S22 GSD STU 1212: The Near Future City Student Projects

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THE NEAR-FUTURE CITY Final Review Booklet

Landscape Architecture Core IV STU 1212 Spring 2022 Harvard GSD

Orient Heights Alex Wall

Dorchester Heights/West Broadway Belinda Tato

Abhishek Desai Bichen Wang Lexing (Eric) Cao Lingyu Li Pavin Banternghansa Rongqing Liu Shengfeng Gao Sophia Glasser-Kerr Yueying Li

Chunfeng Yang Dingrui Wang Forrest Rosenblum Jessie Pan Jiayu Tong Kawthar Marafi Shuo Wang Shuyue Liu Yiqun Wang Zhuohan Zhou

Maverick Square Sergio Lopez-Pineiro

Newmarket Rosalea Moacella

Austin Sun Boya Zhou Chen Chen Elle Li Enrique Cavelier Liz Van Dyke Ruizhu Han Supriya Ambwani Yihui Yang Yingchen Lang

Angelica Oteiza Demitri Gadzios Erin Voss Jingyuan (Loki) Zhu Julia Li Meg Koglin Raphi Tayvah Sara Gong Sonia Ralston Yazmine Mihojevich Zina Fraser

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Grove Hall Danielle Choi

Mattapan Square Lorena Bello Gomez

Catherine Auger Ellena Wong Jiazheng Li Justin Jones Lara Prebble Liwen Shi Matt Gorab Peter Sikorsky Ruijie Liu Sophie Chien

Alex Berkowitz Celina Abba Chandani Patel Giovanna Baffico Jiin Ahn Choi Jonathan Boyce Kat Wyatt Nick Gray Rachaya Wattanasirichaigoon

Fields Corner Jill Desimini Alyssa Taylor Elizabeth Quintero Jiyoung Baek Kevin Robishaw Meghan Gutnecht Mila Ratto Minzhi Lin Rebecca Shen Siyue Fan Weiran Yin

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ORIENT HEIGHTS

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Urban Forestree Integrating Social, Cultural, Ecological Urban Fabric through the Lens of Tree Equity Abhishek Desai Alex Wall Map of tree cover in cities is too often of income and race. This is primarily the result of redlining and other discriminating urban policies that have shaped the modern urban landscape. Apart from having physical implications, like poor air quality and low groundwater levels, neighborhoods of color and low income also face serious degradation in the quality of life. Much like buildings, trees, open spaces, and access to fresh air are crucial infrastructures to improve the quality of life. Trees also aid in curbing rising heat trapped in our contemporary urban environment, reducing heat-related health risks in the community.

Urban Forestree advocates for Tree Equity with a conceptual integration of various urban assemblages with historic formal patterns to provide a healthy, open mixed-use community.

Benefiting from the sea level rise, water is welcomed into the city through a system of marshes and canals. Strategies like Social saltmarsh, forest corridors, Groundcover rails, and Stack park advocate addressing Tree Equity from the implications of sea-level rise, urban pollution, and environmental justice.

Festivals of Care is a proposal for the project which initiates care of the urban ecological landscape. Apart from being one of the racially diverse neighborhoods of Boston, the existing urban landscape fails to integrate the various nationalities. Being racially diverse neighborhoods to its core, the urban fabric lacks open spaces or urban spaces to celebrate cultural events. Urban Forestree provides spaces to celebrate and integrate the various communities but appeals for collaboration with the authorities, inhabitants, and professionals to collaborate on implementing strategies to achieve Tree Equity.

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The Vibrating Air Re-imagine the Community of East Boston under the Realm of Aviation Bichen Wang Alex Wall The atmosphere we live in today is no longer the pure product of nature. Air has no form, but it carries humidity, temperature, clouds, radio waves, sound, particulate matter, and pollutants. By first focusing on the extreme noise created by airplanes in the sky of Boston’s Orient Height, this project uses different strategies like creating underground space, collecting rainwater, expanding soft ground, and using new biofuel and sound energy to achieve a more hospitable environment for the co-living between human and non-human under the vibrating air from the deep sky to deep ground.

When more and more aircraft exist in the atmosphere and generate fluctuations, the sound invisibly affects the ground with the atmosphere as a medium. Envisioning the three types of “Urban Cloud” including the “Mist Cloud”, “Green Cloud” and “Surface Cloud” to form urban space, the city will protect humans and non-humans from negative air conditions. The relationship between air and ground will be further built which makes us view the future city in a vertical way.

As technology continues to develop, the world occupied by aircraft is no longer an imagination. The application of SAF and aeroponic gardening mature, energy crops and three-dimensional farms will expand further, future cities will become more organic and sustainable, and people will have more rights to access healthy air.

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Reclaiming the Habitat Lexing (Eric) Cao Alex Wall The proposal focuses on critiquing the existing fossil-fuel-based infrastructure and envisioning how we can recreate and reorganize our habitat in a future of sea level rise.

Site is located at Orient Heights in East Boston where sea level rise will compress human and non-human living space and threatening existing infrastructure.

Cities are not only being invaded by the sea; vehicles are also taking up a lot of urban space. Yet vehicles are not the real users of our cities; they are simply resources that have been artificially placed in the city. They invade and consume our territory and people lose their right to live and walk because of the roads.

What’s worse, these series of facilities associated with gasoline cars not only occupy our urban space, but also bring water pollution and produce harmful gases emission.

Vehicles now dominate the city. We must reverse this trend, not to live with them as equals, but to completely suppress their continued growth. We need to reclaim our habitat from the various infrastructures that are related to fossil fuel form of transportation. In the cities of the future, vehicles will be hidden from view. Humans and other creatures will be able to live safely and comfortably together around the sea.

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Liberating the Ground Drone Delivery System for Food Justice Lingyu Li Alex Wall I want to replace the existing ground delivery system with new drone transportation to activates Boston’s local food resources and to alleviate East Boston’s low food accessibility problem. I will use drones as a medium to develop, utilize, and hybridize the vacant and abandoned space to liberate crowded city streets, to reduce the footprint of ground transportation-related, and ultimately create the new distributed public green spaces in the near future.

As the distribution system grows, it will gradually establish and enrich the entire food planting and drone delivery system. The cultivated food species will renew the urban soil in constant iterations and use the waste produced by the food to build a compost system. And during the second phase, I will add new high-density vertical farming to expand the scope of drone delivery as the system gradually becomes profitable, and gradually generates new delivery centers and receiving stations. Eventually, the entire network of drone delivery systems will be connected to the existing public green space in East Boston to break the isolation of each community. Food has become a medium for connecting various public spaces, while drones break the dominant paradigm of the original ground transportation and liberate the future urban ground.

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Urban Archipelago ‘The Edge of Tomorrow’ Pavin Banternghansa Alex Wall I believe in the synergy between humans, non-humans, and our environment. I believe in the city that accommodates changes, the city that allows us to co-evolve together through the passage of time.

Urban Archipelago, The Edge of Tomorrow re-envisions Orient Heights’ littoral zone as regenerative grounds for ecological and cultural resiliency. Two and a half-century ago at East Boston, we went against the natural site formation when we filled the land to build our settlements. In the coming century, the sea is coming to claim it back, back to an archipelago. To re-establish the balance and create synergy with the land and the sea, we project the sea level rise at the end of the century, deploy a strategic retreat by moving to higher ground, deconstructing existing infrastructures, reshaping the land, and re-imagining Orient Heights as a city in the amphibious edge. By expanding the littoral zone, we expand the political grounds between the land and the sea, providing room for negotiations between human and non-human agencies. The landscape of the Near Future City will be performative undulating terrains that offer niches for biodiversity, material resources, cultural infrastructures, and attenuate storm surges.

The water is coming. It will keep coming. We can keep building walls and raising the ground, but that’s a precarious solution, one that will burden and risk the next generations.

Urban Archipelago, the urban edge of tomorrow, envisions how we can grow together with our non-human companions in the Near Future City.

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Co-Living _ Sharing Space Redefine the Publicity and Cooperative Lifestyle for Future Affordable Housing and Mixed-Use Rongqing Liu Alex Wall East Boston is surrounded by water, Chelsea Creek, Belle Isle inlet, and Boston Harbor, which are under the pressure of the sea-level rise in the future. Flooding will threaten living spaces, public spaces, and infrastructure. Public areas may become a luxury, and the people’s living spaces should be redefined. I believe that the boundary between the public and private spaces will become ambiguous in the future. The population has decreased in parts of Boston, and East Boston is one of the areas. The rising price of house rent and lacking convenient accessibility between each community are reasons. A new market-rate real estate development is under construction in Suffolk Downs, East Boston, leading to protests demanding more affordable housing.

The question that drove the design: How do we maximize the co-living potential? How do we achieve an inviting, city-integrated, common home?

The barrier of each community and the boundary between each area create negative spaces which are insecure. Lacking the space for traditional and new activities and social interaction further demonstrates the significance of sharing space. Opening the ground space can create the opportunity for sharing. The rooftop is the fifth face of a building, which creates a social space for the community and a permeable surface as a microhabitat.

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A Secured, Strong, and Sufficient Neighborhood Defensive Landscape in East Boston Shengfeng Gao Alex Wall East Boston’s population experienced the first significant increase after World War II. But climate change is threatening property, lives, and the local community. Another issue East Boston residences are facing is the lack of fresh food supply. When flooding and invasive water begin to dominate this place, getting fresh food will be even harder.

Landscape architectural design is capable of protecting the vulnerable land from flooding and stormwater by using gray infrastructure and green infrastructure in a defensive and resilient way. It is a methodology that can be applied to other vulnerable harbor shores in Boston. It produced a new form of urban landscape urbanism that can promote economic growth and protect limited lands for the increasing population.

The overall design will be able to attract approximately 1300 residents or 430 families.

The system of the food production and farming provide jobs for both local community as well as invited group, in which to create a more diverse, multi-cultural and strongly bonded community.

The current Orient Heights residences have no need to leave their home even after the impact of climate change and sea level rise. The city will be more physically and socially adaptive, and resilient against extreme weather and natural disaster, providing hybrid and affordable living condition in the future.

