Infilladelphia, a prototype for urban infill development

2016

Infilladelphia is a 2016 award-winning proposal that tests out this decentralized development model in the Mantua-Belmont neighborhood of Philadelphia. This prototype for urban infill development focuses on the planning and design process at the neighborhood and block scale.

In areas such as Mantua-Belmont, where urban vacancy and blight exists in close proximity to high land values and urban cores, gentrification is a risk. Development in similar areas commonly results in multi-parcel buildings that are significantly larger in scale than the existing housing stock and escalating property values that challenge the local community. Total neighborhood health is a first principle for Infilladelphia. Social well-being, physical well-being, and economic well-being are seen as key components in a continuous feedback loop to sustain long-term community health.

Infilladelphia proposes a neighborhood development methodology that incorporates tactical interventions into a long range planning process, uses new data resources to optimize key community programming, creates low-rise housing prototypes to facilitate parcel-by-parcel development, and engages a financing model that lowers the bar to home ownership by allowing community stakeholders to become partial owners and financial stakeholders as their neighborhood changes.

Supernormal collaborated with a cross-disciplinary team of finance, design, planning and real estate professionals to build out a replicable urban development template for changing communities with high levels of infill development potential.