South Boston is a linear network of walls: an axial, unrelenting grid of parcelized, privatized space. Under such circumstances, the public is shut out and shoved over. The city's infrastructural grid renders it efficient, and uncompromising.  

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South Boston faces increasing development pressure that may further jeopardize the quality of life here. Increasing density, left unfettered, may lead to irreconcilable erosion of potentials for delight in the public landscape. 

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However, we believe, as Kevin Lynch did, that “the urban landscape, among its many roles, is also something to be seen, to be remembered, and to delight in”.

 

As such, we propose just this for South Boston: a future city in which the right to beauty, the right to roam, and the right to see are established and protected in perpetuity.

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To achieve this, we propose the unification of city block interiors through de-parcelization, to create a novel urban fabric, a network of public space. Through an overarching plan composed of these connected moments, our future city embeds a large park within the historic grid of South Boston itself. Replete with an array of programmatic spaces – ranging from the social and active to the quiet and introspective – we draw influence from Frederick Law Olmsted’s signature large park designs. In place of his deep divisions between city and park, we weave our interventions within the urban grid.

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Influenced by Charles Eliot’s foresight in the protection of land that became the greater metropolitan park system of Boston, we have created a code that would protect the spaces and moods of our large park, allowing a mediated form of the inevitable development that will occur around it.

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Lastly, we take our programmatic spaces into different cities around the world to ponder, in the spirit of the specific-generic, how this framework might transform the cities of our future from within.