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Eco Industrial Park of East Boston Creative Metabolisms of Waste Sophia Glasser-Kerr Alex Wall Eco Industrial Park of East Boston: Creative Metabolisms of Waste, imagines a culture of abundance to replace the current mentality of scarcity and over-consumption. The flow of resources from outside in, (interexchange) is recirculated to a flow of resources/waste within the city (intra-exchange). This is a future city that slows down and integrates waste streams and gives agency over material and nutritional flows. Thus, reducing resource exploitation.

The combination of physical and social intra-exchange infrastructure for organizing autonomous communities that share excess resources and are actively engaged in stewarding the environment facilitates social cohesion and a resilient society.

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Over Your City Food Will Grow Re-imagine an Ancient Future Food City Yueying Li Alex Wall As we face an uncertain future with the global pandemic, climate change, and regional war, food issues will continue affecting our city, where the vulnerable communities are the hardest hit. Looking at Orient Heights, this project seeks to combine vernacular agriculture paradigm with high-technology, establish co-operative food web across the society, and build new urban food systems to reconnect people with food.

The project dives into one of the large vacant space in the orient heights, and proposes a food park as the central component of this future urban food supply system. Having diverse food-related programs, this park will become a place to celebrate the joy and beauty of growing food, rather than banishing food production to distant monocultures and greenhouse clusters, to actually be the drivers of space and culture in Orient Height.

This project is re-imagining the future urban food system as a dynamic, fluid, and complex network of symbiotic co-operations, the co-operation between plants and animals, between pixel farms and agricultural infrastructures, between vernacular knowledge and high technologies, and between public life and all these elements. Through this system that emphasizes the interconnectedness, the project’s hope is to reestablish a relationship with food that offers a path towards recognizing beauty in diversity and in public life—embracing an ancient future.

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MAVERICK SQUARE

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Leaky Infrastructure Redefining the Street through Irrigation Austin Sun Sergio Lopez-Pineiro We have a leaky pipe problem. The United States loses around six billion gallons of treated water every day (~18% of total). With our country’s aging infrastructure and outdated systems, most of this water leaks out of pipes. Sea level rise and climate change have begun to exacerbate this problem, with issues ranging from overwhelming existing systems with heavy storms to saltwater intrusion on sources of freshwater.

Leaky Infrastructure takes Maverick Square as a case study for a new way to approach water infrastructure. This project proposes creating a redundant fresh water infrastructural system that is designed around inevitable leakage. Leakages are used to water a new street landscape: high elevation streets and green spaces in Maverick square are transformed to hold and transport fresh water via a new series of pipes lifted above the street level. By re-positioning pipes to be lifted above the street, a new landscape emerges.

Leaky pipes turn into a street wide irrigation system, with a set of adaptable plants on a gradient based on water tolerance and needs. This small-scale intervention becomes a tool for city making by creating networks of connecting gardens. Redefining the public street allows Maverick Square’s retailers, restaurants, residents, and community organizations to have the opportunity to claim back a “front yard” to define a new public, private, and privately owned streetscape. Life and activities flow around this new infrastructural irrigation system.

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Wastescape Rebuild Memory along Future Coast Boya Zhou Sergio Lopez-Pineiro Waste should be recorded and sensed. As the end of material flow between our human body and the external environment, it records when we move, how we live and what we eat. When modern supportive systems such as logistics and sewer networks have taken the role of urban kidney, the production and process of waste become invisible and intangible. Humans lose the sense of how much we consume and have no idea what is taken from and left to nature.

As the sea level rising begins to reshape the future coast, the filled East Boston will go back to separated islands with tons of construction waste from demolishing projects while household waste from communities keeps accumulating. Regarding waste as a material ethnography, where city-scaled construction waste meets personal household waste becomes where the collective memory of global climate change meets that of localized community life. By rebuilding the future coastal area with on-site waste, the project translates the previous urban fabric into layers of waste-scape. Seeing waste debris with original painting and texture, people would trace back their old days; and experience their new life with plants sprouting from this new ground layer.

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City Value the Hidden Wisdom of Trees Chen Chen Sergio Lopez-Pineiro Trees may look like solitary individuals. But the ground beneath our feet tells a different story. If tree roots are connected as a network, they can exchange sugar, nutrients, and warning messages. When functioning as a community, trees will achieve an overall more vigorous life and better ecology resilience.

Now, architecture and gray infrastructure take priority in city planning. The little preconsideration about trees makes them be planted isolated. What if we re-discover the tree intelligence as a supportive living environment for the city. Make room for underground tree roots and let them communicate. The underground root network will define the above-ground land use and support human activities. In the near future, humans will welcome the tree community to live together with us. City planning will consider the tree community and human community simultaneously. Trees will pay back a more resilient and shadier city with a water storage ground, a pleasant microclimate, and clean air.

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Ambiguous Streetscape Elle Li Sergio Lopez-Pineiro Ambiguous Streetscape can prioritize equitable mobility for those who choose not to or cannot drive.

Ambiguous Streetscape can reclaim streets, recreating necessary mixed public space.

Ambiguous Streetscape can ensure less reliability on private cars that burden transport systems.

Ambiguous Streetscape can promote improved physical and mental health.

Ambiguous Streetscape can help combat climate change by addressing carbon emissions and urban heat waves.

Ambiguous Streetscape re-imagines streets as places that bring the marginal agents back to center.

In future cities, we no longer have to build streets in one particular way, we can build in so many new ways, bring variety by addressing each street and each species very particularly.

Also, street is not only for people and efficiencies, but also for nature and inefficiency.

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Cyborg Landscapes Re-framing the Political Agency Of Public Spaces in the Near Future City Enrique Cavelier Sergio Lopez-Pineiro The virtualization of politics through online platforms has emptied public spaces from their civil significance. Simultaneously the rise of social media as the primary space of contemporary political rituals menaces democracy through polarization, distrust, absence of accountability, and lack of mediated discussions.

Through the design of cyborg landscapes - hybrid organisms of entangled hardware, software, humans, and non-human systems- the project aims to reintroduce political rituals in the near future city’s urban spaces. By reestablishing trust, accountability, verity, and mediation through these landscapes, the project proposes a framework to recover the political agency of public space while suggesting a bridge between the virtual and physical realms.

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The Ruinous Edge Liz Van Dyke Sergio Lopez-Pineiro Here comes the end of capitalist reproduction. The Ruinous Edge and the deindustrialization of inner-city environments shares concerns over post-colonial orderings of cities producing an extended perspective of modern urban buildings, which included the fall of leftover fragments that might be remnants of destroyed or demolished buildings. This edge in case has been carried by sea level rise and exposure. The reduction of capitalism starts with an invitation to detach its walls. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it only took 2 hours and 40 minutes for the Titanic to sink. Deconstructing various walls, windows, and doors will open a new assembly to the landscape’s setting while the brushed environment allows space for a landscape estuary to grow. The escape from the over-built world, the ruinous edge leaves a memorial and removal of capital infrastructure. Welcome to the new age.

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The Polyphonic City Ruizhu Han Sergio Lopez-Pineiro The project critiques the present city that lacks a conscious understanding of the quality of sounds it generates. Current interventions on urban sonic environment focus mainly on noise reduction instead of improving the quality of the soundscape. The polyphonic city aims to improve the acoustic wellness by creating a variety of sonic experiences throughout the city for all living beings. The perception of sound (timbre, pitch, loudness, etc.) is as crucial as the physical attributes of sound (amplitude, frequency, complexity, etc.). Urban and landscape elements should actively and intentionally intervene in psychoacoustics as well as the physical generation and the transmission of sounds. The interplay of sonic textures and space is crucial. The focus on the perception of sound triggers a new understanding of topography, urban morphology, planting, and voids. More importantly, how they perform as an integrated whole in the urban soundscape.

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Vectorland Supriya Ambwani Sergio Lopez-Pineiro “Come then, let us play at unawares, And see who wins in this sly game of bluff.

Man or mosquito.”

The Mosquito, D.H. Lawrence This project examines the absurdity of humans’ insistence on “staying in place” as sea levels rise, extreme weather conditions increase, and our populations fall prey to diseases caused by climate change. Homo sapiens are a migratory species trained by artificial borders and neoliberal notions of land ownership to hold onto private property even as their homes get inundated or burnt to ashes, even as they get battered by disease and conflict.

The vector of this project is a vector—a mosquito. Small enough to perch on a fingertip, it feasts on blood, spreading diseases that cripple humans and animals worldwide.

As temperatures increase, vector-borne illnesses previously limited to the tropics are spreading to temperate regions. Boston is already experiencing a summertime rise in mosquito-borne diseases like West Nile Virus and Eastern Equine Encephalitis, the incidences of which will only increase as warm weather extends later into the year and sea levels rise. Outbreaks of dengue and malaria in Boston now seem feasible.

This project reimagines a future, inundated Maverick Square redesigned around the desperation to keep a single creature away. The mosquito is the biggest problem facing Maverick Square, and the urban fabric reflects its importance. Ditches criss-cross the neighbourhood to keep water flowing rapidly, topography is weaponised against standing water, and planting attracts and repels mosquitoes in different contexts. The Bureau of Mosquito Control polices the neighbourhood, handing out harsh punishments like excommunication and property seizure to those who violate its draconian anti-mosquito rules. The mosquito is more a metaphor than a mosquito.

Ceci n’est pas un moustique.

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Frontstaging Backstaged Infrastructure Yihui Yang Sergio Lopez-Pineiro We won’t come to care about and to value something not until we are able to see it and experience it. As Susan Leigh-Star puts it, “Infrastructure systems are often physically and metaphorically veiled beneath the surface of urban life.” The second we wake up in the city, wires hidden behind walls are constantly delivering electricity, streams channeled into brick sewers are continuously transporting water. When they work best, they are noticed least of all. Only breakdowns and disasters frontstage the “backstaged” infrastructure.

However, extreme weathers coming more frequently with shifting climates. Maintenance and repair thus become a burden to the city after disasters.

What if we make the pipe systems more resilient?

What if we reintroduce underground utilities to the aboveground?

What if we integrate them into the urban fabric and our daily lives?

Allowing pipes to run free in the urban city; pairing climatic infrastructure with daily life services; using waterways both to provide resilience and to provide space to the diverse community. When infrastructures become visible, there’s a better chance to be aware of the inequities relating to their presence and to be able to take actions.

