Data Data Data Data Dump Dump Dump Dump
Critical Spatial Analysis by John McCartin
Final Portfolio Spatial Analysis + Representation Fall 2014
Table of Contents Introduction p. 03 The North End
p. 04
Is Regina Home?
p. 06
Institutions and High Densities(?)
p. 08
Dodgy Bankers
p. 10
Gentrification by Brewpub
p. 12
The Great (Daily) Escape
p. 14
The Youth Take Allston-Brighton
p. 16
Laying Out p. 18 Engine: Dudley
p. 21
Good Times + the New Civic Art
p. 26
*Each project will also be marked by its assignment’s name.
p. 02
00. Introduction
The following serves as the final portfolio for the Fall 2014 class Spatial Analysis + Represention. Many thanks to David Gamble and Bobby Pietrusko. Aided by their teaching, the following is (hopefully) not just a litany of technical exercises, but a critical look into the methodologies of spatial analysis as well as the analyzed spaces themselves.
01: The Map + The Diagram
How do you begin to understand a place? This exercise asks for observation and desscription, through on-site sketching and subsequent mapping. Here I attempted to understand what it the neighborood felt like while being there, and to start attaching nominal categories to those feelings for later analysis.
p. 04
The North End Core, Peripheray, Axes
The North End’s core, marked by its feeling of insularity and central axes, ringed by megadevelopments.
charlestown east boston
The North End downtown
Boston’s North End sits at the tip of the Shawmut Penninsula, bound on three sides by water, on on the fourth by the Central Artery/Kennedy Greenway. The North End essentially has two discontinuous districts. Its core is articulated by tight blocks and its two axes: Hanover and Prince streets. The core is ringed off by a series of roads running parallel to the waterfront. Furthermore, the block size and building morphology along the waterfront is radically larger than at the neighborhood’s core. This is an artefact of past industrial uses, but serves to structure the waterfront for luxury condo development.
Despite burying the Central Artery, the North End remains somewhat insular. Left: the North End’s main streets (Hanover & Prince) and the highway/ greenway as coastline.
02. Chart-Based Analysis
How can data interrupt our visceral undersandings of a place? Here inflected what I thought I knew about a neighborhood with some simple datasets. My ‘felt’ understanding from the last analysis (at least partly) fell by the wayside as a new, unexpected, and more provocative narrative emerged.
p. 06
Charlestown
Is Regina home?
Food Service Workers in the North End
East Boston
“North End West”
North End
Downtown
Back Bay
The North End is known to many as the Italian quarter, the best place in Boston to go for a meal or at least a mean cannoli. However, it’s also known for mulit-million dollar condos and, well, yuppies. Can the workers who must staff the North End’s famous South Boston food service industry even live in the area? Where do food service workers live? Where are the restaurants? How far is the walk? And do the workers in the area walk?
Transportation to Work
Boston
th End Wes or
t
N
h End (All) Nort
Walked Car/Truck Transit Bicycle Worked at Home Other
Food Serivce Establishment
North End Walk Line Starting Point Boundary
03. Figure-Ground
Data-informed thinking is one thing, but blind faith in data is quite another. This exercise tries to use categories given in a dataset to analyse a spatial relationship, only to find the dataset is inadequate to fully describe the reality of place. Playfulness with the dataset’s nominal categories reveals a much different picture.
p. 08
Land Uses in the North End
High density housing + multi-family housing coverage in the North End.
Institutions and High Densities(?)
High Density Housing
0
100 Yards
Multi-Family Housing Institutional
charlestown east boston
The North End downtown
Commercial Transportation Beach Industrial
Institutional land uses – including schools, libraries, and government services – should be located to serve as many people as possible. Thus, among the different land uses, one might imagine high density housing and institutional land uses to be roughly co-located. This hypothesis seems confirmed in Boston’s North End. However, this data and concomitant visualizations hardly reveal an actually existing pattern. The high density clusters largely sit within clusters of multi-family housing. The distinctions between these two categories are vague and have little noticeable relation to actual conditions in the North End. A broad grouping of high density and multi-family housing is perhaps more meaningful, and covers most of the land in the North End (above). Furthermore, the categorical weight of “institutional” falls apart in its broadness – for instance with the inclusion of a school and a Coast Guard base.
