At the corner of Carlisle and Diamond Streets lies a tiny house and rows of planter boxes that make up the Temple Community Garden. 

Here, student and community member volunteers garden and distribute free produce, local families have claim over vegetable beds and Philadelphians can sit down and relax, surrounded by greenery and fruit trees. 

Well-maintained green spaces like Temple Community Garden near Main Campus are rare, but they can help reduce heat and gun violence and improve air quality and neighborhood mental health. They provide an outlet for people to connect with nature, relax or exercise, according to the National Environmental Education Foundation.  

Due to the benefits they provide, residents of North Philadelphia can benefit from having access to clean and safe green spaces within their neighborhood. But many living in the neighborhood who want to experience an open, natural area could have up to a 15-minute bus ride between them and their goal of enjoying nature.  

“I think it’s really important to understand the needs of the people living near that prospective green space and understand what their top priorities are,” said Hamil Pearsall, a geography, environment and urban studies professor. “And I think a place like Temple is really interesting because we have students, but we also have a lot of residents of the community.” 

The Office of Clean and Green, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and The Philadelphia Land Bank have all launched initiatives  aimed at turning vacant lots into green spaces in the city. 

Through the years, Temple had also planned to develop and improve Main Campus through several different landscaping plans. The plan’s initiatives include the renovation of sustainable processes and adding green spaces around campus both students and community members can benefit from. 

CITYWIDE EFFORTS

There are around 40,000 vacant lots in Philadelphia, and more than 74% of them are privately owned. These empty spaces can become dilapidated due to owners’ lack of attention, causing problems like illegal trash dumping and higher crime rates.

The city’s Vacant Lot Program is working to clean and maintain the properties. If a cleanup is requested on a lot, the city will ask that the owner correct any violations. If the owner doesn’t comply, the city will clean the lots and bill their owners. Philadelphia spends almost $20 million a year trying to clean and restore these properties to improve the living conditions of the people around them, according to a February 2024 report by Circular Philadelphia, an Environmental Conservation Organization. 

A high number of vacant lots are located around the North Central area and many of the abandoned properties are in neighborhoods with high rates of gun violence, according to the same report. 

Historical redlining ensured areas in North Philly, specifically in areas with large Black populations, were not invested in or maintained for decades. Areas that were marked as “hazardous” and undesirable for development in the 1930s — a hallmark of discriminatory redlining practices — still face some of the highest rates of gun violence in the city today, according to a January 2020 city report.

Many homes and vacant lots became blighted or covered in debris due to a lack of financial or temporal investment. Living in this environment and having limited access to clean green spaces raises people’s stress levels and contributes to these crime and gun violence levels, said Melissa Stutzbach, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s director of landcare.

Philadelphia has around 6,000 acres of natural land. That green space, however, is not equally distributed around the city: Parks and green spaces in Philadelphia are concentrated on the northwest side of the city, but the North Central area significantly lacks green space compared to other neighborhoods. 

In recent years, the city government has been working to reduce the number of vacant lots and increase the amount of green space. The Philly Tree Plan was a 10-year plan aiming to increase tree canopy in the city. On March 5, President Donald Trump froze a $12 million federal grant that was supposed to be used for the initiative, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Parts of North Philadelphia, like the Hunting Park neighborhood of the city, are the most affected by extreme heat, magnified by the urban environment of concrete up to 10 degrees hotter than surrounding areas. Adding trees and grass to the landscape is an effective way to counter the heat.

The city has started initiatives to tackle the issue of vacant lots while simultaneously increasing the number of green spaces. 

Pennsylvania Horticultural Society maintains greenery in more than 12,000 vacant lots around the city, given permission from its private owners or the city itself. Some of the treated lots have been turned into community or pollinator gardens by the residents around them.

“Turning vacant lots into green spaces is a really good start,” Stutzbach said. “But we also know that trees make a big difference. We know that community gardens make a big difference.”

There has been a 29% reduction in gun violence in neighborhoods where empty lots have been cleaned and restored in comparison to areas where the lots have remained vacant, according to a 2018 study by the University of Pennsylvania.

Mayor Cherelle Parker established the Office of Clean and Green in May 2024 with the goal of cleaning and remodeling empty lots. The office also fixes potholes around the city and removes abandoned cars.

“The big change that this mayor made was making the investment to bring the maintenance of those lots up to a year-round maintenance standard,” said Casey Kuklick, deputy director of the Office of Clean and Green. “So they went from being maintained six to eight months out of the year, those 12,000 lots, to now being maintained year-round.”

The Office of Clean and Green has worked with PHS to establish “pinpoint communities,” or areas with high crime rates, which they focus on in their vacant lot cleaning efforts, Kuklick said.  