What lies beneath the surface of urban life is as critical as the world above.

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Shared Ground Reconceptualizing “Defensible Space” in Maverick Square Yingchen Lang Sergio Lopez-Pineiro One day, probably soon, we need some recognition of the sense of security that our cities haven’t granted and the fact that maintaining order and safety in the community is not limited to the police’s responsibility. The project aims to re-conceptualize “defensible space” through the shared ground and shared responsibility with the new identity of various hierarchies. City dwellers will build cohesive unions ranging from tiny groups to large-scale net through collaborative practice, shared ownership, and a sense of collective belonging.

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WEST BROADWAY / DORCHESTER HGTS

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Autonomous Voids Intelligent Decentralization of Urban Services into the Residential Neighborhood Chunfeng Yang Belinda Tato The sea-level rise provides the opportunity for people to relocate and chase higher altitude living spaces while leaving the ground level a more flexible, adjustable, and resilient space. With the rapid advances in information technology and the emergence of the sharing economy, the ground spaces can be much more intelligent and more efficient than the traditional ones.

While rising seawater allows people to elevate their lobby, one void space to consider is the ground level. The residential block is re-divided into two different counterparts to incorporate a shared neighbor. One is private, including the house property and the yard in front and behind as a transitional space from personal to the public. The other is that it was once private but often with limited access and use. To achieve autonomy, there will be a wireless charging grid paved on the ground. A kind of autonomous dolly robot would help to serve as the base for the programs added. The robots can run across the charging grid and would be able to reach every corner of the residential block space. A variety of urban services will be loaded on these dolly robots and move between each house property to achieve the activities and information exchange. The second void space to consider is the roof void. The neighborhood has three major house types: one/two singlefamily houses, triple-deckers, and attached townhouses. They can provide different spatial opportunities to hold various urban services as well.

Many residential blocks have very limited access to these local services including the civic, commercial, production, cultural, and sports. With the “autonomous voids,” the decentralization process will happen, and diversity and equity will flow through each neighbor.

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New Energy Future Dingrui Wang Belinda Tato There is a serious social problem in South Boston: by overlapping the data of per capita income and energy consumption, it is found that low-income areas that minority gather tend to have higher energy consumption.

After studying further of the community’s problems, it shows that the causes of high energy consumption have multiple layers: 1. Houses lack canopy, and the temperature in community is pretty high in summer, requiring more electricity for cooling. 2. Poor heat insulation of the wall makes it easy for heat to enter the room in summer and difficult to prevent heat loss in winter, resulting in higher cooling power loss and heating gas consumption. 3. Lack of family-use energy production facilities, all energy consumption comes from the energy companies and people have to pay the high energy bills. 4. High consumption of household appliances, such as lights, televisions, computers. which are used independently by each household, increases the consumption of electric energy. The causes of these problems are all related to the poor living environment caused by the low income of residents.

In order to address the energy justice issues in the community, a case-by-case approach to these issues is needed. For the lack of shade trees, we can provide Tree Yard, Street Canopy and Green House. For the heat protection problem of the house, we can provide endothermic paving on the ground and thermal baffle on the house facade. For the lack of energy generation facilities, household self-generator that provide composting, wind, and solar energy to achieve energy self-sufficiency. For high energy consumption of household appliances, we can provide community public activity space, such as public theater, public office, restaurant, game place, from individual energy consumption to public energy sharing. And then, design the spatial matrix according to these functional requirements and site condition, combined energy facilities with programs for People’s Daily activities.

Each part of the improvement action would be taken care by different stake holders.

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Opening Inward First Steps for the Anxious City Forrest Rosenblum Belinda Tato The current city rushes people from task to task, demanding time and energy for a system they know to be out of control, and which feels far beyond their scope. Models of collective land stewardship are attractive as an ecological and social response, but how can people realistically be expected to work together in radically new ways if they aren’t provided ample space for the authentic processing of thoughts and feelings? By designing the city for people’s embodied emotional wellbeing, this project aims to set the initial conditions necessary for the later emergence of organic sustainability and resilience. It begins with a progressive process of spatial, psychological, and social opening through which the people of South Boston can renegotiate their relationships with their environment, each other, and themselves. An expanding public realm snakes parcel by parcel through formerly private property with a steady spreading logic that creates space for new possibilities of habit and mind. Materiality and spatiality are linked to points along the human energetic cycle and are deployed variously throughout the city as grounds designed for the safe experience of a wide range of emotions. The concurrent material and psychological progression will act as a social engine, producing both the quantity and quality of human interactions required to creatively iterate and productively self-organize around principles of stewardship and harmonious interrelationship.

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Food Urbanism Smells of the Neighborhood Jessie Pan Belinda Tato Food is an essential part of our daily life that matters to our immune system and mental health. Besides nutrients and health, food is also considered a social connector that brings people together and allows them to interact, share, learn, and respect. Imagine the future city has an easy-accessibility to any kinds of food and ingredients for different people from different generations, income classes, races, and cultural backgrounds. When people are gathered by food, all the social hierarchies disappear, and a respectful and equivalence community appears instead. I would refer to its diverse agriculture sourcing and food distribution as an urban planning strategy as “food urbanism.”

South Boston is one of the most historical neighborhoods that contain less diverse urban programs, which has finally formed a segregated urban system year by year. Therefore, the design is framed by the desire to understand and decentralize the social gaps inside the neighborhood to get over these cultural barriers.

The design contains four types of self-assembled structures that provide opportunities for residents to occupy their neighbors democratically. The prototypes are operated on three different urban scales: urban farms, rooftop gardens, backyard clusters, and food trucks are distributed based on the model of the instant city, which has given the characteristics of ubiquity,diversity, and democracy. Above and beyond the importance of food, the idea of “food urbanism”is to achieve equivalence society in both economic and cultural contexts.

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Participatory, Educational, Recyclable Public space bottom-up reactivation Jiayu Tong Belinda Tato Dorchester Height is having one of the lease racial diversity communities in Boston, where more than 70% residents are white. Future transportation change, creating extra space beyond the street and parking lots, providing potentials of building up communications among Dorchester Height and neighbor communities. Those spaces can be spaces for people of different races to communicate with each other and can be the content of the communication.

Different from the original designer-centered design, a new participatory design process might emerge. Residents, students, as well as neighborhoods, can become the designer of public space. By using the simple design tool kits, different interventions can be created.

Voted by public, constructed by communities under the instruction of designers and labors, reactivation of public space is increasing the communication of people in every stage.

In this bottom-up design process, education and environmental-friendly construction method will be the extra outcome.

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A Living Ground Rethinking the Urban Surface Kawthar Marafi Belinda Tato Modern cities are usually imagined as purified spaces of human existing constructed for human by human. The project is recognizing the non-human as agents who actively shape the city creating a new possibilities for designing an environment of interspecies spaces that reflects the interdependence of human, animals, and plants. As south Boston sits on a constructed land of sand and soil, covered by thick layers of impermeable surfaces and pavements concealing the biodiversity of insects, soil, and plants. Using insects as a thinking tool, the project sets guidelines to rethink the ground-underground interface to harness the power to create an environment for insects to thrive.

Insects are a vital component of terrestrial biodiversity, underpinning important ecosystem services such as soil formation. The project is presenting insects as a labor and a key component for habitat creation that further invite other plant and animal species into the city. The insects in the city are not passive but full of potentialities and they play crucial role in animating and producing the urban. ”A Living ground” tires to bring new forms and shapes of the urban sidewalks determined by the insects and the living ground designing a condition of coexistence and tries to answer the question: what kind of world we need to build and rebuild for other kind world to emerge?

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Public Space Expansion The Potential of Smart Transportation Shuo Wang Belinda Tato With the development of society and the increase of population density, the living space that people can use is decreasing, and the quality of life is declining. Under the trend of smart transportation, using smart transportation to reduce the space required for urban traffic and leave more room for people’s living spaces has become a problem that we need to think about.

Once smart transportation is introduced into the community, the space required for transportation will inevitably be reduced. Some roads can be converted into linear activity spaces for residents to use. At the same time, due to the introduction of smart transportation, the number of private cars will decrease, and car-sharing will become the mainstream trend. Thus, the number of parking lots can also be greatly reduced, and most of the parking lots can be converted into public activity spaces.

This project aims to expand the space for residents’ activities by introducing smart transportation. The power of activity space planning and rearrangement is returned to the residents, allowing residents to express their needs through the free assembly of prototype models. Through participatory design, the transformed community can meet the actual needs of residents to the greatest extent. This project proposed to create a new smart, user-friendly, low-carbon, and environmentally friendly community environment.

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The New Liberation Shuyue Liu Belinda Tato It’s not the fact that exclusively humans are living in the city. During pandemic, turkeys are wandering the street, raccoons are climbing the facades of buildings, coyotes are seen in the city center. In the near future city, if humans are relying more on the virtual world, will animals appear more in urban environment? However, the current urban environment is lack of space for animals, we build the city as we want, we sense the world as we see, and think that our world is the only possible world to be. Yet, there are colors, sights, sounds and smells, or other, partly unimaginable, senses of which we know close to nothing. In the near future city, there will be space that gives liberation, the new liberation, to the non-human creatures.

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Floating Water Landscape Yiqun Wang Belinda Tato Can the infrastructure of water turn to be the landscape with both performance and experience? My project proposes the floating water landscape to create this realm through promoting economic effects, social construction, and environmental resilience.

First, by collecting and treating sewage and stormwater on-site in neighborhoods, the floating water landscape shrinks the family water bill and infrastructure maintenance budget. Second, by using macrophytes as cleaning tools, the floating water landscape creates social spaces below active private backyards in the South Boston area. Third, by promoting water circulation between the infrastructure and the atmosphere, the open treatment system improves the microclimate of communities and raised their environmental resilience in the age of climate change.

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Stormwater-driven Near-future City Water Management for Climate Comfort Zhuohan Zhou Belinda Tato With the near-future city continually threatened by climate change, urban populations become highly vulnerable to its effects like hurricanes, storm surges, urban heat, cold winter, and heavy rainfall. Stormwater will be the value in this proposal. A new urban landscape will help adapt to these future climate scenarios. And this landscape will be introduced by the engagement with the urban water cycle. Stormwater will be the driving force to be utilized and catalyze the spatial transformation in this near-future city.

