Market Urbanism - Failure of Boston’s newest park

[raider.adam]

Old Urbanist on the failure of Boston’s newest park | Market Urbanism

Interesting little discussion.

[ArcticSplash]

Wasn't the cover of the tunnel specifically designed to not be particularly load-bearing?

In other words, there's no way you can just go back and put in 20 story apartment towers offering greenspace views.


I think the author is right though... the park doesn't become the focus of attention unless you have to make a long trek to reach some other green space. So the space that you do got has to be the right sized if it's going to be some man-made park and not some big nature conservancy (Ridley) or park easement (Fairmount). Central Park is completely surrounded by tall residential that developed a premium price for overlooking the park, but it didn't start out that way... the reason why the Dakota building is named so is because early NYC residents thought the Upper West Side was so far remote from "the action", it was like being in North Dakota.

[CityMaps]

Great article, thanks. The obsession with greening the city is understandable, but too often does more harm than good from a placemaking or urbanism standpoint.

the Dakota building is named so is because early NYC residents thought the Upper West Side was so far remote from "the action", it was like being in North Dakota.

That sounds urban legendy, but I like it.!

[raider.adam]

Yeah, pretty much pointing out that park space follows supply and demand rules too. If demand is constant, but supply goes up, people can attribute less value to it.

Which is important because, as pointed out, it does cost money to maintain green space (just ask friends of Rittenhouse Park).

[eldondre]

I believe they left a provision for a tunnel connecting south and north station (which the greenway does)

[desolate]

Jacobs is wrong, normally. And her point here is as well. She thinks limited parks over vast sprawling parks create a sense of place.

It's the concentration of wealthy residents with lots of free time and spending money and or large tourist population be it local or regional that allows for these active parks.

My favorite is the complete ignorance of the benefits of a transportation network. How the businesses that employ the residents, and pay the taxes to fund these projects require this expansive network of roads and not just for personal vehicles.

And allowing buildings over said tunnel would have easily quadrupled the cost.

They didn't built the tunnel at such a high cost because the highway wasn't needed. It was needed for the city to survive, for business to prospers, for the movement of goods and services.

This new park suffers from a lot of "overhead" planning where the designers laid out the park from overhead on an autocad and not how you actually would interact with the park as a pedestrian.



Our own parks like Maconi in SOuth Philly, (great but lacking density to activate) or Penns Landing (not enough residents) or the Parkway (again, not enough residents)

All the cafes and bike paths in the world can't make up for a lack of people to populate your park.

and as we can see from Market East, you need more than people, you need wealthy people with spending money.

Treat highways like any other transportation line. People don't lament train tracks the same way as highways but they do just as much "perceived" damage.

Even Amsterdam has a large sprawling and modern highway network.



It allows for the city to be a world capitol of buisness and shipping which then powers it's extensive tourist area which is really the only limited area with heavy biking.

The rest/majority of Amsterdam (the part where the residents live) is quite American with roads and garages and highways and gas stations.

[Illiniwek]

This park really is just a space to be crossed on the way to or from the North End. From an urban planning standpoint, it is an utter flop.

[eldondre]

This park really is just a space to be crossed on the way to or from the North End. From an urban planning standpoint, it is an utter flop.

I've only seen it from a taxi but desolate's photo, I think, gives you a good impression. it kind of reminds me of the independence mall redesign in the way the walkways flow. from here, it just looks like a poorly designed park if nothing else. what's there to draw you to that space? it looks like a lot of concrete. I'd ask, is there any reason small one story structures couldn't be built there? (like I said, I think they wanted to keep the right of way open in case someone decides to link north and south station which should have been done as part of the original project).
one could also look at it from desolate's POV. sure it wasn't worth the money but since boston used state funds to improve their town, it was worth it for bostonians.

[3rd&Brown]

It's not really a residential area at all. Almost all of those buildings are commercial, and some of the commercial is downright downtrodden. Downtown Crossing (their version of Chestnut Street), is at ground level of the buildings at about the mid-way point on the right hand side of the photo. If it weren't for Filene's, it would be a complete no mans land, IMO.

There are some residences out of view on what would be the bottom-left of the picture, but those are at the Intercontinental Hotel. My ex has a friend who used to babysit for one of the families in residence there: the former head of Gillette. Not exactly the type of people who like, take their own dogs for a walk, let alone inhabit the place year around.

