Jane Amidon
Even as the days to the demise of Boston’s 2024 Olympic bid were running out, a panel co-hosted by Northeastern University and the Urban Land Institute (ULI) posed a critical question: Can the bid help Boston become the city it aspires to be? In the room were thought leaders in design, planning, policy, engineering, climate science and design education. Although the bid has now collapsed, the questions it raised are still worth asking for the valuable insights they offer about Boston’s future resiliency.
The panel – “A Better Environment: Boston’s Sustainable Coastal Development” – was the third in a series of public forums called Boston Futures, sponsored by Boston 2024, the Boston Society of Architects, the Boston Society of Landscape Architects, ULI, Harvard University, Northeastern University, MIT and the Venture Café. While acknowledging significant challenges, the panel viewed the 2024 bid as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to showcase Boston’s design, planning and construction talent to imagine and create a more resilient city by advancing sustainable construction strategies, implementing green infrastructure and coastal adaptation, and prototyping best management practices.
Three themes emerged from the panelists’ diverse approaches and perspectives. First, in addressing the resiliency challenge, we should build on Boston’s strengths. In a city literally constructed from the ground up – or the mudflats up – we already have a history of wholesale reshaping of urban terrain. The Games’ two core locations – the Athlete’s Village on Columbia Point and the Stadium at Widett Circle – focused attention on areas with tremendous opportunities to further Boston’s growth and its rich tradition of reinvention and innovation by implementing much-needed coastal protection measures.
Matthew Kiefer
We have a wealth of shared local knowledge from mega-projects such as the Harbor clean up and the Big Dig, public works that profoundly challenged – but eventually proved – the city’s capacity to create positive environmental change on a large scale. And we would not be starting from scratch; initiatives such as Boston’s Climate Action Plan, Go Boston and Imagine Boston 2030 have already begun envisioning the city’s future.
Second, we can harness the aspirational spirit of the Games to pioneer and test new adaptation and mitigation approaches which could then be used in coastal cities across the globe. Because of their scale, Olympic build-outs revealed opportunities to focus on broader ecological gains in flood control, storm water management and energy and transit infrastructure, and therefore to pose integrated resiliency frameworks. Even without the Games, this approach could extend the prescient urban ecological connectivity of Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace and Charles Eliot’s far-reaching metropolitan parks system to the city’s coastal edge. The Olympics could also inspire us to undertake demonstration projects such as temporary superstructures, alternative transport and walkability networks and floating structures that can be rapidly prototyped at the urban scale, with goals, data harnessing and performance metrics predesigned into the systems for subsequent evaluation.
Third, the bid taught us the importance of creating a compelling public narrative about how major undertakings can serve our city’s future. Urban resiliency is an abstract goal that can be hard to communicate; the Games offered an opportunity to make it more concrete and comprehensible. Planning for the Games operated at a scale that is both personal – many of the proposed sites would have dramatically altered neighborhoods and habitats on a temporary and permanent basis – and collective, potentially linked into a constellation of resiliency-oriented coastal and urban improvements. This scale of undertaking requires messaging that plays to both individual imaginations and broad civic interests.
As their deep ambivalence about the Olympic bid shows, Bostonians are both striving for the large-scale changes that resiliency requires and deeply wary of major undertakings. Yet, Bostonians know how to leverage major cultural moments, like the Boston Marathon, Tall Ships and First Night, into broader economic and social gains. By promoting a clear environmental agenda within 2024 planning, the Olympic bid could have helped build a broader narrative about moving the city in a direction from which all residents benefit.
The Boston Futures panel raised provocative questions that still linger after the bid has foundered. The bid began to create a sense of urgency and possibility, even if the scope, scale, cost and timeline of the Games did not encompass the totality of actions needed for lasting urban resilience. In this sense, the bid may leave behind an improbably legacy. Boston 2024 won’t be building any Olympic venues, but it’s possible they will be remembered for building momentum around a sustainable future.
Jane Amidon is an associate dean and professor of urban landscape in the School of Architecture at Northeastern University. Matthew Kiefer, a director at Goulston & Storrs, specializes in real estate development and land use law. He also coordinates the firm’s Climate Resilience Task Force. He is a member of ULI’s Boston/New England advisory board.
