Boston – urban rehabilitation

Tomorrow morning we leave Boston and head to Montreal on our Greyhound bus. It has been an interesting three days here, and I have certainly found myself very much liking the city. Compared to New York, Boston has felt quite small, a bit quiet and I guess certainly a bit more familiar. Not to say that I don’t also like New York of course – the two cities are just, well, quite different.

One interesting aspect of wandering around Boston is taking a look at how it responded to what one might call the “dark days” of urbanism – the mid 20th century. The days of “urban renewal” (which really meant widespread demolition), the days of highway building and so forth. In many respects Boston suffered worse than New York did during these dark days – probably because there is a bit less to Boston than there is to New York, so therefore the city was less resilient to the impact. There are two classic projects that hammer home the effect of mid-20th century thinking on Boston: the Central Artery (now replaced by the “Big Dig“) and the Boston City Plaza.

The Central Artery was an elevated freeway slammed through the heart of central Boston in the 1950s – a photo of it is included below:

The elevated highway cut off the lovely North End area from the main part of the city, and unsurprisingly had horrific effects on the functioning of the city as a whole. It didn’t even do its traffic distribtuion job very well, with traffic jams occurring near continuously.

City Hall Plaza (photo here) somewhat reminded me of Aotea Square – only worse: a large blank space with difficult to define edges surrounded by ugly buildings (although at least with Aotea Square we have the town hall to try to fix things a bit). To create the space for City Hall Plaza and the surrounding buildings, a complex network of little streets and buildings was completely bulldozed in the 1950s and 60s.

So far, so bad. However, despite the horrific efforts of mid-2oth century urban planners to destroy Boston – I would actually now call it largely a planning success. The enormously expensive “Big Dig” (latest estimated cost of around $US22 billion including interest) has put the Central Artery underground, and while the City Hall Plaza has yet to be changed, there are plenty of other amazing parts of Boston that have rehabilitated very well over the past few decades – such as South End, North End, Back Bay and Beacon Hill. All these inner-city suburbs embody everything that’s good about inner-city areas, and all seem to be absolutely thriving. The town houses have been refurbished, there are exciting cafes and shops, the lack of parking doesn’t seem to put people off living in the townhouses and so forth.

Overall, it seems to me as though Boston has learned from its mid-century mistakes. Some of the lessons have proven to be extremely costly – such as the need for the Big Dig. Other lessons are yet to be properly remedied (like City Hall Plaza) but there seems to be an understanding and appreciation of what is good for the city and what is not so good. Taking this experience and applying it to the Auckland situation provokes some interesting thoughts – what could we do to rehabilitate our inner areas and once again link the central city with its surrounding suburbs? What should we think about new projects like AMETI and the Waterview Connection, which seem stuck between operating in a 20th century mentality of “we must provide more road capacity“ crossed with a 21st century conscience that this comes at a price for local communities.

In the end, I guess it’s all a reflection of the fundamental transport paradox: that the more emphasis you give to moving people around the city via cars, the worse the impact on the city generally is. How do we find that balance between enabling people to get around while ensuring that the city itself is somewhere people will still actually want to go to and be in? Boston appears to have regretted its mid-20th century focus on prioritising the through over the in. I get the feeling that in Auckland we are starting to regret it too, although it remains to be seen whether that means a new transport paradigm, or whether we will continue to want to “complete” motorway networks, widen roads and somehow magically “fix congestion”.

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