04. Mapping Inequality
The limitations of data notwithstanding, what can combinations of data tell us about the uneven geographical development of our society? This exercise begins to critically read the city as platform for inequality, stuctured through interwoven and mutually horrifying investment strategies.
p. 10
Dodgy Bankers
Small Business Loans per Capita $2400 2400
The Financial Landscape of Dudley Square Financial institutions and financial markets embed themselves in Boston’s landscape in ways complex, opaque, and seemingly paradoxical. On the one hand, banks originate few small business loans to Dudley Square, laying commercial siege to the former retail destination. On the other, Dudley was targeted for highcost, predatory mortgages during the sub-prime mortgage bubble, exacerbating foreclosures and successive disinvestment. Whether banks fail to lend lend or they lend aggressively, Dudley Square finds itself in the same place: the wrong side of “uneven geographical development.” That said, private capital (and its interwoven relationship with government) remains critical in moving even ‘progressive’ urban developments forward.
Private Indirect
$1800 1800
0
Public Direct
Private Direct
1/2
1 km
Downtown
$1200 1200
$600 600
$0 0
Back Bay Dudley Square
Suffolk County
Back Bay
Sources Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, “Community Reinvestment Act Aggregate Tables,” 2013.
South Boston
Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Neighborhood Stabilization Program 3: Data for Applicants: Massachusetts.” Project Status Updates received at the 10.06.14 meeting of the Roxbury Strategic Plan Oversight Committee. Updates were authored by the given project’s development team. Some legacy budgets updates were also used, accessed from opportunityroxbury.com, as well as the Whittier Choice Transformation Plan.
Public Indirect
Small Business Loan Distribution + Predatory Mortgage Lending
Banks / Investors
Government
Direct Debt
Grants
Direct Equity
Direct Equity
Purchase Govt.-Backed Bonds
Increment-Based-Debt Guarantees
Debt-for-Migrant-Status
Assemble Foreign Investment
Purchase Tax Credits
Award Tax Credits Infrastructure Development
Dudley Square
Dudley Square 1 High Cost Mortgage
Number of Small Business Loans Issued in Census Tract 1-20 21-50 51-100 101-400
Devlopment funding sources for large projects in Dudley Square, by class. Projects include Parcels 3, 9, and 10; Bartlett Place; and Whittier Choice.
However, these classes obscure the interdependencies between public and private investment.
401-1100
* High Cost Mortgages not shown in exact location, but randomly placed within their Zip Codes.
05. Small Multiples
This exercise is partly about discovering new sources of data, but it’s largely dedicated to narrative, and how groups of small maps (“small multiples”) can frame a story about place.
p. 12
Gentrification by Brewpub
Charlestown
Gentrification is commonly understood by scholars through shifts in population and housing characteristics. However, popular notions of gentrification are often constructed through its most conspicuous signs: changes in the retail and restaurant character of a neighborhood. This project attempts to interrogate gentrification in the Boston area through that lens. Is there are retail or restaurant presence that correlates with presence of a gentrified population?
Harvard Square
Downtown
MIT
Packard’s Corner
Back bay
Brookline
A. High Educational Attainment
C. Cheese Shops
B. Breweries, Brewpubs, and Beer Bars
D. High Yelp Ratings
A. High Educational Attainment. Percent of adult population who have masters/professional degree or higher. Deep red indicates a majority. Proxy for gentrification. (American Community Survey)
C.Cheese Shops. Few and far between, except in the (Italian) North End. Because of the scarity, it’s not the best indicator. But it does kind of match up if you squint. (Yelp API)
B. Breweries, Brewpubs, and Beer Bars. Spots to get specialty/craft beer. Maybe Boston’s best indicator for retail gentrification. And the most fun. (Beer Mapping API)
High educational attainment is used as a proxy indicator for gentrification writ large. Clustering of two product categories – artisanal cheese and craft beer – is then mapped against that demographic indicator. Finally, restaurants with high ratings on Yelp are mapped. These indicators are far from perfect, both as quality datasets and as proxies for gentrification. That said, retail and restaurant trends likely preexist demographic shifts and datasets.
D.Highly Rated on Yelp. Yelp is young and highly educated, so you’d think this would be a good gentrification indicator. Yelpers’ love of food from ethnic enclaves makes it less than useful, though. (Yelp API)
“Fully Gentrified Neighborhood All Cheese Shops” “America’s Finest News Source,” the Onion, ran the above caption with this photo last March. Maybe so in the paper’s native Chicago, cheese has a lot of catching up to do when compared to Boston’s preferred old school processed consumable: beer.