Community members around the city have taken initiative to establish small businesses and take advantage of the empty spaces for many years, according to Circular Philadelphia. 

In the future, the Office of Clean and Green hopes to continue renovating vacant lots around the city and turning them into useful places that benefit the community. 

“We want to make sure that the land is used for whatever the community [wants] for needs in the community,” Kuklick said. “So it could be that vacant land gets developed into affordable housing, it could be that vacant land gets preserved as permanent community green space.”

However, simply turning a vacant lot into a green space isn’t always enough — the area needs to be maintained for the community to see benefits, according to a February 2020 study by the University of Virginia. Unmaintained lots can have negative impacts, incidentally increasing crime, blight and the growth of invasive species. People often don’t feel safe using green spaces that aren’t in good conditions, leading to more crime and violence. 

CHALLENGES

Philadelphia has limited resources to maintain parks and green spaces, so several neighborhoods have additional funding to support the green areas on their own. For example, Rittenhouse Square receives additional funding from the neighborhood’s business improvement district to upkeep the park, which is something other areas in the city can’t do, Pearsall said. 

“Not all neighborhoods are going to be able to create a nonprofit to do fundraising and offer additional amenities in a park,” Pearsall said. “And that creates a situation where there is an equitable resource allocated to green spaces.”

Community members often volunteer to maintain green spaces themselves. Maintaining green spaces is a tedious and laborious responsibility that can become a challenge and occasional liability. It can also be harder to find willing volunteers in less populated neighborhoods like those in North Philly.

Those who want a short-term lease can go to The Philadelphia Land Bank and file for temporary ownership to develop vacant lots and use the spaces to create green areas. 

Ownership of a vacant lot also makes it harder for organizations trying to turn lots into green spaces. Green areas are vulnerable due to temporary leases, meaning the owners can sell their properties to others who may use the space to build or develop something else, Pearsall said. 

GREEN SPACE AT TEMPLE

Temple has accomplished most of the steps in its landscaping master plan, “Verdant Temple,” which was first introduced in 2015.  

A decade later, trees and grass are planted, stormwater management systems are installed and new street lights illuminate campus streets. Piece by piece, projects like the Founder’s Garden, the Mazur-Gladfelter terrace and the fountains in front of Ritter Hall came together, to redefine the impression Main Campus left on the community and prospective students.

But one of the last projects remaining from Verdant was arguably its poster child: the re-imagining of the Bell Tower area which includes the demolition of Beury Hall and the Biology and Life Sciences building to create a new expansive green quad that would stretch from 13th to 12th Street, and West Norris to Pollet Walk. 

President John Fry was presented with a new campus development master plan this year, which includes the logistics of the quad and relocating surrounding buildings that delayed the project for a decade, and other landscaping improvements around campus and Broad Street. The master plan is likely to be released to the public in late spring or summer, said James Templeton, assistant vice president and university architect.

Because Main Campus is open to the public, students, faculty and community members alike could benefit from the greenery changes outlined in Verdant Temple — designs meant to improve mental health and provide a clean space for events and everyday use. 

“The thing that has honestly improved the experience of our campus and has been the most transformational are landscape projects because they really unified the campus,” Templeton said. “Really, more so than we ever imagined. It’s really impressive. So we keep going with as many as we can get. That quad will be, hopefully, the final piece.” 

As an urban campus with limited space, Temple has to consider buildings they may need to replace in completing landscaping projects. It would take years to plan the relocation of Beury Hall and the Biology and Life Sciences building, alongside the landscaping itself, Templeton said. 

City infrastructure in, under and around campus also provides a unique issue. 

“Infrastructure in general is the biggest challenge, because not only do we as Temple have our own chiller lines and steam lines and electric and teledata lines everywhere, the city of Philadelphia has utilities everywhere,” Templeton said.

Reimagining city space calls for city planners and architects to also consider what was once there. 

The Temple Community Garden planted roots in a few different locations around campus before the corner of Broad and Diamond Street, where they use half of the grassy field to tend to their planter boxes, trees and compost. The other half of the field is unusable because a paint manufacturer once stood there, effectively contaminating the land under it. The garden itself used to be apartments, said Sophie Mayes, vice president of Temple Community Garden.

As many vacant lots remain around the North Central area, the university and city government officials are working to increase green spaces so the community can take advantage of the benefits they provide. Some believe the city and nature are at odds with each other and don’t exist in the same space, while others don’t subscribe to the “green versus gray” dichotomy.

“I feel a lot of people think, ‘Oh, we’re in the city’ but it’s like, we’re still on Earth,” Mayes said. “The environment doesn’t end at the city limits. The environment is everywhere.”