A surfeit of open space will make this development, like everything that happens in Tommy "Mumbles" Menino's Boston, a disaster.
Look at how open space is proportioned in any successful urban area: In New York, it comes in the form of a small number of well-defined and judiciously spread-out parks surrounded by high-rises and densely built residential areas whose inhabitants can read their papers and eat their lunches in the park in summer and use them for skating in the winter. In Boston, we have the Comm Ave Mall and the Public Garden/Common -- again, oases amidst dense neighborhoods. In Vienna, you'll find open space along the Danube or in carefully delineated parks throughout the city; and in Paris onetime royal gardens and hunting preserves provide residents with serenity and beauty.
But consider open space's failures: housing projects like in New York's Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn -- new homes were spaced out far from one another there in the 1960s, breaking the street grid and creating "leafy" superblocks championed by Robert Moses and his ilk. Today, 17 blocks in that area cost the government $17 million per year to incarcerate residents -- so-called "million-dollar blocks." The surrounding blocks, also extremely low-income and often consisting of housing projects but older tenements that have remained part of the densely built street grid, have significantly smaller prison rates.
The sprawling suburbs of Paris, full of ill-defined open spaces between buildings, are now home to frequent riots. Vienna's outskirts, bursting with -- you guessed it -- open space meant to make life better for low-income residents, are similarly miserable.
And in Boston many of the most dangerous, economically depressed areas are low-density neighborhoods.
Open space is a wonderful thing in moderation, and when clearly defined as a park. But when it takes the form of a half-baked suburban lawn around apartment complexes, it overpowers buildings, tears apart communities, chases out would-be residents, and the neighborhoods are left to rot. A city's vibrancy and vitality comes from its density and the bustle and activity that follow. Fill buildings with lots of awkward, ill-defined and uncontained open space and you wind up with Lexington, minus the single thing that makes Lexington attractive: single-family homes the total privacy they offer for families.
Moreover, it is no coincidence that apartment complexes with yards age very poorly and lose their value and appeal to middle-class families more quickly than apartments in dense neighborhoods: surrounded by grass, when their design becomes unfashionable there's no way of hiding it. When apartment blocks are built as part of a dense community, the stores they house and buildings around them of different styles mask them as they age.
What do you, Harry, and other residents of the area want from the abundant open space you seem to be demanding? Do you want a place to walk? Do you want cleaner air? Do you want a place for kids to play?
People don't walk in poorly planned urban areas: a grassy area is infinitely less interesting than a densely built one, and there's little protection from the elements. Would you prefer a stroll through Harvard Square or Barry's Corner? That has little to do with the architecture, which in Harvard Square can be shabby, and everything to do with the neighborhood's fundamental density.
Clean air comes from trees, not grass: Plant trees in a dense neighborhood and you'll do your lungs better than by creating urban pastures. And a miserable strip of grass alongside a building is no place for a kid to play. Kickball, baseball, homerun derby, soccer, 500 -- all these games are better played in a park. If a neighborhood is judicious in building parks, you'll have a higher number of people using each park, making park use more safe for kids, parents, the elderly and everyone else. That's a lesson that should've been applied to the Greenway, which is surrounded by more open space than buildings and as a result is already becoming a wasted space and a deadzone.
The last 50 years, with a pinch of common sense, provide many lessons and blueprints to follow for building a successful urban neighborhood from scratch. Filling half of it with awkward, poorly defined open space breaks up communities, encourages car use, and creates a barren, windscraped and ultimately aesthetically uninteresting and just plain ugly feel to a community. Barry's Corner is a mess today because of its abundant open space; by following its present-day fundamentals, the neighborhood will be just as depressing in 20 years, Harvard or no Harvard.
