Seaport Neighborhood - Infill and Discussion

Re: South Boston Seaport

Either the shadow/parking/openspace lobby hasn't hit the comment section of that Globe article yet, or an ArchBoston-approved consensus is emerging...
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

Shepard said:
Either the shadow/parking/openspace lobby hasn't hit the comment section of that Globe article yet, or an ArchBoston-approved consensus is emerging...
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I did my best to get the ball rolling in the right direction. ;)
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

That editorial was a bit of a joke. The Globe shouldn't need to be saying things like "an increasing number of downtown dwellers don't need cars" in 2010. This has been a cultural trend for 20 years - and one that was rediscovered from a period well within living memory. It's just appalling that we haven't moved on from some assumptions at this point.
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

No one reproduced this fantastic op-ed by Glaeser yet? It was formatted to play into the stupid "innovation district" buzz, but really applies to the Seaport (and actually all of Boston) in general.

Four demons to innovation district
By Edward L. Glaeser
August 12, 2010

ENTREPRENEURSHIP PREDICTS urban success, but can City Hall create a district that attracts more entrepreneurs to Boston? Unfortunately, the genie of inventive entrepreneurship doesn?t just come when called. But while governments have a poor track record of micro-managing innovation, they can help eliminate the barriers to entrepreneurship, like excessive regulation and a dearth of affordable, attractive living and work space.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino?s vision of an innovation district ? a 1,000-acre area on the waterfront ? could provide the structures needed to nurture new businesses. And cities filled with small, nimble firms have fared much better than places like Detroit, which is dominated by big companies. Employment growth between 1977 and 2007 was twice as fast in counties with smaller than average establishments than in counties with bigger firms. Suffolk County has the highest average establishment size of any large county in the United States. Boston has huge hospitals, colleges, and financial firms, but a paucity of the smaller enterprises that are so often associated with economic growth.

Menino?s proposal to allow more building in Boston?s beautiful core will enable the city to fulfill its destiny as a productive and environmentally friendly place to live and work. A family in Boston emits about six tons less carbon per year, primarily because of less driving and home heating, than it would if it lived in the suburbs.

Fifty-nine percent of Boston?s current housing units were built before 1939, making an expensive unit in an old triple-decker or a suburban apartment on a commuter line less appealing than an equally-priced McMansion in Atlanta. Smart, entrepreneurial people will put up with smaller apartments and a carless life in exchange for a spectacular view, a short commute, and the ability to walk to a changing array of restaurants and shops.

That?s the promise of the innovation district, which could be a mix of homes and businesses within walking distance of Boston?s core. Development shouldn?t involve subsidies ? the space is inherently great ? but the innovation district must avoid four great dangers that circle it like sea serpents in the harbor.

Impatience is the first danger. This is not exactly a propitious time to be pushing for bold, new development. There will be constant temptations to make unfortunate compromises in order to get the district moving (casino anyone?). Locking in early to the wrong project would damage the district. Indeed, the inherent unpredictability of innovation implies that the district?s zoning should allow constant change and upgrading.

The second danger is acrophobia ? a fear of building up. High densities will support exciting ground-floor shops and cafes, and allow the innovation district to do as much as possible to green the environment and alleviate the high cost of real estate. Hyper-density can help connect innovators and speed the flow of ideas. Ideally, the permitting process would require minimum, not maximum, floor area ratios, at least within the limits imposed by Logan flight paths.

Exclusivity is the third demon. A high rise district on the waterfront screams luxury condo, but the mayor knows well that Bostonians of all incomes need space. The innovation district is meant to be start-up friendly and disprove Jane Jacobs? dictum that ?new ideas need old buildings.?? New buildings can also be affordable if the Boston Redevelopment Authority streamlines the permitting process and continues to champion innovative building solutions, like more shared space.

The fourth demon is the empty sidewalk. The area around the Convention Center, which is within the district, is far from foot-friendly. The innovation district must change that completely. It must be easy to stroll and filled with ground level retail and dynamic public spaces. Every building must be built with abundant retail space, and the pedestrian routes need to be made safe and exciting.

The innovation district can provide the right big buildings that will attract small firms, but that will require patience, density, affordable space, and ground floor excitement.

Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University, is director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.
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http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/e...010/08/12/four_demons_to_innovation_district/
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

I guess academics like Glaeser don't need to do any historical research into the Seaport District's planning history. If he did, he'd discover that everything he says was written in 2000. I'm having a hard time believing that people are believing this "Innovation District" crap because they don't remember or know where we've already been.

Glaeser is just one step ahead of MIT's leading urban planning guru, who's history of advocacy parallels whatever current market conditions at the time suggests should be built.
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

Glaeser isn't buying into the Innovation District gimmick; he's been around the Boston planning + development block way too many times. He's just using it as a hook to reiterate planning principles that are not going into place in the Seaport, even if they've been mentioned before.

