Building on our contributions to the foundational 2012 Master Plan for the Central Delaware, OLIN prepared a Sustainability and Resilience Plan for the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation (DRWC), the non-profit set up to implement the Master Plan and manage the growing system of public spaces created through it. The plan addresses six issue areas: energy, water, waste, risk management, biodiversity, and environmental health and justice. By considering both sustainability and resilience, it simultaneously tackles issues of climate mitigation and adaptation.
As a place-based non-profit, DRWC must coordinate with City and State agencies to implement the plan, as well as a wide range of stakeholders including neighborhood groups, waterfront developers, and environmental advocates. Through extensive engagement this plan seeks alignment with these partners as well as the many ongoing resilience planning efforts in the Philadelphia area, while focusing on the geography of the Central Delaware Riverfront and the three essential systems of the Master Plan: the Public Realm, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Private Development. For each of these three systems and issue area, recommendations were tailored to the degree and type of DRWC’s control, and include both short-term actions that DRWC can implement directly and long-term policy changes that DRWC can advocate for. Unlike many physical resilience plans, this document also addresses the resilience of DRWC’s programming, maintenance, and operations.
