William Penn – City Planner for Democracy

How his original blueprint for the city of Philadelphia became a blueprint for our democratic society

As we approach the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence it is appropriate to reflect on the special role that Philadelphia played in setting the stage for a stunning world event: the birth of American democracy. However, Philadelphia was more than just a geographically convenient location for the nation’s founders to gather. By the time of the Revolution, Philadelphia had become an important intellectual and economic center of the colonies, and its unique political culture and form of government established at its founding helped inform the development of American democracy, embodied in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights a century later. 

This essay explores how William Penn’s forward-thinking advocacy for religious and political freedom and his belief in democratic self-government were expressed and encoded in his remarkable plan for Philadelphia, particularly its historic five public squares.

Quaker Brand Ambassador

William Penn may be remembered as the founder of Pennsylvania and its first governor – although the state was actually named in honor of his father, Admiral Sir William Penn. And of course, we may know him for his famous grid plan for Philadelphia, and as the familiar face of Quaker Oats. But owing to the distance in time and the scant four years he spent in Pennsylvania, most of us don’t understand the full measure of his impact on our country’s foundational principles. 

But Penn should be better remembered. In addition to being an early advocate for religious freedom, he was also a supporter of political freedom and representative government. His “1701 Charter of Privileges” that functioned as the Constitution of Pennsylvania until the Revolution was an important step in the development of modern democracies in America and throughout the world. 

William Penn was a leader in the Quaker faith, a persecuted religious minority in England, and he was among the most well-known religious dissenters of his time. His life-long ambition was to achieve religious freedom in England, which later would become a key political tenet of the Enlightenment along with individual liberty, representative government, and the rule of law.

Unable to achieve his goal in his home country, Penn sought to establish a colony in America to be a refuge for religious dissenters. At the end of the 17^th century, the level of religious tolerance that William Penn encouraged in Pennsylvania – his Holy Experiment – was unknown in the western world, so much so that French philosopher Voltaire marveled at it, writing, “William Penn might glory in having brought down upon earth the so much boasted golden age, which in all probability never existed but in Pennsylvania.”

The unprecedented level of religious freedom and openness he championed attracted a diverse range of people, skills, and talents, creating economic opportunities that not only established Philadelphia, but made it an intellectual, cultural, and innovation center of the colonies. “This success was linked in the minds of many onlookers to the freedoms, particularly the religious liberty, its inhabitants enjoyed.”¹

To put the level of religious tolerance in colonial Pennsylvania in further context, a decade after William Penn arrived in America and began the work of establishing a refuge for religious dissenters, colonial Massachusetts accused nearly 200 individuals of witchcraft and executed19 people.

Finally, it should also be noted that over 75 years before the American Revolution that won the independence of the colonies and unified them into a democratic republic, Penn’s 1697 “Plan of Union” represented one of the earliest proposals for colonial unification, urging for a union of all the English colonies in America.

Connecting a Right to Worship to a Right to Assembly

As his most recent biographer, Andrew Murphy observed in William Penn: A Life, as early as Penn’s 1670 treatise, “The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience,” written while he was jailed in London’s Newgate Prison for violating laws against religious dissent, a century before the creation of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Penn recognized the need for not only protection of the rights of belief, but also for the rights of worship and the right of assembly. 

The English Parliament’s 1664 Conventicle Act forbade “conventicles” (or religious assemblies) of more than five people other than immediate family, outside of the established Church of England. In direct response, Penn wrote “The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience,” stating that, “By imposition, restraint, and persecution, we don’t only mean the strict requiring of us to believe this to be true, or that to be false…but by those terms we mean…any coercive…hindrance to us from meeting together to perform those religious exercises which are according to our faith.” 

Although he was speaking in the context of freedom of worship, from his earliest writings, Penn was distinguishing a separate right of assembly distinct from, but necessary for, religious practice; he would also later define the right of assembly as a necessary component for political freedom and self-government. This political liberty would eventually become part of the First Amendment of the Constitution more than 100 years later. 