It's just a complete dead zone, and the park isn't enough of an attraction to bring people there, given the quality green spaces elsewhere throughout the city.

[hammersklavier]

Jacobs is wrong, normally. And her point here is as well. She thinks limited parks over vast sprawling parks create a sense of place.

It's the concentration of wealthy residents with lots of free time and spending money and or large tourist population be it local or regional that allows for these active parks.

My favorite is the complete ignorance of the benefits of a transportation network. How the businesses that employ the residents, and pay the taxes to fund these projects require this expansive network of roads and not just for personal vehicles.

And allowing buildings over said tunnel would have easily quadrupled the cost.

They didn't built the tunnel at such a high cost because the highway wasn't needed. It was needed for the city to survive, for business to prospers, for the movement of goods and services.

This new park suffers from a lot of "overhead" planning where the designers laid out the park from overhead on an autocad and not how you actually would interact with the park as a pedestrian.



Our own parks like Maconi in SOuth Philly, (great but lacking density to activate) or Penns Landing (not enough residents) or the Parkway (again, not enough residents)

All the cafes and bike paths in the world can't make up for a lack of people to populate your park.

and as we can see from Market East, you need more than people, you need wealthy people with spending money.

Treat highways like any other transportation line. People don't lament train tracks the same way as highways but they do just as much "perceived" damage.

Even Amsterdam has a large sprawling and modern highway network.



It allows for the city to be a world capitol of buisness and shipping which then powers it's extensive tourist area which is really the only limited area with heavy biking.

The rest/majority of Amsterdam (the part where the residents live) is quite American with roads and garages and highways and gas stations.

You just proved Jacobs' own point...! Isn't there any part of Death and Life you understand and/or will not willfully misinterpret?!?

[BarryG]

It allows for the city to be a world capitol of buisness and shipping which then powers it's extensive tourist area which is really the only limited area with heavy biking.

The rest/majority of Amsterdam (the part where the residents live) is quite American with roads and garages and highways and gas stations.

Your point is very well taken, but I must add that almost every neighborhood is Amsterdam is linked with proper bicycle ROWs and not only that, there are interurban bike trails running along highways. The culture is bicycle-friendly, period. But yes people do drive and have good highways AFAIK and also highway congestion, just like here.

[billy ross]

Your point is very well taken, but I must add that almost every neighborhood is Amsterdam is linked with proper bicycle ROWs and not only that, there are interurban bike trails running along highways. The culture is bicycle-friendly, period. But yes people do drive and have good highways AFAIK and also highway congestion, just like here.

How much does fuel cost in Amsterdam? I would suspect that people are much more careful about how much they drive, just as we Americans used to be very careful about how much we talked long-distance back in the days of Ma Bell, due to the high marginal cost.

[hammersklavier]

To add more substance to last night's off-the-cuff reaction:

1. On Jane Jacobs and parks: If you read Death and Life carefully (something a certain someone obviously never did), you'll notice that when she talks about parks, she breaks them down into two categories: community parks (à la Washington Square in New York or Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia) and destination parks (à la Central Park in New York, Boston's Emerald Necklace--inclusive of the Common and the Public Garden right next door--or Fairmount Park in Philadelphia). These are two different classes of parks and it's unfair to treat them the same way. Essentially, destination park amenities need to attract people from all over the city--be the "lungs of the city", if you will--while neighborhood parks need to directly service their neighborhoods.

Lots of parks fail, Jacobs argues, because they either (a) attempt to be a destination park without destination park-type amenities or (b) attempt to be a neighborhood park without offering good neighborhood service. Remember here Jacobs has been talking about the sociology of cities--how they actually work. So a neighborhood park fails, in her analysis, because it fails to directly interact with the sociology of the city. Her example of Rittenhouse, especially, is telling: there are homes, offices, and businesses surrounding Rittenhouse, and interactions with them from the park are easy, so the park is populated or securitized (watched over) 24/7. Washington Square, when she was writing, was in the middle of a massive office district; with few homes or businesses nearby, it was well-used at precisely one time of the day: lunchtime. Franklin Square, at the time, was Skid Row (much like what parts of the Parkway have now morphed into)--which made the park well-used by an element of society which no other elements wished to interact with. Logan Circle, of course, has a monumentality complex: the only real reason to go there is to cool off wading in the Swann Fountain, which has been illegalized.