06. Daily Diagram
The ‘felt’ experience of the first exercise should not be lost in any exploration of place. Here I attempted to concretize subjective experience by mapping such against an actually lived trajectory (a walk) and data about the areas where I walk.
p. 14
Parcels Owned by Harvard
Upper Allston
End: Home Brighton
Threshold of ‘De-Harvardization’ – Specific points where I feel like I’m leaving Harvard Territory My walk from the GSD to my apartment
Harvard Allston Campus
Start: GSD
Place/Business with ‘Harvard’ or ‘Havahd’ in its name (via Yelp)
Lower Allston
Harvard Square
0
.5 Miles
The Great (Daily) Escape Approaching the gates from within Harvard Yard, you aren’t reaching the ‘End’ of the university’s space, but a threshold between the official Harvard and Harvard the idea/ cultural space.
Every day I walk between the GSD and my apartment in Brighton. Roughly half the trip is dominated by Harvard, but Harvard confronts the city as a gradation, rather than a monolith. The effect of moving ‘to’ or ‘from’ Harvard is complicated by those elements of the city that intimate Harvard, without actually being the University, as well as places that seem disconnected, but are in fact owned by the University. Though I wouldn’t call the transition discontinuous, there are also “thresholds” where Harvard feels as if it’s asserting itself, becomeing more of a presenece.
07. Layering and Time
Furthering the practice of narrative-building, this exercise introduces time a structuring device to tell a story.
p. 16
The (Apolitical) Youth Take Allston-Brighton
Allston Brighton
Cambridge Downtown Back Bay
Brookline Roxbury
0
1
2 Miles
Intra-year variations in voting don’t even register when compared with subsequent years.
Voting in Allston-Brighton begins to hollow out despite so-called youth enthusiasm.
Voter apathy takes hold around BU.
Some BC-adjacent voter apathy
Lower Allston maintains some voter presence despite Harvard ‘s incursions.
Number of Ballots Cast by Precinct 80,253 Youths
The kids today are spending too much time at the Unexamined Life and not nearly enough time in the voting booth. Allston-Brighton is continuing its transformation from blue collar, immigrant-attracting suburbanish settlement to neighborhood-size student dorm/ Boston’s Bushwick. Consequently, A-B seems doomed to political irrelevance as the aggregate number of ballots cast steadily declines with increases in the young adult population. Non-voting emerged around the universities, but quickly spread out, digging in deep througout the area. Sources Voting: City of Boston Demographics: American Community Survey (2006 1-year, 2008 1-year, 2010 3-year, 2012 3-year, author’s estimate based on ACS data).
55,4414 Youths
Number of 18-34 Year Olds in Allston-Brighton
08. Laying Out
A single graphic rarely stands alone. This exercise attempts to lay out, in a schematic way, the structure of an argument through multiple drawings, diagrams, and text. Like an outline, these wireframes are extremely iterative as one attempts to deliver the best form of the “story.�
p. 18
Engine: Dudley
District Diagram Not an exact laying down of every proposal
Diagrammatic Sketch of Civic Corridor
Context Map
A sampling of wireframes built for my final Engine: Dudley proposal. This second iteration had three boards total. This number grew to five, but eventually shrank to three and a half.
Education– Roxbury CC Square Existing
Entrepreneurship – Dudley Square Existing
Industry – Hampden Street Existing
Entrepreneurship – Dudley Square Rendering
Industry – Hampden Street Rendering
Demog. Need for Jobs
Existing Edu
Education – Roxbury CC Rendering
Underused Space
Industrial
Proposed Partnership Circuit Diagram
Sloganeering
Potential Connections Diagram
Potential Parnters Profile
Funding Parntnerships
p. 20
09. Core Studio
Each of the above exercises (with the exception of the wireframe), though united through a methodological trajectory, is a single, stand-alone piece. The following four pages represent, in contrast, the culmination of a 10-week project. Here I deliver my research on a single neighborhood, Dudley Square, and argue for proposals to empower and transform Dudley over a 20-year period.