Believe me, I've been to enough academic "this is how you write op-eds" workshops. The strategy is to use some current issue or topic as a frame for pushing your less time-sensitive, more theoretical ideas. I honestly don't mind him paying lip service to the mayoral decree of the day as long as it helps make some of his decent advice orthodoxy.
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

Boston Redevelopment Authority approved both Waterside Place and Seaport Square, tonight.
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

JohnAKeith said:
Boston Redevelopment Authority approved both Waterside Place and Seaport Square, tonight.
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Why do I have the impression that both were approved years ago? Do you mean the latest revisions or was I totally fast-forwarding where we were in the approval process?
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

Well, your comment is hilarious, AFL. I wasn't at the meeting tonight, I was following on twitter. I wrote the following:

JohnAKeith: Real question: Has the @bostonredevelop BRA ever NOT approved something on its agenda?? By the time it gets to them, it's a fait accompli.

And their response:

BostonRedevelop: @JohnAKeith Yes, we have. Last month's meeting the board did not vote on the Greenway guidelines.
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

Approved, now get financing.


BTW thanks for the heads up on BRA Twitter.
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

Well, doesn't this all sound familiar. At least they think about and address their problems over there:

Hamburg's New Quarter
The Challenge of Making HafenCity Feel Neighborly
By Cathrin Schaer

Hamburg's new quarter is one of the largest urban development projects underway in the world today. But will it be successful? City planners are hoping that their application of an academic field known as environmental psychology will do the trick.

Luxury apartments, star architects and a waterfront promenade; a five-star hotel, a university, plenty of residential and office space and excellent public transportation. Hamburg's HafenCity is one of the largest city center development projects in the world today, and it is an incredible undertaking. The jewel in the crown will be a brand new, and very expensive, opera house designed by Herzog & de Meuron -- it will be a sight to rival Sydney's landmark concert hall.

By the time HafenCity (Harbor City) is finished in 2025, Hamburg's newest district will stretch 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) between the city center and the Elbe River, covering the site of the former harbor. The quarter will double the population of Hamburg's city center. No satellite town this: HafenCity sits less than a kilometer from the Hamburg town hall and its success is essential to Germany's second largest city.

But how to ensure that success? How can one make certain that this very important piece of real estate actually becomes a living, breathing part of the city -- a place where people want to both work and spend their leisure time? Indeed, how can one guarantee that a brand new neighborhood actually feels neighborly?

Strolling through HafenCity on an overcast, late-summer evening is enough to make anyone feel the weight of such questions. It remains difficult to get here with several roads blocked by construction sites and taxis a rarity. During the day, a never-ending stream of trucks cause noisy, dusty traffic jams. While some in Hamburg are optimistic, calling the development "Hamburg's most beautiful construction site," others are less kind, referring to it as an "architectural zoo." For the moment, both are accurate. Many of the new structures are certainly aesthetically pleasing, but HafenCity does not feel like a city center. In fact, apart from a couple of lit windows and one or two pedestrians out with their dogs, it feels like nothing so much as an oversized ghost town.

'A Space that Will Not Attract People'

Some fear it could remain that way and that high property prices could seal the new quarter's fate as a "rich man's ghetto" full of wealthy pensioners. Such concerns have been fueled by forecasts estimating that up to 10 percent of office space in Hamburg's city center will stand empty by the end of 2010.

Were HafenCity to fail, it certainly wouldn't be the first. As American William H. Whyte, wrote in his 1980 book "The Social Life of Public Spaces": "It is difficult to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished."

Earlier examples include Chandigarh, the town designed by legendary architect Le Corbusier in India and the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, demolished in 1972 after failing spectacularly to provide a new revolutionary form of low-cost, high density housing. Closer by is London's Docklands area, which was redeveloped during the 1980s and '90s and has been roundly criticized for a focus on making money from luxury developments rather than aiding the low-income families that already lived there. Hamburg itself has its very own example of a development-gone-astray. City Nord, a commercial development built in the 1960s to accommodate companies who couldn't find space in the city center received the following verdict in SPIEGEL: "The architecture was award winning -- but the lifestyle? There's more going on at local cemeteries."

Happily for the city of Hamburg, the planners of HafenCity are well aware of the potential pitfalls. And to avoid them, they are relying on the principles of a field called environmental psychology.

Good for Your Mental Health

A multi-faceted discipline, environmental psychology enjoyed a lot of attention in the 1970s and '80s and launched its own publication, the Journal of Environmental Psychology, in 1980. With its broad definition of environment -- used to include social, physical, architectural and other elements -- it has since been used to get shoppers to buy more in malls, to encourage environmentally friendly behavior and even to determine whether indoor plants are good for your mental health.

HafenCity is one of the most significant developments utilizing elements of environmental psychology today. Indeed, J?rgen Bruns-Berentelg, the executive chairman of HafenCity Hamburg GmbH, which is overseeing the development, seems downright enthusiastic about what he describes as the psychological development of "a post-modern community."

"At the end of the day, physical structures are also social and cultural," Bruns-Berentelg notes.

