Civic mobilization and public land in West Philadelphia's Mantua neighborhood 2013–23

This chapter is about recent activism by Black-led organizations in Philadelphia’s Mantua neighborhood – activism centered on the valuation and disposition of publicly owned vacant land. To make sense of this mobilization, it is necessary to understand both the historical experience of Mantua’s residents during the Urban Renewal Era and their past and current relationship to the powerful academic institutions that are their neighbors in West Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University. During the 1960s, members of the Mantua Community Planners organization reacted to the University of Pennsylvania’s displacement and dispossession of African-American households in a nearby community by creating a neighborhood-based vision for their future. In the 2010s, two contemporary organizations, the Mantua Civic Association and the Mount Vernon Manor Community Development Corporation, resumed this engagement to ensure that their neighborhood’s publicly owned vacant land could be activated to preserve and create housing that would be affordable in perpetuity to current residents even as new Drexel-sponsored development was triggering significant land price increases in the area. The groups’ partial success shows that while the habit of treating publicly held land primarily as a resource for market-aligned, elite-driven real estate development is endemic in American urban politics, mobilized citizens are capable of interrupting traditional habits and practices by insisting on alternative methods for understanding land’s value.