Engine: Dudley Cambridge Downtown Fenway
South Boston Dudley Square Newmarket
A Corridor for Economic Empowerment John McCartin :: 8 December 2014 :: MUP Core Studio Year 1 Fall
Context
Can my customers afford to live here? We’ve known our marketplace for 40 years, but will it be the same marketplace?
Between Marginalization + Gentrification
Assets
Percent of Households with Incomes Below the Poverty Line
Percent of Households whose Gross Rent as a Percent of Income is 35% or more
Dudley Square by Race / Ethnicity
industrial production
startup centers
underutilized land
iversity
tern Un
Northeas
Park Madison l Vocational HS HS Science Technica nt Math/ O’Brya e
ity Colleg
mmun
Co Roxbury
+ Tech) Schools Public nter (Ed Boston Innovation Ce Roxbury Library
+ STEM ademy Dearborn y/Evening Ac Da Boston
career education
a corridor emerges
public squares
Superblock Removal
Light Industrial Mixed Use R.E. Investments
Partnership IMP
Malcolm X Square Revisioning
RoxMAPP+ Partnership
Hampden St. Streetscaping Revolving Startup Fund Dudley Square Rebranding
Rezoning + Design Guidelines
152 Hampden St. Demo Project
Retail Rehab Fund St. Patrick’s Square Branding Effort
Lo-Tech Incubator
Skill Development
[Roxbury Community College] has truly been the gateway, unlocking the reality of my dreams.
Wealth Creation
Roxbury is not looking to be saved. It has people and resources, and these accelerators, coworking, and innovation spaces will allow these awesome people to connect and begin to build a movement.
-Rashida Jenkins RCC Graduate
Strong Jobs
Dynamic People.
[Manufacturing locally] allows for interplay between [our] research, manufacturing, and product development.
-Tito Jackson Boston City Councillor
Agglomeration ready.
Individual successes. -Giovanni Mancini E Ink, which run a factory in South Hadley, MA
Sytemically Underperforming. graduating from Madison Park
Underfinanced.
Small Business Loans Made within Census Tract 1-20 21-50 51-100 101-400 401-1100
Low-spec facilities.
Skill Development Coordinate reform and development efforts at local educational institutions to build a set of distinct but complementary career education programs.
Roxbury Career Education Summit Boston Public es
nity Colleg Mass. Commu ce Executive Offi
RoxMAPP+
Schools Technical Madison Park h School Vocational Hig e munity Colleg bur Rox y Com O’Bryant High
of Career, US DoEd Office lt Education Technical + Adu
School
m HS Dearborn Ste
or
Organized Lab
Summit Invitees
Expanding on the first RoxMAPP: an RoxMAPP 1 official, big-tent Madison Park partnership + YouthBuild + Carpenters’ Union P-Tech: New York Schools + Businesses
ening Boston Day/Ev
kstreets Boston
Northeastern
Bac
University
or ive Office of Lab Mass. Execut elopment + Workforce Dev
iness
Newmarket Bus Association
Smarter in the
City
ion
ent of Educat
Mass. Departm
Costs
Lo-Tech Incubator
Encourage startup formation and location in Dudley Square, particularly fledgling businesses headed by Roxbury residents.
IMP Preparation
Year 2
RoxMAPP+ Partnership formally organized
Boston Local
RoxMAPP 1 completed, study outcomes and potential revisions
Raise Capital for investment funds. Find suitable temporary retail / customer-facing incubator space and funding for such.
vation Center Roxbury Inno
RoxMAPP+ Programs launched post-RoxMAPP 1 Review
munity College
Dudley Square
Revolving Loan Fund
Graduate two incubator classes in temp. space.
Equity Investment Fund
Communty Nat’l Assoc. of neurship College Entrepre
Year 5
Open permanent lo-tech incubator space. Open restaurant incuabtor.
$1,000,000 capital
ity Capital
Boston Commun
Main Streets
$200,000 operating
$500,000 capital
DSNI
First capital projects under IMP break ground
Begin lending + equity investments in Dudley companies.
Incubator
Roxbury Com
Revolving Loan Fund + Equity Investment Fund
Year 2
Retail Rehab
. (BRA)
Cap Mass. Growth
Year 10
$10,000 capital
Year 1
Corp Development
ital Corp.