Jacobs' argument represents a revolution in urban studies: for the first time somebody asked how a city works, instead of how it fails! She's right but only if (again unlike a certain poster) you don't ignore facts.

I have mentioned before my quibble with her involving my in-park businesses, but it is a minor issue--one made wrong by time, as any scientific point can be--within the edifice of a massively successful way of explaining cities. (Much more successful than Mumford, that's for sure.)

So how does this relate to the Rose Kennedy Greenway?
a. It's not a good neighborhood destination. It lies at the border of neighborhoods and does not knit them together.
b. It has poor amenities. The space is a place to be crossed, rather than one to stay.
c. It is shunned (actively avoided) by locals.

So their Greenway works the same way as our Independence Mall. With time, the park may cease to be a failure and become successful--especially if the ECG were routed through it--but only if, through development-cyclical turnover, the buildings and people on either side came to embrace it. The odds against this happening, though, are astronomical.

2. On Amsterdam: Statistically speaking, yes, Europe is just as suburbanized as the United States. This is perhaps Bruegmann's strongest argument in Sprawl. They are just as interconnected by highways, and even have edge nodes, many of which are purposely designed (think La Défense). So why are European cities stronger than American cities?

There are multiple reasons...desolate, unsurprisingly, touched on none of them. One, of course, is the historical concentration of project housing in the urban fringe rather than near the core, as it was in America. European city cores are older (larger) than America's--so that may have an effect. But that still doesn't explain why European cities work better as urban units than American cities.

Desolate is right in his intuition that that answer involves transportation. However, like Emerson (Carlyle) meeting du Bois*, he is too hamstrung by his own ideas to use his intuitions and language to transcend the edge of knowledge. For European cities are girdled with multiple transportation networks. Unlike in most American cities**, where it is exceptionally difficult, if not outright impossible, to reach most destinations in the urban network without a car, European public transportation is extremely easy-to-use and a bedrock of the urban organism. This is the major difference. Planning in European cities has been concentrated around ensuring that most of the suburban network is within easy reach, by any mode of transport, of the urban center, firstly, and that that suburbs are, secondly, are deliberately structured in such a way as to never lose their quasi-rural charm. This has been an exceptionally successful mode of planning and development, but it requires a strong planning tradition on a regional scale, something we're only beginning to realize there's a need for.
_________
* MSE will know this, but...in The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. du Bois uses Emerson's language, phraseology, and idea structure to reanalyze beyond the limitations of Emerson's context. Where Carlyle used "heroes" and Emerson the "genius" of a person, du Bois uses these ideas to refer to a civilization (or society), a body of acquired knowledge, more or less, that tells its members who they are. One of the problems--opportunities--of America, du Bois argues (not just in Souls), is that there is no native civilization here--just a mashup of every other world civilization. This means that our real task, in a certain way, is to hybridize up a new civilization.

Subnote. du Bois characterizes race in terms of civilization, so for him, the Irishman (Celt) is as much a different race from the Teuton (Germanics), and Khoisans as different a race from West Africans, as black from white. It is a really remarkable redefinition...and suggests that the way we see race in America is tied to the fact that, in his terms, we don't have a race we can call our own.

** Exceptions, of course, to a greater or lesser degree, include: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Chicago, Portland, and San Francisco-Oakland. In addition, D.C. is the only city where European urban planning principles are consistently applied across the metropole. Portland, while the poster child, does not have these principles applied in a large chunk of the urban region (in Washington State), and AFAIK their public-transportation investment has not been concomitant with the large-scale application of transit-oriented development.

[BarryG]

How much does fuel cost in Amsterdam? I would suspect that people are much more careful about how much they drive, just as we Americans used to be very careful about how much we talked long-distance back in the days of Ma Bell, due to the high marginal cost.

Fuel is more expensive there than here but that is true all over Europe. Many cities have separated bike lanes and good intracity networks but the cycling obsession is unique to the Dutch. It's just how they roll.