The key, says Bruns-Berentelg, is avoiding the kind of compartmentalization -- with areas for offices clearly separated from residential zones -- which characterizes many German cities rebuilt soon after World War II. In HafenCity, cultural and social institutions -- such as art galleries, museums and the university -- will end up alongside commercial structures and residential buildings. Penthouses for the wealthy are to be neighbors with apartments for those with lower incomes. The first school has already opened as has a retirement home.

In addition to the so-called "mixed use" concept, an aggressive communication strategy is aimed at attracting the right mixture of people to the development to avoid the rich retiree scenario critics have warned of. Bruns-Berentelg, who also helped develop Berlin's Potsdamer Platz following German reunification, envisions cultural and social institutions side by side with apartment buildings and shops as a way to create a sense of community.

Part 2: But What About the Birds?

Most important, though, has been the effort to encourage dialogue between those who have already moved in to HafenCity and the developers themselves. Eventually, the quarter is expected to have around 5,800 residential units with 12,000 residents and between 45,000 and 50,000 workers commuting to the quarter during working hours. For the moment, however, there are just 1,550 residents and 6,000 workers.

To facilitate communication with these forerunners, HafenCity has employed sociologist Marcus Menzl, who acts as a go-between for the residents and HafenCity. "You can't have a totally structured place and then just expect people to fit in," Menzl says. "But nor will it work if everything is totally open to interpretation." The goal, he says, is to find a balance, "between structures and freedoms and opportunities."

Menzl points out an example to illustrate how the right balance can be struck. In 2008, he says, there were 600 inhabitants including 40 children, a number that was surprisingly high given the lack of a kindergarten and playground at that early stage. Indeed, during his regular interviews with the new HafenCity dwellers, Menzl discovered that a playground was high on parents' wish list. So HafenCity decided to go ahead and build a temporary one that could be moved once construction had advanced.

The parents also suggested an indoor recreation area for use during bad weather. "We said we would do this too as long as they took over responsibility for it," Menzl says. HafenCity financed half of it and the parents financed the other half.

Lessons from a Mining Village

This kind of fine-tuning on the fly, says Bruns-Berentelg, will be used as additional issues and needs crop up in the future -- exactly the kind of drug that environmental psychologists might prescribe.

For six years Gerda Speller, an expert in the field from Germany who now lectures at the University of Surrey in Britain, studied the relocation of the hundred-year-old mining village Arkwright Town in Derbyshire, Britain. All the villagers were moved into new housing a short distance away in the mid 1990s due to methane gas emissions from a nearby coal mine.

From her research Speller concluded that a number of conditions must be met for people to form an attachment to a new neighborhood. First and foremost, residents need to have a say in the shaping of their surroundings. "Often," Speller continues, "you will find with developments like this that they are completely finished before people move in. So they lack the chance to make their new environment their own."

Obviously this is not the case with HafenCity where, despite the existence of a "Master Plan," the residents and other stakeholders have an input into the ongoing project. As Bruns-Berentelg points out: "Research has been going on for five years now. It is a learning process with no blueprint."

Security and Autonomy

Additionally, Speller found that security, autonomy and a sense of "place congruence" were vital as were optimal levels of internal and external stimulation. "If those things are in place, then it should work," she says.

Sometimes it can be the little things that count. When the inhabitants of Arkwright Town moved into their new lodgings, everything was more or less finished. But there was no greenery, and therefore, no birds. "People were absolutely distressed," Speller says. "It took about six months for shrubs and trees to provide enough cover for the birds to frequent the new town. The planners of the new town had tried to think of everything and it was fascinating that this lack of external stimulation turned out to be so very important."

Being right by the waterside, this should not be a problem for HafenCity. Furthermore, initial research has shown that those who have moved in already identify strongly with their new surroundings, says Menzl. "That sort of emotional connection usually only comes with time," he says. "But they seem to have identified with HafenCity very quickly and they want to support the philosophy. You cannot build a neighborly feeling," he reasons. "But I think that architecture can help certain processes and hinder others."

That seems exactly what Bruns-Berentelg set out to do. Furthermore, HafenCity has also ensured that residential units are available for a wide range of budgets, an important part of attracting the kind of mixed population the quarter strives for.

"We are doing something very ambitious here," he says. "Yes, we are building buildings. But we are also producing social and cultural environments for the next century. After all, a city is not only a commercial product, but also a public good."
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Link (w/ video and photos):

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,714008,00.html
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

A perfect Frankenstein of corporate paternalism: enough research and science to combine a bit of this and a bit of that will allow us to bring to life a soul.

(I blame Will Wright.)
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

Could be worse

CopyofIMG_6419.jpg
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

you've captured every new building built in the last 23? yrs,Fan Pier looks good from this angle!
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

23? I think every building in this shot has gone up in the last ten, save the original WTC.
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

when was the court house erected I thought it was 1987?
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

Good pic, but there is no variance in building height. It is soooo boring...
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

Is what it looks like from a distance all that important? Isn't what it looks like at ground level all that really matters? It sucks at street level too, so fail all around I guess.
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

^^We have that debate about two or three times a year around here.

For what it's worth, I agree with you. The skyline should be the dead-last thing considered when planning a project.
 
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