William Penn’s long foresight in recognizing the relationship between public assembly, representative self-government, and democracy was later confirmed by the US Supreme Court. Its 1937 landmark decision De Jonge v. Oregon asserted, “Assembly, like speech, is indeed essential in order to maintain the opportunity for free political discussion, to the end that the government may be responsive to the will of the people and that changes, if desired, may be obtained by peaceful means.”

Penn’s philosophy and belief in public debate in open public space draws on principles of democracy in ancient Greece – and the practices that we have inherited today, whether expressed in rules of Congress or encoded in the “sunshine laws” that govern public decision making in the smallest borough or town meeting.

In “Public Space and Democracy,” philosopher and anthropologist Marcel Henaff and political scientist Tracy B. Strong trace the establishment of philosophy and the formation of democratic politics in ancient Greece to the transition of religion and worship from the control of royalty and the nobility to that of a public office. 

“By carrying the mysteries [of religion] into the public marketplace, right into the agora… [philosophy and by extension democracy] is made the subject of public and argumentative debate, in which dialectic discussion finally assumed more importance than supernatural enlightenment”² from the oracles that was always open to interpretation. Thus, they observe “truth does not originate in secrecy but in public debate.”³

The framers of the US Constitution likewise recognized this fundamental relationship between democratic ideals and the freedom to gather in public and debate the people’s business, and they enshrined the rights of free speech and public assembly in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. One could not be had without the other; the public sphere and public space were unified and both necessary in achieving democratic self-government.

Quaker City Planning

Penn’s values were not mere abstractions. They were manifested in his physical plan for the city of Philadelphia. His famous 1683 grid plan for Philadelphia, for which he may be most remembered, was designed by his surveyor Thomas Holmes. As the historians Mary Maple Dunn and Richard S. Dunn wrote in their 1982 essay on the founding of the city, “If ever a man created a city, William Penn founded Philadelphia.”⁴ According to the Dunns, “Penn wanted his city of brotherly love to be radically different from any other town in the Western world.”⁵

“Being a Quaker community Philadelphia was not designed like seventeenth-century Paris or Rome as a vehicle for Baroque display,”⁶ assert the Dunns. “Williamsburg, Virginia laid out a few years later, is a far better example of Baroque planning in America, designed to place the chief public buildings, the College of William and Mary, the Capitol, and the Governor’s Palace, as elegantly and effectively as possible. Penn’s design for Philadelphia was prosaic by comparison.”⁷

Most self-respecting Philadelphians may have some acquaintance with William Penn’s vision for Philadelphia, which he described as a “Green Country Towne which will never be burnt and always be wholesome." 

Penn saw first-hand the devastation of the Great Plague of London in 1665 and the Great London Fire of 1666, which destroyed 85% of London’s center. His plan for his capital city of Philadelphia envisioned well-spaced home sites and plentiful open spaces, including five public squares, providing generous fire breaks and abundant fresh air.

Public health and safety, however, were not the only values expressed in the original blueprint for the city. The plan also expressed key articles of the Quaker faith, including the lack of a hierarchy, emphasis on equality, and the promotion of the community. As the architecture critic and art historian Michael J. Lewis wrote in Philadelphia Builds – Essays on Architecture, “This avoidance of hierarchy marks the architectural character of Philadelphia as does the general Quaker disdain for pomp and display and such vanities as wigs and jewelry.”⁸

Commenting on the Holme’s plan for Philadelphia, Lewis linked the plan to Penn’s Quaker faith, observing that, “From the Renaissance comes its geometric regularity and its strictly gridded plan. From the Reformation comes its radical Protestantism and social egalitarianism. The result is a plan of extraordinary formal order but virtually without spatial hierarchy.”⁹

Although motivated by Penn’s Quaker faith, these characteristics embedded in the plan for Philadelphia, particularly the emphasis on equality, are also the building blocks of a democratic society. 

