Robert Campbell thoughts on the future of Boston

The Rose Kennedy Greenway. The Greenway is part of that future urban village. But today it looks suburban. It's as if a mad emperor had chosen to build a golf course in the middle of downtown Boston. It's an empty expanse of green that nobody knows what to do with.
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Nice.

But things will improve. Plantings will mature. New buildings, or additions to old ones, will fill in along the Greenway's edges. They will bring civic life: shopfronts, restaurants, caf? tables, doors and windows and balconies, maybe roof gardens, maybe museums, all of them overlooking the Greenway, perhaps spilling out onto it.
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See this is why I'm not so pessimistic about the Greenway.

I even cherish the hope that, some day, it will be possible to overturn the current rule that 75 percent of the Greenway must always remain as public open space. With a whole ocean a block away, we don't need that much space in this location. Better to fill in some of it with handsome low-rise redevelopment, sewing the city back together over this still-gaping wound.
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Thank you!

Overall I thought it was a little sparse on ideas but then when predicting the future it is best to be a vague as possible.
 
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Very interesting article. It's funny that he had to clarify the density was good, not bad, to the readers. One complained that he wrote from an Ivory Tower...well, since you don't know what's best for you, then he's better off telling you what is.
 
Today they're selfish and isolated. I can't imagine, just for one example, why Harvard, even before the current slump in its endowment, wasn't eager to collaborate with Boston and Cambridge to help fund the Urban Ring, which could connect Harvard to its satellites in Allston and Longwood.
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Oh I wonder why Harvard wasn't eager to throw all their money down the snake pit of waste and corruption that is the T...

In the future the universities won't be so separated off onto campuses. They'll begin marbling in with the rest of us. Town-gown distinctions will blur.
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Don't tell Northeastern and Suffolk, which are busy gathering their students into on-campus housing.

Some of the comments are actually pretty insightful or at least thought-provoking:

I think the greenway and the area around it are doomed to the suburban feel Campbell describes until it is made more pedestrian friendly. In my walk from the north end to south station along the greenway (and the highway ramps) the sidewalk narrows to shoulder width, sometimes with a car parked on it. In front of the Intercontintal Hotel, the Boston Harbor hotel, and between Hanover and Endicott parking is allowed on the sidewalk, while pedestrians need to wind around and dodge traffic and parked cars, ON THE SIDEWALK. This makes it miserable to be a pedestrian downtown, and is absurd that this all happened recently, not in the 1950's. Why is Menino allowed to do this, and why is he so anti pedestrian. Does he not understand we cant all afford (or want) to drive into work and play in Boston?
Boston used to be America's Walking city, but recent rating have downgraded us because of things like putting parking on sidewalks and highway ramps cramping out sidewalks.
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I do wish that there were more promising development examples in the Seaport area (where I live). There is still too much derelict space and, for a new area, too much poor planning. For example the spiderweb of roads between Summer and Congress streets. These new roads make the area feel like a giant on/off ramp for the various highways underneath. Yet this area is a huge part of the city's very valuable waterfront. Instead of the ugly, gigantic suburban style parking lot, highway access roads and wasted space, the Seaport area needs to become something resembling a destination area for pedestrians. Instead it feels more like a half-abandoned office park on an I-495 interchange.
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From an architectural standpoint it has alot of potential to transform itself into one if the most liveable cities. From a first class city standpoint itelf has a long way to go. The conservative and old money interest must get put aside. It needs to stop catering to the upper class. It lacks diversify, entertainment, and culture.

The only time of the year that Boston is a beautiful city is in the summer, and fall. Until there is global warming and Boston becomes a more bearable city in the winter this place will remain a depressive, unfriendly city.

If it was not for the universities in this city Boston would be a big Portland Maine. The only reason people stay here is to work.
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Regarding the Kennedy Greenway. St. Louis has two elongated parks similar to the the Greenway, Memorial Plaza and Kiener Plaza. Both run along Market St a heavily trafficked artery. Except when there are special events, both these plaza's are devoid of activity excepting the homeless. These parks and Market Street effectively cut downtown St. Louis in half. Of course Memorial and Kiener didn't replace an elevated freeway, but their failure is a cautionary tale for Boston and the Kennedy Greenway. Regarding the Kennedy Greenway. St. Louis has two elongated parks similar to the the Greenway, Memorial Plaza and Kiener Plaza. Both run along Market St a heavily trafficked artery. Except when there are special events, both these plaza's are devoid of activity excepting the homeless. These parks and Market Street effectively cut downtown St. Louis in half. Of course Memorial and Kiener didn't replace an elevated freeway, but their failure is a cautionary tale for Boston and the Kennedy Greenway.
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>> "The Universities. The Boston area's universities and hospitals are its economic engines."