RoxMAPP+ IMP submitted to BRA
$100,000 operating
Equity Investment Fund Revolving Loan Fund
CropCircle Kitchen Incubator
$100,000 operating
Year 5
$50,000 capital
Revolving Revolving Loan Loan Fund Fund
Costs
Summit held for local career-focused educators and potential partne orgs
Summit
Tech is great, but it’s hardly the only path to entrepreneurship.
Highlandtown Retail Pop-Up
Expand view of ‘startups’ to include traditional business categories.
Year 1
Coordinator
RoxMAPP+ Partnership IMP Area
Wealth Creation
Split funds into seed and growth funds.
ociation
iness Ass Newmarket Bus
Year 10
Begin debt service + dividend diversion into Dudley lockbox. Year 20
Year 20
Close funds and sell incubator space if appropriate.
Joint facilities come online, RoxMAPP+ campus formalized
Strong Jobs
existing
proposed
Demonstration Project residential
Integrate Dudley with the Newmarket industrial core by building a light industrial mixed use neighborhood: the Hampden Industrial Gateway.
Dudley Square
precedents
light industrial
or Groups
Organized Lab
ton (BRA) Backstreets Bos k OneUnited Ban ufacturing Investing in Man Partnership Communities
LIMU Real Estate Development Investment Fund
ancillary retail
MA Advanced Collaborative
g
Manufacturin
unidad CDC
Nuerstra Com
g Allicance
turin Urban Manufac
GE Advanced Manufacturing + Software Technology Center. Michigan.
ign Center
ufacturing & Des
Boston Jobs
Coaltion
Greenpoint Man
nsion ufacturing Exte Hollings Man ce) t. of Commer Partnership (Dep
152 Hampden Street
Hampden Industrial
Cost Estimates Acquisition: $600,000 Rehab: $800,000 Contingency: $100,000
Newmarket
Total: $1.5 million
proposed zoning changes
existing zoning
Costs
Year 1
Organize Investment Funds + Raise Capitla for Demo BRA to study rezoning
Year 2
Demo land acquisition
Light Industrial Mixed Use Development Fund
MAKLab. Glasgow, Scotland.
Hampden Industrial Gateway rezoned for LIMU
Demonstration Project $1,500,000 *Rezoning + Design Guidelines have no additional costs, wrapped into BRA operating budget
Year 5
Demo Project online LIMU Investment Fund begins investing in projects
$5,000,000
Newmarket Industrial Development Area
St. Patrick’s Neighborhood Shopping Subdistrict
Multi-Family Residential
Open Space
Boulevard Planning District
Institutional Master Plan Area
Light Industrial Mixed Use – Back Street Massing
Light Industrial Commercial – Mixed Use – Main Street Main Street Massing Massing
Multi-Family Residential
Open Space
South of Market, San Francisco.
Year 10
Private LIMU projects online Year 20
First capital projects under IMP break ground
Infrastructure
Pedestrian vs. Freight Circulation
Alternative One:
Complete Streets + Visual Identity through Corridor
Total Street Redesign (Long Term) Add new streets to remove ‘superblocks,’ install bike-ped infrastructure through corridor, rebuild squares consistently, reenvision the Madison Park area as Malcolm X Square, rebrand St. Patrick’s Square.
Alternative Two:
Tactical Interventions (Short Term) Provide grants of $10,000$50,000 to artists and urbanists on a competitive basis to build “transformative” projects that create a consistent visual identity throughout the neighborhood.
Costs
Coordination Help programs work together by providing complementary incentives, e.g. lowering the cost of financing for graduates of RoxMAPP+ entrepreneurship programs.
Keep organizations mutually informed and aligned by including on a given Board of Directors representatives from relevant organizations – such as labor leaders and manufacturers on the RoxMAPP+ board.
Roxbury Lockbox Fund Paying for It
Alternative Two
$1m Over 10 Years
I-Cubed Style Catchement, but without Bond Issue
Board of Directors Overlap Low-cost/in-kind Financing
Investments that create/attract jobs
Alternative One
~$700m - $1.2b
Complementary Incentives
Payroll Tax Catchement Zone
Retain tax increment for future investments
10. Hybrid Experience
Data-informed spatial analysis and reasonably propositional urban planning is an important form of argument. Nevertheless it can fail to communicate the end-game emotively. This exercise attempts to cultivate the emotive side of planning – the spatial imaginary for a better future. In this case, that future is the careening, historicist modernism of labor, collective action, and good times.
p. 26
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