[eldondre]

thanks for the excellent synopsis of jacob's arguments and thoughtfully written common sense about parks in general and this one specifically.
To your last point baout planning, I don
t know that this is exactly the problem or solution. Mind you, it was strong central planning that got rid of walkable neighborhoods. I'd further argue that our weak public transportation is much less the result of a lack of planning than money, or specifically the will to build or run it. there has been no lack of people with ideas. not that a coordinated approach couldnt help but the state just built a giant boondoggle of a convention ctr while it cried poor on transportation

[BarryG]

So why did they bury this thing in the first place?

[hammersklavier]

thanks for the excellent synopsis of jacob's arguments and thoughtfully written common sense about parks in general and this one specifically.
To your last point baout planning, I don
t know that this is exactly the problem or solution. Mind you, it was strong central planning that got rid of walkable neighborhoods. I'd further argue that our weak public transportation is much less the result of a lack of planning than money, or specifically the will to build or run it. there has been no lack of people with ideas. not that a coordinated approach couldnt help but the state just built a giant boondoggle of a convention ctr while it cried poor on transportation

Well, the second section was trying to list as many differences between European and American urban networks as I could think of...but the regional planning tradition has always been much stronger than here in America (this was the point I was trying to get at), and politicians there, unlike here, always understood the importance of incorporating all modes of transportation into anything new...of course, the fact that the major European railroads were all nationalized for the second half of the 20th century did help play a part in that.

Interestingly, highway building and maintenance in France was largely done by private enterprise while railroad operations were a public service.

[desolate]

You just proved Jacobs' own point...! Isn't there any part of Death and Life you understand and/or will not willfully misinterpret?!?

Please xplain.

You love to just say she's right.

"We can already see that city districts with relatively large amounts of generalized park, like Morningside Heights or Harlem in New York, seldom develop intense community focus on a park and intense love for it, such as the people of Boston’s North End have for their little Prado or the people of Greenwich Village have for Washington Square, or the people of [Philadelphia's] Rittenhouse Square district have for their park. Greatly loved neighborhood parks benefit from a certain rarity value."

It has nothing to do with the amount of park.

It has everything to do with the wealth of the surrounding residents.

Norris Square is a great park. Locals are poor. Park not so great. Hunting Park would be a treasure...if it wasn't surrounded by poverty.

Her acertations here are wrong.

Her actions created one of the largest sprawling auto based suburbs in North America. Missasagua formed after she helped "change" Toronto. THe businesses just moved outside of her controls and formed one of the fastest growing areas of the continent.

THere are limits to her logic and this is one of them.

[hammersklavier]

Please xplain.

Read before posting! Market Urbanism - Failure of Boston’s newest park

You love to just say she's right.

"We can already see that city districts with relatively large amounts of generalized park, like Morningside Heights or Harlem in New York, seldom develop intense community focus on a park and intense love for it, such as the people of Boston’s North End have for their little Prado or the people of Greenwich Village have for Washington Square, or the people of [Philadelphia's] Rittenhouse Square district have for their park. Greatly loved neighborhood parks benefit from a certain rarity value."

It has nothing to do with the amount of park.

It has everything to do with the wealth of the surrounding residents.

Norris Square is a great park. Locals are poor. Park not so great. Hunting Park would be a treasure...if it wasn't surrounded by poverty.

Her acertations here are wrong.

Her actions created one of the largest sprawling auto based suburbs in North America. Missasagua formed after she helped "change" Toronto. THe businesses just moved outside of her controls and formed one of the fastest growing areas of the continent.

THere are limits to her logic and this is one of them.

Rarity value does not equal concentration of wealth. The North End was hardly wealthy in the 1950s (it had just unslummed), and Norris Square is hardly wealthy today. Just because the surrounding neighborhood is poor doesn't mean its park isn't loved. Your assertion is wrong.

Missisaugua is just one municipality in the Toronto suburban organism...again, to claim that her actions drove suburbanization is incorrect and fallacious on a number of levels ("factually" and "correlation and causation" being just two of them).

[BarryG]

I never read Jacobs or studied urban planning but it seems like good and well cared for parks would increase property values, leading to wealthier residents. So I'm not surprised that the better parks have wealthier people around them. Rittenhouse Square is loved by the whole city, not just the rich folks who live on it.