Preliminary infra-lab fieldwork: ‘Smart’ utility planning in Dorchester, Boston
On a cold afternoon in mid-December, Ingrid Foss-Ballo and I conducted a first round of fieldwork exploring smart city/smart urbanism efforts in Boston. Ingrid and I are Boston-based team members of the Urban Living Labs/Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions (GUST) group; we are planning a infra-lab for next April, when many team members will be in Boston for the 2017 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting.
A significant element in the discussion of ‘smart cities’ and ‘smart urbanization’ centers on how to re-configure legacy, underutilized industrial districts into spaces competitive-in and relevant-to the 21st century, global economy. The transformation of the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston from a centrally-located but under-utilized district has recently begun under the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BDPA, the re-branded Boston Redevelopment Authority) leadership. Two plans guide Dorchester’s redevelopment, one focusing on ‘smart’ infrastructural upgrades and one on transitioning the neighborhood to a more residential one. (Links: The PLAN: South Boston Dorchester Avenue Planning Initiative and the Boston Smart Utilities Vision documents). For this infra-walk, we are interested in the intersection of these plans, one socially-minded and one infrastructural, and how the friction, so to speak, between the two will spill over into the material landscape itself, creating a 21st century district on top of a 19th century streetscape.
While the transport corridors — road and rail — as well as the commercial, industrial, and residential built form are largely of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Dorchester Avenue corridor is on the edge of a shift. Smart utilities communicating through digital connection, flexible in operation to account for a changing climate and as-yet-unforeseen demand, underlie a just-released city plan based around community needs for much more housing, more open and green spaces, and a new street grid to break up the no-longer in use industrial form of the area. The smart utility agenda and the community plan are very new and not yet visible in the landscape, but change will come quickly, as has been the case in Boston since at least the turn of the century. To this end, on a brisk, windy Friday afternoon, a colleague and I walked Dorchester Avenue from Andrew Station to Broadway Station to in order to document the streetscape. Dorchester Ave is very, very heavily trafficked. Layers of the industrial city are still visible, if fading and or rotting away, from old railroad tracks to wooden utility poles no longer connected to the grid, to weed-filled lots where warehouses used to stand. In terms of existing business, the storage of cranes and other equipment is common, low-value land use that can be moved to a less-central location when the property is deemed more valuable and worth selling to turn into residential or new commercial uses. The Dorchester Avenue corridor is sitting, waiting for redevelopment that is about to happen; the two BPDA plans are the kickoff for it.
