Strait Talk

What can we learn from Sicily and Tunisia?

by Nathaniel Popkin

It's fitting that last year, the year we elected Michael Nutter as mayor, Pantheon brought out the 50th anniversary edition of The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. Lampedusa's wise and tender novel — the story of the fading Sicilian aristocracy — makes great use of the parched island. Sicilians appear as recalcitrant as the soil itself. "Sleep," says the book's subject, Don Fabrizio, to a bureaucrat from the north, "my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts."

Nutter, of course, has woken so many of us; now we're sitting up in bed awaiting a trayful of goodies.

And yet all week I've heard the somnolent muttering of people who would rather that nothing new happen in their neighborhoods. At 40th and Pine, some Spruce Hill neighbors oppose a hotel that will result in the renovation of a long-neglected Italianate mansion. In Society Hill, some are screaming about an elegant hotel proposed for long-vacant New Market that would result in the transformation of Headhouse Square from a parking lot into an inviting public space. In Norris Square, the civic association would watch significant architectural landmarks fall apart rather than form partnerships with for-profit developers. In East Falls and Roxborough, the specter of Manayunk has so frightened community activists that they're opposed to securing basic amenities.

"In Sicily," says Don Fabrizio, "it doesn't matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of 'doing' at all."

Doing nothing is de facto community planning in Philadelphia. It didn't start that way. In the 1960s neighborhood groups were empowered to promote their own ideas. But what began with strong democratic credo has evolved in so many cases into a rigid NIMBY "No!" As a result, according to Tom Lussenhop, who teaches urban development at Princeton and who hopes to build a Hilton Homewood Suites hotel near the busy trolley portal on 40th Street, "Nothing good has been built in some neighborhoods since the Great Depression."

By taking advantage of 40th's transit infrastructure and providing sidewalk amenities, including a terraced outdoor café, Lussenhop wants Philadelphia to function like the green, cosmopolitan place he knows it can be. Yet despite a plan which includes guest parking with a Penn garage two blocks away, neighbors have erected the familiar defense: the loss of parking. Indeed, across Philadelphia the parking space is dug like a trench, the last hope to keep the outsiders at bay.

Will the new mayor be able to overcome these ersatz barricades, while still giving neighbors a strong self-governing voice? The solution may lie in his ability to change the language of the conversation — much as Barack Obama is doing — from fear to opportunity. Can Philadelphians be made to feel that development might actually enrich their lives? To do so will require the long-deferred move from the Sicilian-style parochialism under which Italy is presently suffering toward a dynamic urbanism.

It may be useful to hydrofoil our way across the Strait of Sicily to the Northern African nation of Tunisia. Speaking in Philadelphia last week, Tunisian Ambassador H.E. Mohamed Nejib Hachana described his nation's historical openness, liberal investment rules and moderation founded on centuries of accommodation and adaptation to outsiders. "Let me just tell you that in Tunisia," he declared, "negotiating with outsiders is opportunity [to profit]. It's the basis of our civilization."

Nathaniel Popkin is a frequent Slant contributor.