Data Dump

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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