In the framework of the proposal, three types of severe scenarios, urban heat island, solar analysis during winter and stormwater flow, are analyzed and the blocks are categorized accordingly. Under this structure, 6 types of spaces, rooftop, backyard, sidewalk, parking lot, street and park are intervened for the potential transformation.

These spaces will be paired with 9 types of micro or green infrastructure that help the communities adapt to different situations. These modules engage with the reconsideration of the urban water cycle. Stormwater, snow, and runoff will hence play more active roles in the urban water cycle and contribute to climate adaptation. Different types of stakeholders such as policymakers, residents, designers, and organizations will catalyze and participate in the transformation of this stormwater-driven urban landscape.

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NEWM ARKET

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Unveiled City Discovering opportunities for all / others.

Angelica Oteiza Rosalea Monacella We live in cities where the powerful human eye has projected conditions fit only for those considered equals; Obsession with efficiency and speed have resulted in homogeneously, covered, isolating ground. Through space creation, humans have muted and made invisible those considered as other.

Unveiled City materializes a vision of symbiosis. Through a system of cyborg wetlands, the project presents a new ecosystem nurtured from a diversity of intimate exchanges.

Unveiled city fosters heterogeneity as an act of rebellion against the patronizing indifference of asphalt covering. A porous city that breathes at the rhythm of essential cycles and allows room for multi-scale processes to exist above and below ground.

Unveiled City pushes us to understand one another and the places that we live in, to realize that we are all part of the same intertwined system, same superorganism. Unveiled City presents an urgent shared vision for the Anthropocene, where others recognize one another as equals to discover opportunities of intimate coexistence for all.

Through a system of wetland streets, backyards and wetland cooperative economic systems, the unveiled city proposes a way of inhabiting coastal cities at the time of sea level rise.

Harvard GSD Spring 2022 Core IV

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Soft Publics Demitri Gadzios Rosalea Monacella Soft Publics conceives of an alternative public works program designed to engender and empower communal stewardship and the provision of underserved resources towards the foundation of a more equitable streetscape.

Through a new public works program focused on a community-oriented framework of material redistribution and the provision of natural and culturally specific resources, it becomes possible to resist the exploitation of land and labor, and to democratize and facilitate the production and maintenance of the public realm. In this context, Newmarket and Boston at large, may be constructed by and for more self-determinate and empowered publics.

Boston’s Newmarket district—presented here as a case study—is challenged by the failings of the social and material frameworks that produce its street conditions. Cared for by the city only to the extent that enables the district’s locally owned and immigrant operated commercial and industrial activities to service the city, the district and its inhabitants are subjected to the predatory cycles of exploitation determined by the market forces just as they dictate the production of the urban environment. In this context, Newmarket might be re-imagined as a staging ground for a reformation of the urban landscape that traditionally depends on the exploitation labor and land—both near and far afield—into one that leverages more local and circular metabolisms focused on the particular needs of Newmarket and the adjacent neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester.

Harvard GSD Spring 2022 Core IV

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Distributive Ecologies Aligning Novel Vegetation with Productivity Erin Voss Rosalea Monacella Spontaneous urban vegetation, comprised of both native and nonnative species, propagates without human intervention or maintenance. Though often referred to as “weeds,” “invasive,” or “exotic,” they are not inherently malicious, nor should their historical subjugation as an inferior botanical category continue to set the precedence for their presence in the urban environment. This project proposes intended wildness as a novel approach to designing and managing urban green spaces, where spontaneous growth can cohabitate with industrial and productive spaces.

There are five core values that shape this idea.

• • • • •

Right to be named: right to be acknowledged as a valuable part of the urban ecology Right to root: right to grow even if the location of germination is less ideal for human uses Right to seed and disperse: right to pollinate, produce seeds, and spread their genetic information to enhance the diversity of assemblages in the community Right to bask and brood: right to find pleasure in life and return to the earth in their own time Right to care: right to pruning and ground maintenance

The plan proposes increasing biodiversity in Boston by harnessing alternative forms of greening and giving agency back to the natural elements. Intentional, multi-scaled interventions, extending from ground to sky, challenge conventional perceptions of wild urban greenery to create novel ecological assemblages more resilient to future environmental changes. The city becomes a space for cultivation, production, recreation, remediation, and leisure where the deliberate and spontaneous coexist.

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Settled City Jingyuan (Loki) Zhu Rosalea Monacella With urban growth showing no signs of slowing down the expansion of cities, there is no doubt that current infrastructure cannot sustainably meet the demands of a 24/7 society, implying a need to revamp archaic network infrastructures. The spatial demands of the infrastructural project offer the opportunity to simultaneously address pressing social issues.

Many houseless people gather in the Newmarket area of ​​Boston, with tents taking up entire industrial districts. These self-constructed sanctuaries for the houseless are now almost a permanent fixture of the urban landscape, piling up around the local food processing factory and commercial blocks. After a few sweeping actions, the tents and camping soon reappeared.

The proposal is to re-structure the energy supply chain by turning locally produced waste into clean energy and transforming public common space to create new housing accommodation in the process. A variety of building re-adaptation types are suggested and new processes are employed such as composting soil and planting new trees which generate places for unifying people and provide comfortable living in the city. These design strategies offer alternatives to tent occupancy and turn the former challenges of informal housing into productive mechanisms for the near-future city.

The project claims four rights for the near future citizen, including empowering, intertwining, nourishing, and sheltering. Tending for ending homelessness, and nourish the urban landscape, newly proposed public spaces and housing types promote diverse social activities, and reshape the healthy, balanced, and sustainable development of urban infrastructures and social relations within the realm of the future city.

Harvard GSD Spring 2022 Core IV

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Ch91X Boundaries of Respect Julia Li Rosalea Monacella The recently passed Chapter 91X re-frames the existing Ch 91 legislation, which previously emphasized property and public use over hydrological systems. The new Ch 91X prioritizes hydrology and water surfaces, so that prior public trust domain is now reorganized into the nature trust domain, seeking to reorder the current urban hierarchy to recognize nature as its own living entity.

Through the nature trust domain, boundaries of respect are established after the reintroduction of historical water lines, where the sovereignty of water begins. To reconfigure the existing urban interface’s relationship to water, these boundaries are defined as: respect, reciprocity, acknowledgment, protect, and unite. Through each of these terms, the urban interface is reorganized into a community of care, where buildings and water develop a mutually beneficial relationship.

Modifying structures following Chapter 91X values influence urban form, allowing the new water interface into the existing site. As buildings adapt, additional social spaces of water are continuously introduced to offset the ramifications of unsanctioned infrastructure.

This creates environments for water to exist as a living being, where it can nurture, permeate, and breathe. As a result, the city is densified and rescaled to allow for these new water habitats to occur, producing ecological corridors and an entirely new water network within the urban fabric.

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New Futures in Newmarket Square Worker Well-Being through Biophilic Design Meg Koglin Rosalea Monacella Located along interstate and train freight lines that connect to one of the country’s three major Atlantic ports, Newmarket Square is a critical food distribution hub for Boston and beyond. Aside from a portion of big-box retail, the neighborhood is comprised of light industry such as warehouses, shipping facilities, food processing and construction headquarters. There is excess private parking, insufficient public parking, haphazard intersections, and heavy truck traffic alongside vast impermeable surfaces and uninviting security fences. The lack of green space and trees is also noteworthy in comparison to adjacent neighborhoods and greater Boston.

There is room to make Newmarket more joyful and healthy without compromising productivity, and instead increasing long-term efficiencies and economic gains. This project deploys a biophilic design strategy to improve the well-being of laborers. For individual workers, psychological benefits of biophilic design include decreased tension, anxiety, stress, anger, fatigue, and confusion. Biophilic design also cultivates positive physiological responses, including optimal operation of musculoskeletal, respiratory, aural, circadian, and hormonal systems. Exposure to nature or biophilic design yields higher cognitive function - logic, memory, creativity, focus and decision-making. These health benefits for the city’s essential distribution workers can yield positive results for business owners, society, and government.

This project creates access to biophilic design during labor as well as commute and break time. Such micro-restoration benefits can occur in as little as 5-20 minutes in nature or a biophilic environment, and compound into an accumulated health benefit.

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Palliative Urbanism A City’s Right to Death With Dignity Raphi Tayvah Rosalea Monacella The territory that we currently call Boston has had countless lives and innumerable appearances. The steel and capitalist rebar of bygone modes of construction and living protrude from the wreckage of a fractured society that for too many centuries put profits above humanity. Today we reap the wreckage that our ancestors sowed. Where they planted asphalt, we now harvest toxins and anxiety. The soil that was born in the last ice age and once gave life to majestic oaks is now saturated with the refuse of production for capital gain. Commerce and corporations caged the very foundations of the space, forcing an ever-widening schism between people and place. As the never ending grind of boom and bust production deteriorated this land, so too did it destroy the sacred relationship between human occupation of and care for the region. And so the city is dying. The cancer of capitalist industry has metastasized throughout industrial sectors and human neighborhoods. There is no cure for this disease, and thus a palliative course of treatment must be adopted. The city needs to be cared for and made comfortable as its own mortality is confronted, and its life as we know it comes to an end. The city will disincorporate through a phased process of political disassembly. This will manifest as a shift from regional to neighborhood governance units, and lead to a closed-loop labor economy where the work done will be to advance the good of the local community.

Through a series of soil remediation projects and infrastructure disassembly, the present materials and land will be transformed to a hyper-local subsistence model, and the city’s death will become the beginning of a new era of life.

Harvard GSD Spring 2022 Core IV

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Truck Stop City The Right to Care in a System of Efficiency Sara Gong Rosalea Monacella Logistical systems are key for the functioning of cities but currently almost no care is given to the essential workers who keep the system moving or the spaces they work in. In the near-future city, I envision a cycle of care where the landscape demonstrates care for the workers, and the workers, in turn, care about the landscape.

