numbers as absolutes, but to me numbers are to be avoided because they are dead concepts. They have no life.
"There happens to be occurring in Philadelphia a magnificent interaction, on a grand scale, between people who are leaving the city and people who are entering from the suburbs. The people leaving are low-income people, and the people who are returning in droves are extremely high-income, and some of the wealthiest people in the region. They have discovered it’s more fun to live in Society Hill Towers than Wayne.
"If you look at the rate at which neighborhood after neighborhood after neighborhood has been transformed after decades of decay to become a hot real estate market, then you’ve got a trend that promises a bright future for Philadelphia."

I’ve seen it most dramatically around Baltimore Avenue. University City is enlarging and taking up more and more of Southwest Philadelphia. You’ve got new people and businesses moving in consistently.
"Yes, from the suburbs! But if you could bother yourself to look on a broader scale, I just had somebody telling me about Pennsport and Bella Vista and one other neighborhood in the area.
"Oh, my old brain-I can’t remember it, but there are three neighborhoods there where prices are skyrocketing. North of Old City and north of Northern Liberties is just getting off and running, and Manayunk and Spring Garden Street and all directions it’s occurring!"

What about the difficulty of getting developers to build in blighted areas?
"The builders who are conditioned as suburban developers, building on farmlands and outlying areas, they are the people least preconditioned to be effective in the city, where the problem is not to deal with a whole new planned community but to deal with scattered vacancies.
"The mayor still hasn’t understood this, and his cohorts haven’t understood how to handle these scattered vacancies. There has to be a whole new mindset, where you look at neighborhoods and you see every house in good condition except a vacant house, or two or three or four, and you target those and fix them."

What do you make of the mayor’s race?
"I would say I am very disappointed no one has been able to structure the race so that the most vital issue facing Philadelphia-how city government may aid and assist this phenomenon occurring all around the city-would become the central issue of the campaign. There are high-income people eager to move back into the city, so how do we encourage and expand upon that?"

Isn’t Philadelphia trying to tear down old blighted homes to clear the way for developers to come in?
"Where there are individual abandoned properties, where nobody is in control and they are absolutely dragging the neighborhood down, that’s where government should step in. And they should do it in a far more logical way than they are right now.
"The mayor had a wonderful idea. He was going to get rid of abandoned cars, and at that he was very successful, because all he had to do was pick the damn thing up and take it to the dump and then it was gone. No more abandoned cars! But when you come to an individual property that has no owner and just sits there and becomes more and more ramshackle and people vandalize it … it’s an intractable problem, and the mayor’s whole [anti-blight initiative] has not produced anything to solve it.
"I have long proposed a solution where the city acquires and gets clear title to these abandoned properties, which would require new legislation, I know, but it could be done. Once that’s done, you can attract developers, even if you subsidize them. You can take this awful neighborhood hazard and completely turn it around."

You’re saying the city needs to get some mechanism in place to acquire abandoned properties and turn them around, quickly, to new residents.
"Yes, and the other part of the concept is you would then have a city program to develop blight-free blocks. Inspectors would come out and rapidly transfer ownership to an organization that would move in efficiently and restore the building and sell it or rent it. It would quickly change the math and change people’s conceptions of the city. Success would not be quantified by individual properties we have developed but by how many cancerous sores we have eliminated."

But what happens to Philly’s poorest neighborhoods? This doesn’t seem to do anything for them.
"This program is not for the most blight-afflicted neighborhoods. You’re now talking about the worst neighborhoods where city planning’s only plan is simply tearing houses down. There is no logic to it. The people in those neighborhoods don’t even want that. They want new neighbors.
"It’s pretty damn silly to go on to those neighborhoods and make a major investment in tearing down buildings when there are these outlying neighborhoods where you can turn things around much faster. In fact, it’s not just silly-it’s outrageous! You see your ‘either/or’ is invalid.
"Maybe there would be larger, poorer areas you could do wholesale, but the impact vs. dollars spent of the blight-free block program makes it more attractive. And working in the center where the blight is terrible is illogical. My way you attack blight from every side and slowly move in on it until you reach the center."

I can only imagine a big part of the problem here is how difficult it is to get developers to work on projects in the inner city. Mayor Street must have imagined that developers would come in after these homes were torn down.
"You’re kidding yourself. Engaging in some kind of delusion. He didn’t imagine a damn thing, and neither did the planning commission. I’m not saying it’s in any way wrong to clear an area, but there has to be a bigger plan in place-see to it they put in urban homes and not try to do these cute little front yards. To concentrate on the center and not do a damn thing about the outskirts where the single removal of a single blighted property can have such a great impact is outrageous."

When you say put in "urban homes," are you referring to the way suburban developers concentrate on these big housing communities where they save money by building every house out of the same material and according to the same design so they all look alike?
"You talk about look-alikes. Again, that’s precisely the opposite of what I’m saying. Most neighborhoods in Philadelphia-all the homes look alike. But they have street trees and they have character. It’s wrong to let developers have huge lots in the city, and it’s a habit we have to get over. There’s a great danger that the pseudo-suburban will take over."

I’m sorry. Clarify this for me: What makes something pseudo-suburban if it isn’t that the homes all have this cookie-cutter appearance?
"First of all, you’ve apologized, but I’ve already forgiven you. You’re forgiven. Secondly, put your mind on Philadelphia. Almost any block in any neighborhood contains homes that look alike, but they have different-colored front doors and different characteristics. Importantly, they are close together. The key is the size of the lot-not the architecture of the house.
"There’s a sociability people are looking for in a city. The houses are close together. You can talk and socialize from your stoops on the sidewalk and watch your children play together with the neighbor’s children. But if you start putting these houses on corner-styled acre lots, that’s the danger of what suburban developers do.

"We must develop as a city an urban image, in which we have row houses and urban spaces in the neighborhoods, and every space is occupied and healthy."

Thank you very much for your time.
"Thank you! I’ve been sitting here writing my memoirs and thinking about these sorts of things, so your call was perfectly timed as it gave me the opportunity to talk about them. Not only that, but your questions were intelligent, which was shocking, and you actually listened to my answers. Plus, you weren’t afraid to say when you didn’t understand something, and you asserted your own vision of things, which I then smashed."