University City is one section of Philadelphia that doesn't necessarily need any sustainability advocacy. After all, it's home to such forward-thinking and proactive institutions as Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University City Science Center.
University City is one section of Philadelphia, however, that truly has the goods to become a city-wide, and quite potentially, a national model of urban sustainability. There's a trolley and public transportation system that makes the neighborhood extremely walkable. New students are always bringing new ideas. New scientists and entrepreneurs are helping put them into action. And longtime residents have been establishing community gardens and access to local food for some time now.

Recognizing that potential and the community's unique assets, the University City District (UCD) community development organization last month launched Off the Grid, a guide to sustainable living that executive director Matt Bergheiser believes has the power to eventually bring University City together on its own microgrid.

Off the Grid includes an ongoing series of sustainability workshops focused on measures residents and businesses can take to reduce their environmental footprint. It also includes promoting transit use and composting, increasing recycling, providing parking for bicycles and scooters, and creating green streets.

Bergheiser, who came to UCD in June, 2009, talked to Flying Kite about how Off the Grid has taken shape and where it's going.

Flying Kite (FK): How does Off the Grid help UCD achieve its mission?
Matt Bergheiser (MB): UCD has historically been a place-making organization, finding ways to bring together institutional partners to make a broad stretch of West Philadelphia a better place. More and more we think sustainability is tied to that mission because sustainability is increasingly a quality of life issue, an economic competitiveness issue. As we move forward, when you think of placemaking and economic development, sustainability will be implicit in every conversation, so it should be an implicit part of our mission.

FK: How long has this been in the works and what challenges did UCD face in getting it off the ground?
MB: It's very much a fledgling startup venture, but it's real and we're doing things. It's more ideas than action at this point. Basically, the genesis was just thinking about the unique assets that University City has when it comes to looking at sustainability issues. You've got these institutions on the cutting edge thinking about carbon neutrality and reducing their carbon footprint, with a very aggressive population that's passionate about local food issues and community gardens and neighborhoods thinking about energy efficiency in the context of 100 year-old rowhomes. Add it all up and we thought there was an opportunity to be a pioneering community in terms of sustainability. We're going to play it out on a business-by-business and block-by-block basis and figure out how we move things forward.

FK: How did you get things started?
MB: Our first foray is to become a trusted source of information, sort of a clearinghouse, so we started with a website. Then we put together a series of workshops for residential property owners and commercial property owners, ranging from how do you compost or what do the end of rate caps mean. Then we're building a number of things from there. We're working on something called the 40th Street Sustainability Smackdown, which we think of as the next level of commercial energy efficiency. We're engaging University of Pennsylvania undergrads to create energy efficiency plans for businesses on our 40th Street corridor. The best of those plans will be awarded grant money to implement property improvements.

This concept of a community microgrid, where you'd have a geographic collective of businesses and residences and institutions working together to generate energy locally, buy it locally and manage demand--that's kind of a big vision and a big mountain to climb but we've already begun working with a number of folks around that.

FK: How will you know if Off the Grid is successful?
MB: We're working on another project with Penn right now around residential energy efficiency that involves another competition in which we work with PECO and residents to benchmark untility bills and expenditures over a certain period of time and undertake intervention. We're developing a number of things like that where we try to get at mechanisms and metrics to begin to baseline some of this so we can figure out how we're doing going forward.

JOE PETRUCCI is managing editor of Flying Kite. Send feedback here.

Photos:

A canning workshop helps neighborhood residents stretch their homegrown crops longer.

Matt Bergheiser joined the University City District in 2009.