SCAPE is working with the City of Boston on a comprehensive and transformative vision that will invest in Boston’s waterfront to guide open space investments toward more resilient and accessible communities. In October 2018, Mayor Martin J. Walsh announced the plan in his annual speech to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, laying out strategies along Boston’s 47-mile shoreline that will increase access and open space along the waterfront while better protecting the city during a major flooding event.
With the goal of sparking conversations about Boston’s changing waterfront, SCAPE synthesized a range of ongoing planning efforts with new landscape ideas into an integrated vision. This series of drawings reveal how ongoing neighborhood planning efforts could be stitched together with a new layer of parks, boulevards and recreational spaces that help absorb rain water, buffer from storms, and connect all of Boston to more park and waterfront assets. The images can be used to start a conversation around the anticipated changes to Boston’s waterfront, building off of existing work and providing a roadmap for the city’s future climate resiliency plans.
City-wide effort’s like Boston’s are crucial to planning physical, adaptive landscapes and building coalitions to bring forward new stewardship models rooted in communication and place. Without planning and foresight, extreme climate events will exacerbate inequality. This vision aims to anticipate change and is a first step in that open change process, signaling an intent to meet the challenge and a collaborative method to provide solutions.