Within Newmarket Square, care for the workers is demonstrated through the design of the distribution centers. Relaxing gardens and shady seating areas provide opportunities to rest. Bathrooms, fueling stations, and cafes offer refreshment. The spaces create social opportunities for casual conversation and gathering so workers can interact with each other, encouraging and supporting their well-being and unionization.

Increased care for the logistical worker also inspires a change in the urban fabric. The systems of care started in Newmarket Square grow beyond the distribution centers to the neighborhoods the workers deliver to as well, creating a network of social and caring spaces throughout the city. Neighborhood block structures are reconfigured with more places to stop and take breaks. Shared mailboxes, shaded parking, and public bathrooms reduce driver stress, and other amenities like parks, community gardens, and farm stands are built for the drivers and residents to share, allowing them to develop relationships of care with each other.

In the near-future city, through increased interactions, people have learned to care about the essential workers that are currently invisible and the urban fabric has shifted to manifest that care in the landscape.

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LOT ### Immanent domain, imminent ecologies Sonia Ralston Rosalea Monacella The ecological corridors proposed in the former alleys of the industrial site at Newmarket Square aim to imagine what kinds of futures are to be imagined if value and property is considered through the infrastructure of plants.

We commonly think of infrastructure as the implementation of technological apparatuses, including solar energy systems or environmental sensing. The ability to be measured, gridded, and ascribed economic value is integral to the systems of land value that determine the developmental possibilities of urban property. We don’t often think the same way about plants; their presence can be retooled as economic value if they are treated as green infrastructure, but the focus on capital accumulation negates the possibilities to think with these timescales and priorities. This project aims to treat ecological actors— plants—as type of infrastructure where plants do not just add economic value to a site, but rather offer a model to redefine the values ascribed to property through their growth.

Positioned in a complex set of social, economic, and ecological entanglements, Newmarket Square is faced with a future of gentrification driven by profit which will ultimately displace labor and people to the detriment of nearby residents. Drawing from work by nearby community land trusts, this project aims to bring together ecological infrastructure with solar and environmental monitoring infrastructure to create ecological corridors held in community trust. The site will offer solar infrastructure to power a microgrid serving nearby housing, environmental monitoring to establish measures to reduce harmful air and water contamination in a site marked by long-term environmental racism, as well as planting that will assist with environmental monitoring and alter the placement of solar infrastructure.

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Porosit-ing Assemblages for Social and Ecological Percolation Yazmine Mihojevich Rosalea Monacella New Market’s prior state was marsh. As infill ossified tidal flats and saline tides into concrete and asphalt, ephemeral edges became singular borders. What was once marsh became bay what was bay became the highway. The only indicator of the prior state is flooding. When rain beats down upon New Market, it bleeds across its parking lots, sidewalks, and roads, momentarily destroying all borders in one swift watery motion.

The largest of these borders, the Southeast Expressway demarcates a division between two neighborhoods - Dorchester and Columbus park/Andrew Square. Here, between these neighborhoods, on the southeast edge of New Market, is my site. The first assemblage, a housing assemblage, sits at edge of four residential blocks in Dorchester, where the block meets the road. My second assemblage, a greenway, is where the block meets the highway.

Through a series of actions that create social and ecological porosity in the interior of New Market and along the highway edge, the division between individual units, apartments, blocks, and neighborhoods will become muddled. These actions include de-paving underutilized and flood-prone regions across New Market, repurposing that material in depaved sites as permeable infrastructure, and connecting newly permeable regions through a network of swales. Along the highway edge, the former site of separation, permeable infrastructure and surface conditions will stitch together newly porous housing sites. As water stretches vertically into de-paved soil, de-paved infrastructural boundaries will be horizontally traversed, increasingly cross neighbor and cross- community interaction.

What results are a set of spatial conditions that restore and extend interdependent and agent entanglements beyond the boundaries of the unit and into the city.

Harvard GSD Spring 2022 Core IV

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Nourishing City A Future of Food Sovereignty for Newmarket Square Zina Fraser Rosalea Monacella Nourishing City explores a future shift in Newmarket Square from using land to distribute food from other places toward using land to establish food sovereignty. White the site is currently embedded in a harmful global food system with unjust labor practices and significant environmental impact, this project imagines a future in which half of all food consumed in Boston is grown in place.

Agricultural land, warehouses-turned green houses, and soil creation infrastructure (pine groves and compost windrows) produce fresh fruit and vegetables that are gathered and distributed from existing distribution centers throughout the growing season. The residential home transforms as citizens participate in compost creation and elect to contribute part of their yard to create biodiversity corridors. Seed banks become important community hubs.

The driving force of Nourishing City is a land ownership structure that gives power to the community. A city-level land trust manages the Federal Community Cultivation and Biodiversity Fund as part of the Green New Deal to pay public works teams. A neighborhood-level land trust manages composting and biodiversity corridors.

Finally, a Community Supported Agriculture system at the block level manages a seed bank and runs farming operations. The CSA works by allowing residents to buy a share of farming operations at the beginning of the growing season, and every week they receive a share of the harvest.

The Nourishing City is a place where nutrition is accessible and secure, green space is abundant, and community is strong and powerful.

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GROVE HALL

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Life on the (H)edge Catherine Auger Danielle Choi This project seeks to challenge urban borders in Grove Hall as social spaces for both humans and our fellow beings. This envisioned Near Future-City starts with the simple act of thickening property borders into a new hedgerow system. The hope is to reconnect socially and ecologically relink the neighborhood to the existing green fabric of Boston.

Hedgerows are living boundaries providing an alternative to otherwise static fences. The current setbacks required by the zoning code allows growing up to 30 feet-wide hedgerows using front, side, and back yards without the need for deconstruction or displacement. To complement the new network, vacant land becomes hedgerow gardens—spaces for people and other living beings to rest, feast or nest.

The careful selection of edible plants brings forth the value of wild urban vegetation for the city dwellers and begins addressing food insecurity. However, for the hedgerow to act as a self-sustaining ecosystem requiring little maintenance, we must carefully share and respectfully glean. Throughout the hedgerow, pockets and decks allow to enter its thickness to experience the revived liveliness of the city.

Plant life is at the core of the design and hopefully highlights the power of vegetation to bring people and fellow beings together to share, grow and care for this new diverse eco-social system.

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More than Mural Social Niches in the Urban Void Ellena Wong Danielle Choi More than Mural is a series of mural festivals that kick-start social niches from urban tree nurseries. In a disinvested minority-based Blue Hill Avenue, this project challenges the emphasis on economic production in the current Blue Hill Avenue Action Plan. It strives for the right to access, determine, and activate privatized urban void while working towards a co-ownership of community public space.

With the establishment of a community land trust, More than Mural secures vacant lots as sites to hold mural festivals and urban tree nurseries. Building upon the budding street arts in Grove Hall as an outlet for community voices, the project begins with the material cycle of mural wraps. It extends the legacies of the festivals as planting bags in the production of urban street trees.

The project values local parties’ collaboration as the catalyst for this new system of social niches. Mural transcends the conventional two-dimensionality and stimulates the production of space in the festivals. Design intervention manifests in the forms of mural nurseries, tree rooms, pavilions, street tree networks, and urban workshops. The project facilitates collaborations of local neighborhoods through mobilizing bottom-up community engagement, designing with indeterminacy, and freeing up fenced vacant lots.

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Reduce, Reuse, Regenerate From plastic to bioplastic Jiazheng Li Danielle Choi In daily life, everything seems to be recycled effectively. But only 35% of the city’s waste stream has been recycled, and rest of them still need large amounts of financial to dispose them.

The efficiency of plastic recycling is extremely low. Plastics will produce losses during the recycling process and continue to add raw materials to deliver goods. Most Plastics must be recycled no more than three times and end up in landfills. In this process the plastic keeping ends up in the landfill each year. Has potential to be use for building materials.

This project seeks to re-frame and close the recycling circles and discuss whether urban waste can be recycled in a way that recycled locally not globally. The plastic will not be keeping recycling to the manufacturer. They are going to produce synthetic plastics and construction materials for local recycle facilities. The hope is to create a circulation at the source of plastic production. The cycle will be presented spatially and visually to show how plastic is processed and recycled in the city. By visualizing the plastic flow, citizens can be educated the recycle more visually and provide more urban communication space and infrastructure.

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Parking to Program Neighborhood Backyard Puddingstone Mountain Justin Jones Danielle Choi This urban topographic transformation centers Grove Hall’s transit-deprived residential blocks and speculates on an urban condition where communal car ownership and the reclamation of paved surfaces shifts neighborhood agency from vehicle to resident.

Reconfiguring street networks interrogates pervasive spaces allocated to cars at rest such as street parking, driveways, and garages. These spaces are liberated and parking is condensed into a central sunken parking hub. Residents within a five minute walk conveniently access the transit center while above, excavated materials are sculpted to compose “backyard” activity spaces which respond to conditions such as topography, noise pollution, and sun exposure. This terraced landform offers residents access to active spaces such as basketball courts and gardening plots as well as leisure spaces like picnic terraces and a fountain deck. Reclaimed street parking constitutes a network of pedestrian streets. Narrow driveway spaces collect rainwater for residential use while garage burdened backyards transform into a backyard network of canopy. Distinct Transit Spines, Pedestrian Streets, and Backyard Corridors culminate at the central backyard terrace mound and engender neighborhood social opportunities. NEIGHBORHOOD BACKYARD PUDDINGSTONE MOUNTAIN strives to sculpt a more transit efficient and socially connected neighborhood system for Grove Hall.

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Solar Breeze A New Neighborhood Landscape Choreographed through Light Lara Prebble Danielle Choi Grove Hall will experience some of the most extreme temperature increases caused by the climate crisis and Boston’s urban heat island effect. This, coupled with projected urban air stagnation, puts vulnerable populations of both people and urban trees at greater risk.

Solar Breeze imagines a landscape-driven future for Grove Hall that values the right to age in place for both people and trees. Drawing from principles of air circulation, passive cooling strategies – at the scale of the neighborhood- negotiate the biophysical and social needs of people and plants.

