Pilot Projects
The Urban Ring :: Metro Boston
The Urban Ring is the regional urban design strategy whose scope includes several inner ring cities in a single metropolitan area: Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Somerville, Everett, Medford, and Chelsea. It is a “large-scale plan,” representing broad public good, of the kind that the Urban Gauge is designed to measure projects against. The intention of the Urban Ring is to provide a large scale plan that coordinates the needs of the entire region, it is also intended defer to local physical character, in contrast with the more utopian plans of the post-war era (such as the Inner Belt Expressway project, cancelled in 1971 following an outpouring of citizen opposition).
The Urban Ring offers a plan for better linking the more disparate areas of the inner ring cities surrounding Boston’s urban core. The basic idea is to link these districts that radiate out from the city center by means of a circumferential collection of transit connections, linked open spaces, public amenities, and private development. The resulting “ring” of new city would create access to several areas that are currently dramatically underutilized (such as Chelsea, Everett, and Medford), while at the same time improving the infrastructure to access those that are already successful (such as Kendall Square/ MIT, Longwood, Harvard, Northeastern, and the BU Medical Center).
The plan encompasses m ore than just transportation however, and could use public/ private partnerships to encourage larger than normal development along the ring to help pay for public improvements along the way, that would be accessible to the entire region via the enhanced transit network. A whole new part of the region would be made accessible for residential and commercial development in such a way as to reduce automotive demand dramatically.
The Urban Ring is the perfect “large-scale plan” to serve as a test case for the Urban Gauge Planning Tool, because it touches several communities whose planning concerns are very different from one another, and so the flexibility of the Urban Gauge as a tool can be highlighted.
Parcel 7 Mass Turnpike Air Rights :: Boston
The Parcel 7 Turnpike Air-Rights development project is an example of a particular real estate development proposal that can be evaluated using the Urban Gauge. The project is a complex mixture of three buildings, a transit station, public and private parking, and significant public space. The site is the Air-Rights over the Massachusetts Turnpike between Brookline and Beacon Streets near Kenmore Square. The site also includes several surface parking lots adjacent to the Turnpike. The developer, John Rosenthal, has proposed a smaller, 7-story residential building on the part of the site closest to Audubon Circle, then an 11-story commercial building, and finally a 23-story mixed-use building on the part of the site closest to Kenmore Square. The whole development is tied together by a large 700-car parking garage over the highway, and a regional commuter line rail station and public open space.
This kind of project is perfectly suited to the use of the Urban Gauge because there are many different metrics used by the neighbors, public officials, banks, architects, and environmentalists as to why the project should be developed in one way or another. This is the heart of the public process: how to measure the relative public good on a local issue (we don’t like tall buildings) against a regional one like environmental sustainability (energy performance and regional impact on energy use, for example).
The Parcel 7 project has gotten taller, shorter, squatter, and been re-shaped entirely more than once during a several year process. In the end, the Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) endorsed the project and it has moved on to other levels of municipal approval. But the process took seven years. By mapping the actual choices facing this CAC, we hope to be able to model the stresses on this project more accurately.