Then the city is doomed. The city of Dallas has an equal amount of hospital volume, doing the same kind of work, sometimes more unusual (international specialization in cranially-conjoined separation among it). New York and Houston are far more notable than Boston for cancer treatment; Houston is also more notable than Bos. for heart medicine. Craniofacial disfigurement trauma victims are sent to Clevelend. And your star quarterback had his knee repaired in Los Angeles. Your own senator votes with his feet to Durham, NC. The bottom line is that other cities have offer medical care on the same proportional scale.

>> "When the Green Line extends into Somerville,... ."

If.

>> "The Rose Kennedy Greenway. ...It's an empty expanse of green that nobody knows what to do with."

But they were so confident. The drawings even showed people strolling around the green. And the advocates advocated for more open space! Now they've got it.

>> "The Harbor Islands are the recreational future of Boston."

They'll be as popular as Biscayne Bay!
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Regarding the Kennedy Greenway. St. Louis has two elongated parks similar to the the Greenway, Memorial Plaza and Kiener Plaza. Both run along Market St a heavily trafficked artery. Except when there are special events, both these plaza's are devoid of activity excepting the homeless. These parks and Market Street effectively cut downtown St. Louis in half. Of course Memorial and Kiener didn't replace an elevated freeway, but their failure is a cautionary tale for Boston and the Kennedy Greenway. Regarding the Kennedy Greenway. St. Louis has two elongated parks similar to the the Greenway, Memorial Plaza and Kiener Plaza. Both run along Market St a heavily trafficked artery. Except when there are special events, both these plaza's are devoid of activity excepting the homeless. These parks and Market Street effectively cut downtown St. Louis in half. Of course Memorial and Kiener didn't replace an elevated freeway, but their failure is a cautionary tale for Boston and the Kennedy Greenway.
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The Market St. Mall is an utter failure for reasons very different from Boston. Randomly interspersed along some of the parcels are ridiculously bland office-park towers. The parks have no definition and no upkeep-the city doesn't even bother to mow the grass. If it were restored to the way it was originally planned (as part of the World's Fair, I believe, as everything else good in St. Louis was), it would be a stellar example of an urban park. Running from the Jefferson Memorial park (the Arch), through the middle of the city to Union Station. Unfortunately, it ends in a soupy puddle of grass and on/off ramps. The beautiful historic buildings in it lie in the shadow of cheap monstrosities. There is NO reason for people to gather there-not even to play Frisbee, walk a dog (no one lives in the city), or frolic in the fountains. So on and so forth.

Google Maps

From the Arch:
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City Hall:
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In 20 years if global sea levels are rising, Boston will be trying to engineer some massive protection scheme to temper the even further future rises in sea levels that some predict. That potentially could make the Big Dig look cheap.
 
One of the main goals of "going green" is to not let the sea levels to continue rising...
 
Bad news for you: every country could meet their Kyoto targets tomorrow (impossible scenario in reality), and the oceans would still rise enough to threaten Boston.
 
Another guy who blindly envisions the future without cars... I guarantee that in the future we will all drive cars. Not sure what they will look like, how they will drive, or what they will be fueled with, but we are not going to devolve as a society, we are only going to evolve. We will progress, not regress.

We as a people will get rid of our cars when you can get from any point A to any point B cheaper and quicker without a car. Failed government run transit will be a thing of the past, not the future - that's my Monday morning hangover prediction.
 
^If only we had an infinite amount of money to build an infinite number of highway lanes, then we could finally solve that pesky traffic problem! It's really a elegant solution if you think about it, because after we've replaced everything with our infinite number of highway lanes, there won't actually be anything to drive to! Everyone will stay home and voila, our problems are solved! What a brave new world it will be.
 
pelhamhall, what about people that don't want to own cars? How will you solve the biggest problem of the sheer amount of space that cars take up, when they are parked and when they are moving around? Boston as it exists today would not function if everyone had cars. Imagine if every worker downtown drove a car there. The roads would be gridlocked 24/7 and there would be nowhere near enough parking for everyone. Unless of course you propose that we build bigger roads and demolish buildings so that we can add more parking. I think that was tried once before and didn't work out quite as planned...
 
Pelham, you're correct that we'll evolve. We will evolve past cars, not devolve.
 
We had an infinite amount of money ... we spent it on the Iraq / Afghanistan war and the bank bailouts.
 
Robert Campbell said:
We used to zone our cities. Manufacture was here, office there, residence somewhere else. The goal was to keep noisy, smelly industrial activities away from homes. But those noxious activities are gone. Nearly all work in Boston today is clean. So in Downtown Village, everything will be mixed together: homes, offices, stores, places for social life and recreation.
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This is true, whether or not the car is present.
 
What an oversimplification of zoning's present and historical purposes. Anyway, the dissapearance of zoning may be a double-edged sword - it would inevitably be replaced by performance standards of some sort, which makes more sense, but the process would be just as drawn out - arguably American planners have a lot to fear in a more discretionary regime of land use regulation (that's already where it's heading, as Boston and most major cities consistently demonstrate).
 
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