Boston 400: Shaping the Future City
Linda Mongelli Haar, AICP	Author Info

Summary

Boston is one of the great livable cities of the world. But what will our city look like in 2030, the year that we celebrate Boston's 400th birthday? Who will live here? What will be the nature of our economy, our social and cultural institutions? What kind of civic life will we leave for our children?

Periodically, a city needs to step back, look beyond its immediate needs, and think about its longterm future. We need to understand, as a community, the qualities that define a livable city and make sure we have a blueprint that supports and enhances those qualities.

Boston's primary assets are the mixed-use character of our neighborhoods, a multi-faceted economy, outstanding locational advantages for business and industry firms, world-renowned educational and medical institutions, a strong community service systems, and a rich and diverse cultural and ethnic heritage, not to mention the City's vibrant and walkable urban fabric and its location near one of the most attractive harbors anywhere.

Boston 400, the comprehensive planning process that Mayor Thomas M. Menino announced last year, is a grassroots planning process that holds fast to the qualities that Boston's residents and visitors treasure and to make Boston an even better place to live and work.

Ultimately, Boston 400 aims to enhance economic opportunity and provide a strong social support structure for people throughout the City. Opportunity means not only good jobs at every skill level, but also a good place to raise a family, participate in community affairs, and enjoy recreational and educational opportunities.

Boston 400 has begun to work with people throughout the City to devise strategies to enhance Boston's public realm - streets and sidewalks, parks and other natural spaces, museums, community social and entertainment centers, industrial and commercial districts, the waterfront, public transportation, schools and other public buildings. In order for public spaces to thrive, we need to enhance the concentration of vital activities and the strategic connections between those activities throughout the City.

Boston 400 opened in the Spring of 1997 with a series of eight public forums on topical areas of urban planning, to encourage people to begin to think about City life. In the Fall of that year, Boston 400 convened meetings in each of the eighteen neighborhoods across the City to engage residents and merchants in a discussion of what kinds of issues the comprehensive planning process should address. Although they differ on the particulars, most neighborhoods share a common vision about how Boston can build on its tradition as a "livable city."

The most common theme was that we need to foster a greater sense of place in our neighborhoods and business districts; to do that, we need to promote improvements in the public realm that connect the City's diverse activities and people. People want to fix the "broken pieces" of the City. They want to make sure that the healthy physical spaces all have a chance to connect so that they reinforce each other. Better access, greater continuity, stronger identity, clear orientation will enable people to become part of a more creative and diverse community.

The overall tone of community meetings has been very positive. In countless ways, people have expressed high hopes for a process that enables them to participate meaningfully in grassroots planning. There is clearly a pent-up demand for a process that pulls together the scattered visioning, planning, and development processes that have taken root all across the City. Boston 400 gives us the opportunity to bring coherence to the longterm evolution of the City and its neighborhoods, and people seem to appreciate that.

Contrary to early warnings of some skeptics that Boston 400 was too amorphous and looked too far into the future, people in Boston's neighborhoods have displayed a sophisticated grasp of the importance of longterm planning. They have come together - in schools, community centers, and cultural centers - to focus on what they can do to assure a livable Boston for the next generation.

Neighborhoods as diverse as Beacon Hill, Roxbury, Charlestown, Mattapan, and West Roxbury agree on the need for better citywide access to cultural assets, better connections to the waterfront, preservation of the historic and "human-scale" environments against the rising tide of homogenization, better transit connections to bring neighborhoods and their people together, and a strategy of economic development and job creation that emphasizes the importance of community.

The major points of guidance that Bostonians have provided in meetings across the City thus far are summarized as follows:

• Focus on Boston Harbor and the Harbor Islands as the place with the greatest potential to be the common ground for residents of all racial and ethnic backgrounds to gather for recreational, educational, and cultural activities.
• Develop special places for community activities and gatherings in all neighborhoods that are interesting and comprehensible to young people.
• Link together - through well-conceived trails, signage, marketing, and education - a wide range of special places, cultural and historic resources, educational facilities, vibrant commercial spaces, and open spaces and recreational facilities.
• Promote neighborhood parks, cultural and historic attractions, educational institutions, waterfronts, and other public spaces. Make sure that spaces outside the downtown are known to visitors, and that those spaces are attractive and "legible." Provide adequate transit connections to serve these areas.
• Foster development of public and social places within neighborhoods and downtown where all residents and visitors of diverse social and ethnic backgrounds feel comfortable visiting.
• Identify activities that can make neighborhood business districts more vital. Recognize that many of the commercial activities that made such districts vibrant a generation ago have been displaced to suburban malls, catalogue sales, and other means of shopping. Develop strategies to attract a mix of new activities to complement stores, restaurants, health centers, and other services. Promote mixed uses to foster active neighborhood centers.
• Focus on "broken pieces" of the streets and sidewalks, parks and open spaces, business centers, and cultural and historic districts. Devise strategies to make these spaces seamless, to give them a clear sense of direction, and to highlight clear focal points that orient people to the unique neighborhoods of our City.
• Develop and examine a neighborhood-by-neighborhood inventory of empty lots and abandoned buildings. Use this inventory to identify spaces for desirable and mutually reinforcing economic and social activities.
• Develop a comprehensive approach to confronting the homogenization of the City. Encourage developments that offer visual variety, inviting facades and entrances, consumer choices, and human scale.
• Pay attention to street furniture, lighting, trash receptacles, frontage, sidewalks, steps, windows, entranceways, and other "micro" elements of the streetscape that define the character and quality of a district.
• Develop a comprehensive signage policy, in conjunction with other public and private entities in order to make the City more legible and accessible and enhance economic and social life. Special emphasis should be placed on identifying streets, transit stops, and special attractions (e.g., parks, schools, historic sites).
• Assure that all people have public transit access to community centers, libraries, parks and playgrounds, and other public spaces.
• Develop a comprehensive approach to housing that guarantees safe, comfortable, and convenient homes for people at all income levels and at all stages of their lives.
• Implement a plan to coordinate maintenance and other infrastructure projects in the City, so that disturbance of streets and sidewalks is minimized.
• Avoid new projects until systems of maintenance are "built in" to the design of the spaces. All spaces need clear stewardship.
• Build environmental systems into the built environment as well as parks and open spaces.

Our task now is to widen the conversation in the months ahead so that all Bostonians feel a sense of ownership in a process that is designed for them, and to take the planning process to the next level. A task force of planners, designers, engineers, open space and environmental advocates, community leaders and strategic thinkers has been formed to shape specific initiatives based on the guidance coming from the City's neighborhoods. We anticipate that by the Summer of 1998, we will issue for public discussion an update on Boston 400 that includes a draft agenda for the city-wide plan.

Boston 400 offers an historic opportunity for the City and its neighborhoods to collaborate on a civic project that will shape our destiny for years to come. As we move forward, we must remember that Boston 400 cannot impose rigid prescriptions. Boston 400 must strengthen the City's already firm, reliable infrastructure to enhance a wide range of activities - so that everyone in the City can respond to challenges that we cannot predict today.

Kevin Lynch put the planner's task into perspective several years ago, but his words still hold true. He wrote: "Our most important responsibility to the future is not to coerce it but attend to it. Collectively, such actions might be called 'future preservation,' just as analogous activity is called historical preservation." If we attend to our future - collectively, with vision but not rigidity - then we will take advantage of the best of Boston's past and allow for the most promising of futures to unfold.