From the introduction of William Penn’s street grid; to Ed Bacon’s Renewal-era neighborhood planning; to the challenge today of balancing growth and equity – Philadelphia’s history reflects societies’ unfinished ambition for creating socially and economically progressive communities.

While these issues and others are of national import, they are often reported within the urban context because cities produce them at much larger relative densities.

While the last decade has seen an explosion of urban-centric online media, PlanPhilly’s more local focus has helped it differentiate itself. Unlike many of its peer publications, PlanPhilly reports on planning and policy issues that directly effect Philadelphia and its diverse citizenry.

This diversity is reflected in Figure 1 above which visualizes the frequency of words used in PlanPhilly titles since its inception in 2006.

The purpose of this piece is to highlight emergent planning themes in Philadelphia through the analysis and visualization of trends mined directly from PlanPhilly articles.

In February of this year, I wrote a similar meta-analysis article for the urban focused website Planetizen which writes for national and international audiences. For that article, myself and a colleague scraped more than 48,000 articles directly from the website.

This time around, the good folks at PlanPhilly made life easier by providing access to their database which includes data on article titles, authors, dates, number of article views and more for about 7,000 articles. When these data are analyzed, a narrative emerges highlighting issues of increasing importance to Philadelphians.

Let’s begin with the people who make PlanPhilly possible – its writers. Figure 2 below displays the ten most published PlanPhilly journalists ranked by the number of articles they’ve produced. For the record, before this article, I had published 5 articles which puts me both in good company and at a three-way tie for the 26th spot alongside scholar John Kromer and reporter Aaron Moselle.