Dating back 165 years, most of the neighborhoods in Philadelphia were their own municipalities. In 1854 they merged, creating the consolidated City and County of Philadelphia.

Tasked with brainstorming ideas to make Philadelphia a more equitable city, a group at a design workshop at Penn earlier this week suggested getting rid of that very Consolidation Act.

“Our proposal is to de-consolidate the city,” explained Michael Nairn, a landscape architect and adjunct professor for Penn’s Urban Studies program. “We’ll go back to a smaller unit of government where people had a more direct democratic environment. We’ll allocate resources within the smaller units equally and then have a more directly participatory democratic system of how the resources are used.”

Although a “slightly outrageous” idea, Nairn admitted, it’s something that was formed in his group while thinking systemically. It was a proposal created with Bruce Mau’s 24 guiding principles for massive change in mind.

Mau, a designer and founder of the Massive Change Network, applies design tools and concepts to environmental, social, economic, and political problems. Some of his principles include “Compete With Beauty,” “Work on What You Love,” “Think Like You’re Lost in the Forest,” “Break Through the Noise,” and “Design the Invisible.”

In collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is featuring Mau’s work in an exhibit through Sunday, April 3, PennPraxis and the Penn Institute for Urban Research hosted a free evening workshop at Houston Hall on Monday, Feb. 22. Mau led the four-hour event, which challenged the 80 participants, most of whom were from Penn, to think about how to design a more equitable Philadelphia with some of his 24 principles. Before diving into the workshop, where attendees were split into 10 pre-assigned, interdisciplinary groups, Mau spent about an hour discussing his design principles in-depth.

In explaining one, “We Are Not Separate or Above Nature,” Mau emphasized how people can’t imagine a business that “sucks up resources and produces waste.” In forming a business, people must remember, “we are interconnected and synthetic with the natural world, and once you get that concept into your toolbox, you have to work differently.”

PennDesign Dean and Paley Professor Marilyn Jordan Taylor, Associate Professor of Architecture Annette Fierro, and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Karen M’Closkey set the stage for the workshop part of the event with short presentations about Philadelphia’s transportation, public education, and access to parks and open spaces, respectively.

Penn faculty, including PennDesign’s Sarah Rottenberg, Eduardo Rega, and Randall F. Mason, and several graduate students, who all had a training with Mau earlier that day, facilitated each group discussion. At the end of the night, each group gave “PaperPoint” presentations of their proposals to battle the city’s biggest inequality issues.

Michael Biros, a master’s student studying landscape architecture, described the event as “really eye opening.”

“Bruce Mau’s principles provide an incredible way of thinking about the world, and are definitely applicable to the studio projects I’m doing in school and will hopefully do in the future,” he said.

That’s exactly what Mau was hoping.

“It’s important to acknowledge that we don’t have some kind of magic bullet that is going to create an equitable Philadelphia that no one in Philadelphia has ever thought of,” he said. “What we’re here to do is share this methodology and process in hopes that it enhances your work. That together we might create something that we might not have alone … and introduce that kind of fresh way of thinking.”