Planning for Equality 

Thanks to the research for her magisterial history of Philadelphia’s public spaces, The Grid and the River, Elizabeth Milroy, art historian at Drexel University, has surfaced the deeper connections between Philadelphia’s city plan, the public spaces reserved within it, and William Penn’s interest in religious and political freedom.

Milroy writes that Penn believed that, “Well-ordered spaces, in addition to firm laws and responsible government, would ensure moral behavior. Just as the order of regularity presented by the new city’s street grid would promote social discipline, so too the neatly rectilinear landscaped squares, framed by streets, offered spaces for the performance of virtuous behavior.”¹⁰

Importantly, however, Milroy points to a specific reference in Thomas Holme’s notes on the 1683 plan of the city that stated that the five squares of the city would be for “the like Uses as the Moor-fields in London.”

This is a very important distinction, because as Milroy points out at the “beginning of the 17^th century, King James I confirmed that the Moorfields was owned by the City of London, (rather than Crown, which governed other parks in the region, such as Hyde Park and St. James’s) and that the public had free rights of access to the fields…”¹¹

So, by intentionally modeling Philadelphia’s five public squares on Moorfields and not crown parks such as Hyde Park and St. James’s, Milroy asserts that Penn was conveying “a commitment to the political power of the people”¹² through the equal and free use and access to the city’s public spaces.

As Milroy writes, “From within Philadelphia’s public squares, the ordinary citizens would look out onto a community on inter-dependent equals.”¹³ Thus, essentially William Penn intentionally encoded in his remarkable plan for Philadelphia the right to public assembly in public space 100 years before that same right was guaranteed in the United States Constitution. 

And equally remarkably, nearly 350 years later, Penn’s squares continue to function as community-defining public spaces and places. Those original five public spaces – Franklin, Rittenhouse, Washington, Logan, and Centre Squares –  and the city’s other parks and public spaces have long served as platforms of public voice and political speech. In our current history alone, this includes the city’s early LGBTQ civil rights protests that were held every July 4 from 1965-1969 on Independence Square, to the more recent Women’s March on Philly in 2017 on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, to Black Lives Matter demonstration in Dilworth Park in 2020, to pro-Israel rallies at Independence National Historic Park, and pro-Palestinian and pro-Ukrainian rallies on the steps of the Art Museum. And even more recently, in June 2025, the Parkway hosted one of the largest No Kings rallies in the nation.

William Penn’s plan for his capital city reinforces the strong, enduring, and historic relationship between public space and the civil discourse fundamental to democratic ideals. And yet there has been a long struggle through the nation’s history to secure the right to use public space to exercise our constitutional freedoms of free speech and public assembly. That history will be the subject of a forthcoming essay.

The erosion of those rights through public space privatization, human and technological surveillance of public space, government regulations and restrictions of public space, and perhaps, most insidiously of all, intentional under-investment and simple neglect of public space maintenance all represent grave risks not only to access to public space but also real and fundamental threats to our democracy.

Notes on cited works

1. Nicholas P. Miller. The Religious Roots of the First Amendment – Dissenting

Protestants and the Separation of Church and State (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2012), 62

2. Marcel Hénaff and Tracy B. Strong, Editors. Public Space and Democracy

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 10

3. Ibid, 10,11

4. Mary Maples Dunn and Richard S. Dunn, “The Founding” Philadelphia A 300-Year History, editor, Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982), 1

5. Ibid, 1, 2

6. Ibid, 10

7. Ibid

8. Michael J. Lewis. Philadelphia Builds – Essays on Architecture (Philadelphia:

Paul Dry Books, 2021), 2

9.Ibid

10. Elizabeth Milroy. The Grid and the River – Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682-

1876 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 2016), 4

11.Ibid, 17

12.Ibid, 21

13.Ibid