Accepting the projected rise in temperatures, Solar Breeze generates temperature extremes by playing with the sun. In the short term, these differences are created through changing the albedo of the neighborhood’s surfaces through paint. Areas designated as cool zones are cast beneath shade sails which provide immediate thermal comfort for Grove Hall residents and support the growth of young deciduous trees. Varying transparencies in the sails modify their growth as their branches search for the sun, generating a more robust canopy. In the long term, pine forests grown on the interior of blocks cool the air; the deciduous street trees with their branching architecture create tunnels for these cool breezes to pass through. High traffic intersections become “Hot Zones” where sunlight is trapped to warm the air. As hot air rises, these zones create a vacuum effect, pulling the cool air from the tree tunnels and cool zones of the neighborhood.

As an extension of Boston’s Green New Deal, Solar Breeze intends to build community across age groups as the neighborhood collectively cares for a new present and future Grove Hall.

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From A Growing Perspective Liwen Shi Danielle Choi “From A Growing Perspective” creates a city for children that provokes curiosity and awareness of climate future in everyday life by reclaiming streets as the school and providing room for healthy growth of both humans and non-humans.

Under the core values of better childhood development with everyday freedom, broader community connection, and advocacy of citizen responsibility, streets become spaces for families and schools to more equitably access alternative stimulating educational and recreational resources for children from kindergarten to middle school. Instead of the traditional school zone policy, which only has speed limits, the project proposes a new school zone spatially focused on a 4-5-block radius around the school. The school’s primary functions of learning, play, and nutrition are distributed in different street typologies, including commercial, residential, and school surroundings. Along with a new version of the school day, children could learn and grow with a fruit tree in an outside science class near a bakery shop where they have their breakfast with a school card.

The project calls for collaboration between different departments in the city government, the local business, and schools. Turning the street into a welcoming softscape generates a neighborhood more resilient to stormwater, and the transportation and public works budget could benefit the new school zone development. Thus, the mobility system connecting different school hubs becomes the new infrastructure supporting the city for children.

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Warm-up, Chill Out

Matt Gorab Danielle Choi Warm-up, Chill Out is a multi-scalar community-centric strategy deploying snowmelt to create temperate spaces. In the near future, Boston will experience greater climatic extremes. With increasing heat intensity summers, greater magnitudes of Nor’easters, and higher snowfall, the project seeks to make these extreme conditions more bearable for communities. The project localizes emergency relief facilities— that in the present day are inaccessible or unwelcoming to many residents– to the block scale.

The project’s confetti of interventions is a network of snow management, storage, and nodes of relief that weld together blocks based on density while also fostering resident connections through a buddy system heralded by Block Leaders a paid position held by a block resident.

Using municipal funds to implement a local rapid snow management system, snow contaminated with road salt moves to designated snow wells improving storage and taking the burden of snow management off of residents.

Depending on the snow’s purity, it is either filtered through a semipermeable membrane or localized on low-density blocks for winter recreation. During the spring, residual snow is filtered and stored below the frost line. During the warmer months, the stored material is redistributed to the blocks to cool the spaces.

In addition to the physical deployments, the system of Block Leaders records neighborhood microclimate data and resident reports which adds to a more robust climate and weather dataset of Boston. By targeting resources to the neighborhood scale, Warm-up Chill Out provides relief and recreation opportunities for the community

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The Strand

Peter Sikorsky Danielle Choi We planted as soon as a fragment became available, creating a structure that might or might not be modified during the subsequent construction phase . . . In this way, the urban development would retain the imprint of the conversion process.

Transforming Landscapes, Michel Desvigne The French ‘boulevard’ originally signified the top surface of a military rampart, corresponding to the word’s Middle Dutch etymon, ‘bolwerk,’ a wall of a fortification. The contemporary meaning of a boulevard arises from the notion of a promenade laid atop demolished city walls, allowing for wider urban streets. What was once “a construction of logs” became a construction lined by trees.

As this project considers Columbia Road as the unbuilt work of the Emerald Necklace, it seeks to critique its loose interpretation of the boulevard – effectively, an eight lane highway with a median of dying trees. Curiously, this boulevard may be better described as a construction of logs, than a tree lined promenade.

In the attempt to appropriate a more extensive territory for the urban forest in South Boston, this project trespasses orthogonally against the axiality of the boulevard. This is not about creating a set of pretty parks or streetscapes. It is, through an economy of means, a negotiation of privately held land and the public realm in an attempt to fulfill the imperatives of this studio: to understand the preconditions of the site, meet imminent material needs, and properly consider nonhuman agents.

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Porocity Redefine Porosity with Microclimate Ruijie Liu Danielle Choi “Porocity” redefines porosity with microclimate to build healthy and cozy environments for humans and non-humans in the near future. This project also involves sustainable material flow and phasing development participated by the community and individuals to build a porous society.

This project challenges the high rate of impervious ground and relevant hot and uncomfortable environments in Grove Hall. It proposes to create a porous and comfortable microclimate with multiscale strategies that allow water circulation to permeate four sites with nourishment and moisture. Public green adjusts regional climate and offers public space. The existing parking lot is a transition station of trees and soil and a hybrid of a parking lot and filtered wetlands. The streets create a relaxed and wet environment that adapts to shadow and heat analysis. Residents have the right to decide if they would transform their hard-paved backyards into porous green spaces. The development of porocity concerns sustainable material flow to recycle concrete to reconstruction and circulate compost materials for soil fertilization. Phasing development involves the participation of the government, community, and individuals to work together and benefit each other.

“Porocity” imagines a near-future city with porous materials, spaces, and communities that allows water flowing, microclimate enhancement, material transformation, and social interactions.

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DIO (Do It Ourselves) Design-Organizing for a Just Near-Future Sophie Chien Danielle Choi DIO is a project and practitioner-model that translates community ideas into urban space,piloting how a neighborhood can self-determine its own design. Self-determination keeps residents in their homes and increases neighborhood resilience to climate change and gentrification. The designer-organizer works across multiple scales to coordinate policy with local implementation; build consensus through visualization; and prototyping design concepts through scenarios. In Grove Hall, long-term residents build power and wealth through hyper-local densification and an urban forestry strategy specific to climate and material needs. DIO weaves in existing policy with new codes and is initiated by the city deeding sidewalks and parking spaces to homeowners, responding to standardized car sharing in the near future. The design-organizer works to pass new codes that remove setbacks and on-street parking to instead require 40% tree canopy coverage and fivefoot public right of ways that essentialize neighborhood coordination. The tree canopy is planned in concert with the city and designer-organizer and is half pine and half climateadaptive species, which together reduce heat island effect, cooling surfaces 15 degrees on hot summer days. Vernacular triple-deckers are expanded and connected in novel ways, to increase property value and the number of residents. Traditional front yards, once tied to the city street, are flipped to the back of the house, creating a neighborhood-wide “front porch” for more explicit communal space. City streets are transformed into pine production through ways for lumber manufacturing that supply neighborhood densification projects.

Community workdays, hosted by the designer-organizer, include tree planting, harvesting, and framing days. Neighborhood captains--those with construction experience--lead building projects, accompanied by future captains in training. Expertise is shared and over time neighborhood capacity is built for more complex and longer-term projects. DIO is underpinned by the designer-organizer, who works to build power in the neighborhood through designing resilient neighborhood relationships for a more just near-future.

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FIELDS CORNER

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The Next Stop is for the Animals Alyssa Taylor Jill Desimini What if urban designs prioritized non-human animals? Currently, Boston’s subways, bus routes, and roads are built to connect humans, while no consideration is given to animals’ migratory networks. This lack of respect and care for our non-human neighbors leads to unnecessary loss and denies us the opportunity to imagine designs that work for more than one species.

My design explores more animal-centric urban planning strategies by focusing on the needs of three animal agents: the black-capped chickadee, little brown bat, and red fox. In choosing these three, I am signaling my intent to consider social, suffering, and reclusive species, as well as animals that inhabit different strata of the landscape and times of day and night. The chickadee, bat, and fox also interact with a secondary cast of characters, including plants, insects, and reptiles.

The T is an element of connection in Boston that currently exists to move people between places. My design imagines T-stations as opportune sites for urban animal habitat. Field’s Corner and Savin Hill stations, and their adjacent streetscapes, are re-designed to include macro and micro elements that suite my three animal agents’ needs (e.g. , a wildlife crossing bridge, underpasses, modular bird, bat, and insect houses, and fruiting shrubs).

Finally, I believe animal-centric design could improve the city for humans, as well. I envision neighborhood schools becoming intimately involved in the care and maintenance of these new wildlife areas. Also, I see T-stations as places where commuters, who may not have experienced nature all day, could be immersed in a wildlife area. In this way, my design not only builds for the animal other, but enables access to the outdoors and fosters a more empathetic and environmentally conscious community.

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Silvitas Building Civic Spaces and Silviculture in Fields Corner Elizabeth Quintero Jill Desimini The design of the city begins with the design of its streets, a place where people should want to be. The streetscapes are the sites of exchange, open systems that foster chance events, conversations, and mutating forms. These spaces are created using pedestrian passage width and structured tree canopy. When the trees sidewalks and roads give the space between buildings a sense of enclosure, the proportions and details form a harmonious whole that focuses on the people and identity of the neighborhood.

This brings us to the union of civic spaces and silvic spaces. Variations tree planting strategies can slow down passing cars, protect pedestrians, and offer habitat for urban animals. A successful street is one that accepts and encourages revision, adapting to changing times. Utilizing a system of tree root corridors that are continuous with the sidewalk, rather than holes in sidewalks and pavements, can support the growth of lindens, red maples, sweetgum, tulip trees, eastern red bud as well as empower the pedestrian.

To strengthen the Field’s Corner identity along Geneva Ave, improve public health, and bring in local business as well as set the groundwork for future business, parking spots along Geneva will be depaved to create a gateway of tree plantings that expand through the neighborhood. Rather than looking at Fields Corners’ main roads as edges, they should be a filling network of foliage. One variation of Civic/Silvic dynamism unfolds into the next in sequence and the experience breaks the street down into segments that address programming and scale.

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Listen to your Street Jiyoung Baek Jill Desimini ‘Listen to your street’ aims to help people stay connected to each other through sound.

Sound proves existence. We consider noise to be the stress factor in urban living, but is a city without noise a city? Every movement makes a sound. The city without sound is also without movement and interaction.

