No Plan in the Land of the Last HurrahBy Jane Holtz Kay In the eye of the storm, in the din of the feuding factions, the salvo of seaport guns is making the city seem more like The Pirates of Penzance than the site for a design to launch a thousand acres of Boston's last landscape. Is this what passes for plan or process at this defining moment? With one more batch of plans, press kits and pronouncements last week, the future of the opening wedge of the South Boston seaport still remains more scribble pad than drafting paper. The turf wars continue. Some censure the Pritzger's development plan for the first 24 acres as an over-built collection of residences and offices. ("I like to tell people to imagine 13 towers on the Public Garden," says the Conservation Law Foundation's Doug Foy who joined the McCourts, their neighboring builders, to stem the steeple chase.) In turn, others call the McCourt's comprehensive new plan "sketchy foreplay" and a land grab.
Point and counterpoint, dreams and nightmares, sturm and drang. Is this what stretches our hearts and minds and expectations for the city? Hardly. For the sad truth is that no matter who the victor and what the outcome of such turf wars, the absence of a larger public planning process undermines how we embark on building the city's premier space. Today, as at the start of the process, only politics counts. Not a particle of planning, not a single public realm initiative, not a neighborhood participant outside City Hall will decide the last frontier of this small turf of this small city. "No street map, no guidelines, everything was negotiated down to the scrod and the beans," Brian Shea, an architect with Coopers and Robertson who did the mayor's early plan for the complete 1000 acres recalls, describes the city's planning. In short, Shea and every passenger on this floating crap game knows that Boston, unlike its peers, has one and only one chief. No city agency, no city council, no independent planner has any real say in the land of The Last Hurrah. The dice are rolled by one hand--the mysterious hand of Mayor Thomas M. Menino. And mysterious it is. Whether this handout is a public giveaway for real estate operators to make money, whether it is a reduction in new housing for South Boston politicians to hold onto their power base, or a benefit for some clandestine commitment is unanswerable. And irrelevant. What matters is that we are ransoming our future. It doesn't have to work like this. Other cities, for all their problems, have plural lines of defense and professional planning. Certainly, their mayors have power. But there are other guidelines, masterplans, controls, agencies and (hey!) even designers and planners, citizens and environmentalists with real weight. Planning, like democracy, is too important not to be plural. Bostonians do and can engage in the noble art of urban reckoning. They have questions too vital to be left to the private sector on this final frontier. Do we want a place for tourists by the sea or a cozy neighborhood? Offices? More industry? Low-lying dense urban neighborhoods with shops or stores? Amenities or wharfs or interior spaces? How to expand the paltry public transportation? We have seen models that work and models that don't. Bostonians hate the highrise Harbor Tower and love some water's edges and closed spaces---the green stream of the esplanade, the verdant squares of the South End. We take into account the city's built environment (dense) and its "natural" one of small parks and pleasant boulevards (wet and deserted one day, vibrant another). We observe our city--its needs, its possibilities, its aspirations. It is here our thoughts and minds lie-not with the visions of the developers with their towers and offices, with the Boston Redevelopment Authority's (BRA) proposed 2200 parking spaces, with the bulky, inadequate silverline buses with bad connections. History has deposited better dreams by our doorsteps. Tomorrow's designs should reflect that plurality not the dictates of one autocrat. Certainly, some of the problems in today's Make-a-Deal mayoral operation record the ill effects of caving to today's privatization vogue. By demanding, say, piers, and other streetwork from developers, the mayor pushes builders to do the city's work of infrastructure and hence barters away public control of the heights and widths, and loses a claim on their builders' future taxes to boot. But this is nothing compared to what the mayor takes from us in giving away our control for generations yet to come. We are not merely dreamers. We are planners. We have created past visions and vistas that can inspire this waterfront when orchestrated under proper principles. Forget the squabbles. Set the rules. Put public planning in place--and with it a bold landscape looking out to tomorrow's seas. Originally published in the The Boston Globe, April 23, 2000.
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