Downtown Allentown Revitalization and Activation Strategy
As part of a community engagement process that elevated the voices of hundreds of locals, we danced to salsa music in a crowded auditorium, alongside a hundred Allentonians who stayed to share their struggles and stories. (Image: Allentown Economic Development Corporation)
Launching a comprehensive downtown revitalization strategy in downtown Allentown
Billy Joel notwithstanding, Allentown has remade its downtown core into a regional hub. It is the center for live music and museums, a destination for sports and festivals frequented by visitors and – in recent years – a growing population of downtown residents. For generations, Allentown has been home to a proud Puerto Rican diaspora, enriching the city’s cultural mix. Plus, more than $1B in investments sparked a downtown construction boom and high-quality public realm. Yet Allentonians also recognized that, for downtown to become a destination of choice, these intersecting vectors of growth need to be managed.
So, in 2024, a consortium of civic and economic development leaders engaged Public Sphere Projects to lead the “Downtown Allentown Revitalization and Activation Strategy,” a twofold project intended to create a robust, community- informed strategic plan for downtown management, accompanied by a detailed, implementation-ready roadmap for making it happen.
Location
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Client
Allentown Economic Development Corporation
Partners
Senator Nick Miller (Pennsylvania Senate District 14) and the Office of Mayor Matt Tuerk
Year
2024 - 2025
Together with the City of Fayetteville, PSP convened more than a dozen stakeholders, including artists, business owners, residents, and academics, to advise the cultural planning process. Their feedback is captured in “Culture Belongs to Everyone,” a cultural brief that is being used as a roadmap in Fayetteville’s first-ever cultural planning effort.
For the next six months, our team embedded in Allentown. Alongside our partners at Ágora Cultural Architects and MJB consulting, we reviewed policies, pored through planning documents, obsessed over financial spreadsheets and annual reports. We interviewed dozens of retailers, artists, educators, developers, and community leaders. We delighted at responses from nearly 2,000 surveys, in both English and Spanish. We walked every street in the retail core, hearing from hard-working business owners and entrepreneurs. We met with corporate executives, agency heads, and elected officials. We facilitated substantive, at times difficult, conversations among a deeply committed and capable steering committee. We danced to salsa music in a crowded auditorium, with a hundred Allentonians who stayed to share their struggles and stories.
Our final report culminated this discovery and visioning process. It offered a reflection of current priorities, worries, and ambitions. It summarized salient points of diverse stakeholder perspectives. It highlighted insights from around Lehigh Valley – and across the U.S. – that illustrate potential programmatic or strategic interventions. It detailed financial and operational implications of key decisions. It set forth an approach for animating the ground floor of the city’s retail core. It suggested short- and medium-term actions spanning five years, in service of both big aspirations and daily practicalities of running a downtown management organization.
By the numbers
2,000 surveys
in English and en Español
6 strategic pillars
supporting a comprehensive plan
$850k raised
to launch a capable, culturally competent downtown organization
The Fayetteville Cultural Planning Committee included artists like Olivia Trimble, whose mural (pictured here) is located in the heart of downtown Fayetteville.
Taken in aggregate, this document provides a thorough, and thoroughly realistic, blueprint for accomplishing the stated purpose of this exercise: revitalizing and activating downtown Allentown. Since the report was completed, Allentown Mayor Tuerk, State Senator Nick Miller, and a cohort of other civic and business leaders have made a commitment to launching – and substantially funding – a downtown management organization with the mandate and resources to undertake this body of work.
“Let this strategy be a foundation for a future that is thriving, prosperous, and deeply rooted in the unique identity of our city.”
— Senator Nick Miller, Pennsylvania Senate District 14