However, today we voluntarily erase the sound of the surroundings and isolate ourselves even more from the physical world around us by wearing earphones. In a world where everyone is becoming more and more isolated, where we eat alone, drink alone, and work alone, now is a time to reconsider how we can stay connected to the physical world and how sound which is often overlooked can support that.

To bring the characteristic sounds of Field’s Corner back into the street, I selected four spaces to transform: 1) Dorchester Ave, 2) Longfellow St, 3) Field’s Corner, and 4) Kelly House. With acoustic frameworks including sound envelope, material, vegetation, and street furniture, the soundscape of Field’s Corner neighborhood becomes more diverse, unique, and inviting, and less isolating, cacophonous, and stressful.

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Go with the Flow Toward a New Morphology of Ground and Governance in Fields Corner Kevin Robishaw Jill Desimini What moves faster and farther, money or water? In either case, both move through the landscape, shaped by and shaping it.

Money you find in property ownership, and ownership you find in the parcel. Water – always present, ever shifting in form - consistently cuts parcel boundaries, whether through below-ground infrastructure or in flows across the urban surface.

This proposal seeks to use water - and the ground which directs it – to reshape the property parcel. In doing so, the design aims to generate a new commons-based form of urbanism centered around water, one which reconciles the need for social and ecological change with the urge for stability – specifically, the right to remain in a neighborhood.

To this end, a neighborhood ‘ground trust’ is established. Parcels are opportunistically acquired, and the ground is sculpted, directing water such that is not only given the space and time to infiltrate but is made visible and expressive. Elements currently used to move water underground as quickly as possible – curbs, asphalt, the ground itself – are reoriented to instead concentrate and slow water. Streets are resurfaced with modular tiles, composed of re-purposed asphalt and allowing the migration of social and ecological activity into the street over time. New housing – kept affordable through collective ownership of the ground beneath it – is constructed around water.

Through these changes, a new form of urbanism, oriented toward water rather than the real estate market, emerges, generating spaces where resources pool and plants and people can take root.

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Pathways of Engagement Adding Links to the Emerald Necklace Meghan Gutnecht Jill Desimini In the ever growing city where greenspace and parks are limited, restorative environments are far and few between. The potential to engage with pre-existing pathways of communication surrounding the remnants of historic structures to use as a means of alternative spaces of refuge is great. When viewed as potential extensions of the linear system brought forth by Olmsted, a cohesive and far reaching network begins to emerge.

This project envisions an even more connected greater Boston area: where the preexisting, extensive, and historic parks system communicates with the reverberations of the past through form, function, and memory. By connecting these systems of transfer with a network of refuge, the Emerald Necklace becomes a highly dynamic flow of activities that can constantly shift. The moments of engagement created across this proposed network can be placed on this continuum of pathways of exchange and pathways of refugia.

Pathways of exchange can be further subdivided into categories of history, culture, and ideas and pathways of refugia categorized to account for nature, recovery, and health.

While these categories and subcategories have been given names and definitions it is important to note that the sites and their uses are constantly in flux.

Proposed approaches within this network include engaging with preexisting locations like memorials, parks, restaurants, and community buildings while also working to redefine the urban fabric and diversify the type of movement throughout these spaces - including pedestrian, food, soils, and animals. The new network breaks apart into parks, corridors, and nodes. Boston’s extensive park system serves as the scaffolding for this network, supported by small scale parks - called nodes - then tied together through the corridors to create one cohesive system. Together all of these interventions create a new network that allows for the connection of people to each other, as well as to the site’s form and history.

The values I propose for this project position the city - more specifically, Field’s Corner - as a palimpsest of culture, knowledge, and restoration. It is through this lens that we can view the evolution and embedded memory of the historic Field’s Corner, as potential pathways of engagement. These pathways will serve as points of transmission for the transfer of knowledge, culture, ideas, information, promoting restoration between and beyond the communities of today, tomorrow, and yesterday.

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Radical Degrowth Mila Ratto Jill Desimini ‘Radical Degrowth’ imagines a post-carbon city beyond the existing order of globalized extractivism. The human species is on the brink of self-induced collapse, and the problem cannot be resolved within the current system of production and consumption. At the core of capitalism lies an un-solvable ecological contradiction: the imperative of economic growth will eventually collide with planetary limits.

Fields Corner, with its vibrant community and its social fabric tied together by a robust network of grassroots organizations, has an amazing potential to imagine a radical new way of living in the city. Challenging the development pressures that threaten to displace multi-generational families, this broad coalition of social forces offers an opportunity to design a future of energy and consumption descent from below.

The project seeks to downscale, decenter and re-localize the urban metabolism within the limits of the neighborhood and to restore the relationship between the people and the ground. With the establishment of community land trusts in the blocks, and by reclaiming underutilized spaces, vacant parcels, parking lots and rooftops, the project makes space for food production, soil building and waste and water management, to build a highly localized economy of sufficiency that roots the neighborhood’s residents in place.

The near future city grows from within, in a manner that is aligned with ecological limits and where collective purpose is rediscovered.

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Nourishment Network Waste as a Resource for Co-Constructing Public Space Minzhi Lin Jill Desimini Nourishment—replenishing the earth with food, soil, water, air, and social behaviors—is flowing through urban blocks and non-human territories. Abundant restaurants and dense multi-ethnic communities simultaneously facilitate the active circulation of nourishment in Field Corners neighborhood of Boston. Underlying this process of food exchange is a hidden but colossal amount of wasted food and plastic packaging products.

Nourishment Network emphasizes the energy of this neglected waste, creating a network of productive life with discarded resources, including food and plastic waste. By utilizing and organizing the public’s disposal and resource exchange behaviors, city residents co-construct a new nourishing system consisting of countless decentralized and evershifting nourishment pockets.

A new group, the Association of Field Corners Nourishment Sharing takes responsibility for directing the public to appointed sharing sites to participate in the materialization of a new nourishment city. Visible grids are introduced to link not only the inside of each site, or pocket, but also the connecting with adjacent pockets to prompt resource exchange and the co-creation of a new type of public realm among different communities.

The construction speed and size will depend on the amount of collective waste generation, as waste accumulates, landscapes are built, and the nourishment network spreads, enabling rich vegetal growth and social life in the city.

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Rooted in Place Cultivating Collectivity through Food Rebecca Shen Jill Desimini Rooted in Place is a neighborhood foodscape that simultaneously celebrates the multiplicity of cultural identities and fosters the community’s collective identity.

Boston’s Fields Corner neighborhood is a multicultural mosaic, with a strong Vietnamese population alongside Cape Verdean, Portuguese, Haitian, Irish, and Sub-Saharan African immigrants. While the neighborhood is diverse, there exist gaps within organizing toward common goals across differences.

What if cultivating local, culturally-relevant food can help bridge these gaps? To start the dialogue, the project springboards off existing community food and advocacy initiatives, tethering their activities to the physicality of the landscape. The Rooted in Place Coalition forms collaboration across three groups: the community, the organizations, and finally, the developers and agencies. All three must work together against the challenges of displacement. Spatially, zones at the thresholds between existing social anchors and proposed food growing sites bring the groups together. They tap into the productive potentials of various urban sites, transforming vacant yards into socially-vibrant bypasses, embankments into cultivated terraces, and mundane strip mall rooftops into rice paddies and vegetable gardens.

The growing of rice and other culturally-relevant food in uncanny landscapes, such as rail embankments and mall rooftops, serves as a potent metaphor for challenging the perceptions of belonging and difference. Through the tending of the foodscape—a collective commons—the Fields Corner residents proudly identify with the ground on which they live.

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Pocketing the Streets Siyue Fan Jill Desimini In cities, a resident’s public life is always connected via streets, we move from one destination to another, from working, shopping, dining and learning to resting. These public programs branch out from the street, claiming an interconnected system for urban residents. The project looks at the near future of Fields Corner by starting to ask: What is the future of residential neighborhood in Fields Corner? What is the distance between domesticity and publicness? The answer could be: what if – the residential streets are not for commuting, but for gathering, exercising, producing, and exchanging at the same time?

What if – the residential street is not an axis but a series of pockets? What if – a small street is not a subsidiary to the main avenue but a hub in itself?

Today Fields Corner is dominated by the bifurcation between the commercial axis and the residential neighborhoods. The transformation starts with unbuilding part of the triple decker housing with elevator apartments to create voided pockets along the street.

These pockets are then joined to incorporate community programs: local parks, collective farms, elevated plazas, family-owned small businesses, and shared parking. Under the supervision of a community land trust, the system extends to the urban fabric on a larger scale, aiming to shift Dorchester Avenue’s function from the commercial axis into a main transit axis, and to introduce cultural energy back into the core of neighborhoods – along its residential streets.

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Shared Boundaries Fostering Animal-Human Cohabitation in the City Weiran Yin Jill Desimini Millions of animals live in the city, sharing the same space and material cycles as their human neighbors. However, they are usually framed as either ‘victims’ or successful ‘parasites’ of a space (the city) and a process (urbanization) but yet they remain overlooked outsiders.

This project calls for an end to this narrative and a renewed focus on animals’ place and positive role in our habitat. The project provides water, food, and shelter for birds, bats, insects, and small mammals by modifying the street Infrastructure and residential property boundary lines. These pocket spaces and corridors will create networks of movement and habitat for animals in the city.

In addition to providing habitat for animals, the design spaces create comfortable microclimates for human residents. Cultivating crops on urban edges breaks down the original solid fences and promotes sharing between people and animals. Living with animals provides human with ecosystem benefits (pest control, pollination, and seed dispersal, for example), and creates a symbiotic dynamic where animals and humans are considered equal co-inhabitants of the spaces they share in the city.

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MATTAPAN SQUARE

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Reclaiming The River Alex Berkowitz Lorena Bello Gomez A river can divide or connect. It can provide resources, emotional solace, and a space to be in tune with nature. Reclaiming The River imagines the Neponset River as a connector between communities, a space for the local arts to flourish, and a democratic space in an area significantly divided by class, race, and income.

If you visit the river today, you will find a space divided by chain-link fences, inaccessible transportation, and inconsistent access to the river itself. Currently, the Neponset River is a boundary between the two communities that border it- Mattapan and Milton. Reclaiming The River re-frames the river not as a divider, but as a democratic space that brings together the people of both neighborhoods.

The project is centered around an elevated plaza that strategically bridges the two residential areas of Mattapan and Milton and brings both neighborhoods to the river. The Plaza is designed around a wild island on the Neponset that allows the visitor to be on the same eye level as a tree canopy and enjoy the rush of the river from above. By night, the plaza turns into a colorfully lit space for performance and the arts. The project scales out to modify all the bridges in Mattapan to include pedestrian plazas and spaces to enjoy the river. The Neponset is transformed into a vibrant space to enjoy community, ecology, and the arts.

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Across the Color Line Code-Switching Through Landscapes Celina Abba Lorena Bello Gomez Mattapan is the only neighborhood in Boston that doesn’t have a high school and sees many students bussing four hours a day to White schools outside of the city. The youth in this community have been subjected to years of systemic inequity and often fall prey to violence and gang-related activity. The project aims to break the cycle of violence by proposing a neighborhood after-school program. The Porches provides space for a decentralized education program, like the Black Panther Liberation Schools.

Code-switching is the double-consciousness of Black bodies living in two worlds. DuBois describes it as a burden placed on Black bodies that I believe has been amplified in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and countless others. The project tests and subverts these two worlds through the specialization of code-switching and the reinforcement of the color line.

The decentralized network occupies existing open spaces, churches, community centers, public libraries, and schools. Within this network, three sites were developed: the Porch, the River Park, and the Bridge. Porches are places of safety, gathering, and resistance in Black communities. Within each design, the roof, screen, podium, and stoop were dissected and re-imagined through the medium of landscape.

Just spaces must precede reconciliation. The project creates spaces that facilitate inward conversations (Black pluralism) and spaces where exchange happens across the color line. These conversations are crucial to begin the work needed to reconcile centuries of violence against Black Lives.

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Neponset Clean-Up, more than a Superfund Chandani Patel Lorena Bello Gomez The project addresses the idea of an environmental clean-up, as more than an act of removal of contaminants. Legacy pollution as dealt with by the EPA Superfund process is, as the name suggests, an economically driven process. However, at the neighborhood scale, the communities impacted often do not have the social infrastructure to negotiate and are underserved by an agenda that seeks only to remove rather than to reduce risk and build long term resiliency.

This project poses the question, how can environmental justice become a part of the processes of cleaning and remediating an industrialized Neponset. Furthermore, can communities such as Mattapan with shifting populations be served where legacy pollution is ubiquitous but invisible?

Risk as a concept is used to build frameworks to tackle flooding and toxicity in the Neponset River. Existing community associations, marginalized communities and educational institutions are tied into the process to build more enduring structures for advocacy, and art is deployed to build awareness. The remediation process moves beyond simply identify individual perpetrators- to build frameworks to incrementally change water systems which are also implicated, such as the metropolitan regions’ relationship to water.

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UNbuild / REsoil Giovanna Baffico Lorena Bello Gomez This project centers on decentralizing power production and waste management to build a framework for neighborhood sovereignty and environmental stewardship.

Locally reconfiguring the current system structures fosters a cultural practice that creates equitable access to community owned sustainable power sources and expands environmental significance beyond material value.

Brownfield or otherwise contaminated sites are transformed into public active reuse micro exchanges for the local community such as biogas energy production and green house produce. Each site operates as an activator and provides legibility to the previously obscured civic infrastructure as well as an alternative economic and environmental resource. This new remediation infrastructure creates value for a community through increased cultural significance and didactic landscapes.

The testing site proposed in my project represents a pilot initiative that could expand existing green space, transform defunct industrial zones into public amenities and create sovereign, self-sustaining networks. The end goal is to test a process for interrupting the cradle to grave lifecycle of economic consumption, and instead protecting residents against displacement, remediating urban soil, and transitioning to a new urban wild.

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Grandpa Oak and Grandma Linden Opportunities for Intergenerational Kinship in Schoolyard Tree Nurseries Jiin Ahn Choi Lorena Bello Gomez The elderly are a wise and resilient group. But in the United States, aging is undervalued.

Older people are too often left to drift away from societal connections and the means to grow old with dignity. In the urban landscape, older trees are too easily lost in the process of real estate development. Old growth - in people and in trees – provide a support system for a healthy next generation and must be nurtured.

The schoolyard tree nursery activates public school grounds to prioritize learning from our elders and from our natural surroundings. Transportation, facility, and programmatic additions activate extracurricular and outdoor learning and bring the elderly to lead gardening and arboriculture programs with children. In Mattapan, a Boston neighborhood where the lack of a high school means youth must commute out of the neighborhood for schooling, the schoolyard tree nursery provides afterschool opportunities for leadership, creativity, and learning back in the neighborhood where they live. As trees grown in the schoolyard are planted in local parks and on local streets, the children, youth, and elders are able to claim a stake in their greener, more close-knit urban landscape. The near-future city will be better equipped to adapt to climate challenges and urban growth through strengthening the ties between its elders, youth, and children, and to the lifecycles of our natural environment.

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Where We Come From Jonathan Boyce Lorena Bello Gomez The practice of Redlining has helped shape the landscape of many American cities.

Mattapan, a neighborhood located in Boston’s southernmost end is such a neighborhood and our site of interest. Currently, Mattapan is home to a largely Caribbean population and has become a home for culture,history and resilience. As the case in many redlined areas, Mattapan experienced a disinvestment with the effects being limited commercial choices, lack of modern transportation updates and long travel commutes for primary employment, making life a bit tougher in the day to day for its residents. My project, “Where We Come From” aims to uplift and invest in Mattapan instead of focusing on the injustices of its history. It strives to be a place of pride, independence and communing for its residents by increasing connectivity mobility, entrepreneurial opportunity, and a dynamic enduring public space shaped by the need of the community at the time. It also creates and provide space, for non human species to co habitat and thrive alongside human residents. “Where we come from” a Jamaican dance hall song, embodies the idea that this project strives to be, one of perseverance and homage.

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Kinship in the Urban Forest Kat Wyatt Lorena Bello Gomez Recognizing and living in kinship with plants – living alongside and caring for them, and in doing so caring for our communities – is central to both individual and planetary well-being. Plants are not ‘green infrastructure,’ nor tools or decorative trinkets. They are friends, neighbors, a community. What can a human community do to take matters into their own hands and build this kinship, this deep affection between people and plants, into the urban fabric around them? This project proposes spatial, programmatic, and maintenance interventions that make the plant-person relationship central to everyday life across the seasons and years. Mattapan is a largely a residential community; residents of a given block will, through block cooperatives, treat the interior block core as a single tract of occupiable forest, rather than divided, uncoordinated backyards. Such a space will offer a middle-ground between public civic space and the private residential sphere, and a space for humans to enter into relationship with plants through seasonal cycles of care. In the front yard and the residential street, all non-essential impervious surfaces are removed, street trees are linked into a soil-connected system, and policy and tax changes support residents in supplementing the street tree network. Finally, the urban wilds of Mattapan are given welcoming arrival spaces, interior gathering groves, and footpath networks to welcome people into more established forest tracts. With these spatial interventions, and through associated policy and organizational elements like educational offerings and arborist training programs, plants will enter more immediately into people’s lives, producing an awareness and affection that strengthens commitment to place and centers environmental ethics in everyday life.

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Grounding the Digital An Alternative Story for Mattapanian Stormwater and Data Nick Gray Lorena Bello Gomez Data and its underlying infrastructures have grown to near ubiquity. Fiber optic and highfrequency microwave technologies are being rapidly deployed across the world, shrinking the digital infinitum to a hyperlocal, instantaneous scale. Millions of square feet of new data storage are being constructed in the hinterlands of major urban centers, hidden behind landscape screens on state highways. These systems operate below the surface, disconnected from aesthetic conceptions of the city, disconnected from the material flows which unwittingly support them, and disconnected from the people who send, receive, and produce data that travel along fiber optic threads to people-less data centers in the middle of nowhere.

Grounding the Digital calls for new ways to construct, use, and fund data infrastructure.

Data storage requires massive amounts of cooling, offering an opportunity to incorporate the thermal gradient of the server farm into a landscape-centric urban system. By enclosing data storage at the neighborhood-scale, and synthesizing the intrinsic resources of the urban grid – stormwater catchment, derelict structures and littoral expanses, fiber optic conduits – into a circular hydro-digital commons, Mattapan becomes a civic machine for tomorrow. The neighborhood is reformed around the tectonics of topography, water, heat, and data. Traditionally hidden subterranean and farflung constructions of water/ data conveyance and storage are made into dynamic spaces for urban congregation. The storage of user data at the community data center affords the opportunity for residents to tax advertising companies for the use of lucrative consumer profiling data. Thus, the story of Mattapan propels beyond a past of racist disinvestment and towards a future of reparations.

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Mattapan in Motion Transportation as Negotiation of the Urban Landscape Rachaya Wattanasirichaigoon Lorena Bello Gomez Commuting to work, sensing the place, and memories of the city are the essences of the journey traveling to, out, and within Mattapan.

The project proposes ‘The Right to Commute’: joining Mattapan Square to Forest Hills Station (Orange Line) with Surface Light Rail trolleys to close the loop and provide more options in traveling. The application of the rail supports the ‘Right of Wild Way’ in integrating the tracks into roads and pedestrian walkways, as well as vegetation beds with permeable surfaces. Lastly, the new route takes the Mattapan Trolley, an icon of the city, trolley to use in the city, as its capacity and speed suits better, while keeping the history, enhancing the ‘Right of Memories.’

Mattapan Square will serve as a transportation hub and leads the light rail trolley into the city. Sidewalks are extended in place of the old street parking, turning into terraces to support the local economy and swales with shade from street trees. The center roundabout reclaims the space for pedestrians, giving glory to the community’s sculpture, also facilitating plants and storm water management. Compacting the intersection forms a legible space which highlights the commuter’s memories of the city.

Annual to daily maintenance will need to be performed to sustain the system. With care, the benefit is given back, from the citizens to infrastructures and to the city, the quality of lives would be risen. The negotiation of the Urban and the Landscape is The Near Future.

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